Conor Maynard didn’t know he was creating a new project. He just needed to pour out his emotions.
“I just wanted to write about what I was going through,” the English artist tells Los Angeles Confidential. “It was therapeutic for me. It was a form of comfort to process the whole thing.”
Maynard debuted +11 Hours on June 9, a 10-track EP that marks his first body of original work in more than a decade. The record chronicles a difficult breakup— one with a girl from Sydney, Australia where she lived in a time zone 11 hours ahead of his home in the United Kingdom.
When Maynard hops on the phone, he’s in London, but is getting ready to leave for Singapore for tour. His Continued World Tour landed in North America, the U.K. and Europe last year, and, through the spring of this year, around brings him around Asia and Australia.
Maynard’s summer will then finish with the Sad Boy Summer Tour in August, hitting Warsaw, Prague, Frankfurt and Amsterdam.
The emphasis on live performance makes sense as Maynard embraces this creative turning point. Following his 2011 signing with Warner Music Group, he catapulted to fame in 2012 after winning MTV’s Brand New award; found mentorship from Ne-Yo; collaborated with the likes of Rita Ora and Pharrell Williams and earned top-charting singles in the U.K. from his first album, Contrast.
Now an independent artist, Maynard’s workload is bigger than ever. But it’s all worth it to stay true to his creative vision. For +11 Hours, that meant leaning into the rollercoaster nature of a relationship’s end.
“It’s the different stages or different mindsets you go through during a breakup,” Maynard explains. “There'll be a song where it'll be like, ‘I'll love you forever. I'll never let you go’ and then the next song will be like, ‘I hate you. How could you do this to me?” type thing. It's kind of going through the different stages of grief that we go through when we’re struggling with a breakup.”
Read more from Maynard below about preserving his powerhouse vocals while on tour, performing in Australia and more.
You’re touring a fair amount this year. How do you keep your vocal cords strong with all the travel and live performances?
That is something I struggle with literally every single time I go on tour. Funnily enough, I actually just finished my last rehearsal for this part of the tour because we had a couple of new songs, a couple of changes in the set from the first half of the tour. So we did have a few days of rehearsals to get them ready. And yesterday for the first time we did a full run through the entire set. And I was genuinely nervous because I had real troubles and problems with my voice on the first half. It was down to a lot of things, down to me not really preparing my voice properly and then also a little bit of bad organization. Right before the tour started, there was a few aspects of the show that weren't quite right, meaning basically the day before the first show, I had to sit in my hotel room and rerecord a bunch of backing vocals for a bunch of the songs in the set. And then what happened by doing that was the next day, when I woke up ready for the first show, my voice was already sitting at like 30 percent because I'd already made it so tight just recording the entire day before. I went and did the first show, got through it. Second show was much harder and then I think it was the third show that I had to cancel basically straight away because I lost my voice so quickly. I had a crisis meeting with my management and said like, “Right, we need to really try” because the problem is that as well as when you're on tour, if your voice goes, it's just too late. It's very, very hard to find the time to get it back and fix it whilst you're on the road.
The only way you can avoid it is to be more prepared and ready for the next time around, so that's why for this part of the tour, we made it really important that I got into vocal coaching and making sure that I was much more organized and took better taking better care of my voice. And thankfully yesterday we did a full run-through and it was really, really good. So fingers crossed it will hold up throughout the tour.
You mentioned how +11 Hours showcases the grief cycle of a breakup. How is live performance part of that cycle?
Basically, I've gone through most of my adult life not going through a breakup and all of a sudden, literally in the space of two to three years, I went through two really awful ones back to back. Everyone commenting like, “Why is this guy always heartbroken?” I was like, “No, literally if you’d come across me three years ago, I hadn't been heartbroken in about eight years.” I remember thinking it was typical that it all happened at the same time. In 2021, the world was completely closed off and no shows were happening and then once I was able to go back on tour again, it essentially was the first time that I was gonna stand up and perform this [particular] song that was really personal to me and I had never performed it live before. I was nervous. I was really scared because I almost didn't want to perform it. I didn't want it to bring back bad memories. I didn't want it to bring back negative feelings. And then in this moment of seeing the audience react to it in such a positive way and seeing people singing along and listening and whatever, it actually gave a really positive feeling that it made me realize how many people may be affected by this song and how many people related to it.
How are you feeling about going to Australia— or is your headspace just really about seeing the fans?
It is haunting the feeling of knowing that this person that this whole EP is about, that's her part of the world. That's where she lives, where she's from, I'm literally doing a show in her city. So it is a weird feeling. I think having said that, it's been about eight months since it finished and has been zero contact since then. So I feel like the dust is somewhat settled in that area, but you never know. I only control half of what happens. The other half is up to her. But I don't know. I think that it is nerve-wracking. But at the same time, basically every single city that I'm going to on this tour is a city that I've never been to before. So I'm also extremely, extremely excited to see new areas of the world that I've never visited before and, hopefully, I get some time to experience them because touring is notorious for basically giving you no time to actually see any of the city.
I think because a lot of cities are quite far apart from each other, a lot of the time we're flying in maybe a day early or leaving a day after, meaning we hopefully have more time to explore.
Social media has been super important for your career. Do you think it's possible to have a healthy relationship with social media and how do you try to maintain that?
I always find this question quite tricky to answer because when it comes to mental health, people are extremely unique. Everyone has their own triggers, has their own things to deal with, has their own ways of coping with things. And I think that it's very hard for me to put a blanket statement and say, “I think it can be absolutely fine.” I think some people really, really struggle with it, whereas others maybe don't get affected by it whatsoever. At least their mental health doesn’t get affected. It's very hard to judge whether or not it can be a good thing or a bad thing. I thin for me personally, it's all about balance. I think that I have my moments where I definitely want to take a step back from it and I can feel myself being impacted by it negatively. And because I can feel that and I can acknowledge that and recognize it, I make the steps that I need to make to remove myself from that headspace a little bit, which is obviously why I took a big step back from social media at the end of last year because I could tell it was it wasn't doing me any good. And it wasn't helping where my mind frame was at the time. Then, obviously, once I came back and it was time to start releasing the music and start putting out stuff that was about everything I was going through, it was this feeling of relief, like being able to let it all go and being able to put it all out in the open and all out into the universe and seeing that positive response to what I was doing. That had a very positive impact on my mental health and had a very positive impact on how I was feeling.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Photography by: Lee Malone
