Maia Hirasawa may sound like a typically Japanese name to the uninitiated, but those of us from Northern climes know better. Born to a Swedish mother and a Japanese father, Maia grew up in Sweden and started her music career as a back-up singer for famous (famous in Sweden that is) artist Hello Saferide. She soon went out on her own though and achieved great success with the single “And I Found this Boy”, but it wasn’t until she did a cover of The Ark’s “The Worrying Kind” for the Swedish prelude to Eurovision in 2008 that she received serious mainstream attention.

Since then she’s moved over here to Sendai where she’s still living (yup, post-quake) and working her way into the Japanese market. Although with her talent, perhaps “work” isn’t the right word. She’s already produced the track “Boom!”, featured in the commercials for the recently completed Kyushu Shinkansen route, as well as “Fragile” (below) in aid of victims of the Tohoku Earthquake.

To be honest, I’m not normally a fan of female singers outside of the rock/punk/metal scene. Often their pitch is too high, they’re not engaging …or they’re just so sickly sweet I’d rather poke out both eyes and ears than live through another horrifying sugar sprinkled pink fest. And this is coming from someone with a sweet tooth.

Maia Hirasawa is different, and I genuinely hope she makes it big here in Japan – Sweden’s too small of a country to contain such an enormous talent. Not only are her songs (she writes them all herself) a glorious mix of blissfully cheerful tunes and occasional self-depreciative lyrics, but her voice has that sexy-yet-innocent jazz singer vibe – irresistible.

Maia, I think I have a girly crush on you. <3

You’ll find her (and probably me as well) at Gypsy Avalon on the 30th, between 20.30 and 21.15.