By Indi Tejeda – September 8th, 2026
Some artists answer questions, yet Mae Krell inhabits them. Every response arrives with the careful hesitation of someone unwilling to simplify a complicated feeling, tracing ideas through grief, hope, identity, and possibility until they settle somewhere unexpectedly honest. That same intentionality lives inside “i think i’d like to have a daughter,” a song that could have settled for being a quiet meditation on parenthood, but instead becomes something much more expansive. It is a song about imagining a future that once felt impossible, about allowing yourself to hope without pretending uncertainty disappears, and about discovering that sometimes the smallest moments ask the biggest questions. Listening to Krell speak about it, you realize that every lyric, production choice, and memory was considered with remarkable care, making it impossible to separate the songwriter from the person behind the words.
Q: “i think i’d like to have a daughter” feels like a really different kind of love song because you’re writing toward someone who doesn’t exist yet. What does it feel like to write about a future you can’t actually know, especially when that future once felt completely unimaginable to you?
Mae Krell: “One of the things about what I’m writing about is knowing that it actually can’t ever happen. I’m a lesbian, my fiancée is a woman. We’re never going to have a kid that looks like both of us. There’s beauty in hoping for some sort of future, but there’s also a piece of it that’s almost mourning. It feels like a bedtime story. It’s more of a dream or a want than something realistic, and somehow that makes it easier to write about.”
Q: The song carries both excitement and grief around the idea of building a family as a queer person. Was there something specific about imagining a daughter that made you confront the parts of parenthood, family, or queerness that you hadn’t really allowed yourself to think about before?
Mae Krell: “I never really thought about having kids as something I’d want because I never thought much about what my future would look like. Once I started living my life in a way that felt true to me, all of these possibilities opened up. There are parts of the experience that queer people simply don’t get to have, and sometimes you realize you’re jealous of something that isn’t even positive for other people because you never had the chance to experience it. But what’s been beautiful is seeing people connect with this song for completely different reasons. I’ve had people tell me they relate because of fertility issues, and that hadn’t even occurred to me. It’s beautiful that the feeling can be universal even when the circumstances aren’t.”
Q: You wrote the entire song sitting in a parking lot after watching a mother and her daughters at Red Rocks. There’s something almost cinematic about that moment. You saw a completely ordinary family interaction and suddenly recognized yourself in a future you hadn’t pictured. What do you think that version of yourself was responding to in that moment?
Mae Krell: “It wasn’t just seeing a mother and daughters. It was seeing people sharing something that meant so much to me. They’d flown across the country together for the show because they all loved the artist. Watching them laugh and bicker, I realized I could picture myself there. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve met parents who didn’t stop being themselves when they had kids. That moment opened the door to realizing maybe I could have children and still stay myself.”
Q: You described wanting the recording to feel like an old tape pulled from an attic for your future child to hear years later. Did thinking about an imagined future listener change the way you approached your voice, the lyrics, or the production? And what would you want that future version of your daughter to understand about the person who wrote this song?
Mae Krell: “The lyrics were already written, but when we made the record I wanted this song to feel like something that had been found. I literally stood farther away from the microphone so you’d hear more of the room. Our dogs were around while we were recording. There’s probably little sounds in there that make it feel lived in. If my daughter ever heard it, I’d want her to know that I always wanted her. Even when I said I didn’t want kids, it wasn’t because I didn’t want them. It was because I didn’t think I could give someone the life they deserved. Falling in love completely changed how I saw myself and what I believed was possible.”
Q: Your debut was about surviving long enough to become someone you hadn’t expected to be. This new record seems more interested in what happens once you start wanting things for that life: love, a home, a family, a future. Do you feel like you’re writing from a fundamentally different relationship with hope now than you were when you made (i think) i might be grown?
Mae Krell: “The first record was asking, ‘What was it like to grow up when you didn’t plan to?’ This record is what comes after. The songs are still heavy, but they’re no longer questioning whether there’s going to be a future. It’s more like, ‘This is how things are.’ The commitment to sticking around happened between the two albums. Now the question isn’t if I have a future. It’s ‘what will my future look like’? That feels fundamentally different.”
By the end of our conversation, what lingers isn’t simply a deeper understanding of one song, but a greater appreciation for the way Mae Krell approaches songwriting itself.
She doesn’t rush toward tidy conclusions or definitive answers. Instead, she leaves room for contradiction, allowing joy to exist beside grief, certainty beside doubt, and hope beside fear.
That same generosity is what makes “i think i’d like to have a daughter” resonate far beyond the story that inspired it. It feels deeply personal without ever closing itself off from the listener. Like the weathered tape she imagined someone discovering years from now, the song preserves not only a moment in time but the careful, compassionate person who created it.