I want my money back for the Arular album and the 2005 show at the Echoplex, please.


In one of many contradictions that seem to provide the narrative for Maya’s life and art, Ikhyd was not, as she had repeatedly announced he would be, born at home in a pool of water. As usual, she wanted to transform her personal life into a political statement. “You gotta embrace the pain, embrace the struggle,” she proclaimed weeks before Ikhyd was born. “And my giving birth is nothing when I think about all the people in Sri Lanka that have to give birth in a concentration camp.”

As it happened, Maya, who is 34, gave birth in a private room in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. “Ben’s family insisted,” she told me a year later, when we met in March for drinks at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, in nearby Beverly Hills. Before the Grammys, Maya and Bronfman moved to Los Angeles from New York, buying a house in very white, very wealthy Brentwood, an isolated and bucolic section of the city with a minimal history of trauma and violent uprisings. “L.A. is a lovely place to have a baby,” Maya said.

“We went to the Grammys, we had the baby and we bought the house,” Maya said as she studied the menu, deciding on a glass of wine and French fries. “A month later, all this stuff was happening in Sri Lanka” — the Tamil insurgency was being defeated amid reports of thousands of civilian casualties — “and I started speaking up against it. And then, within a month, I found out my house was being bugged, my phones were being tapped and my e-mails were being hacked into. I was getting death threats, like ‘hope your baby dies.’ The biggest Sinhalese community is in Santa Monica, people who are sworn enemies of the Tamils, which is me.” She paused. “I live around the corner from Beverly Hills, and I feel semiprotected by Ben and, if anything happens to me, then Ben’s family will not take it. Jimmy Iovine, who runs Interscope, my record company, said, ‘Pick your battles carefully — don’t put your life at risk,’ but at the end of the day, I don’t see how you can shut up and just enjoy success when other people who don’t have the fame or the luxury to rent security guards are suffering. What the hell do they do? They just die.”

Maya’s tirade, typical in the way it moved from the political to the personal and back again, was interrupted by a waiter, who offered her a variety of rolls. She chose the olive bread.

Unity holds no allure for Maya — she thrives on conflict, real or imagined. “I kind of want to be an outsider,” she said, eating a truffle-flavored French fry. “I don’t want to make the same music, sing about the same stuff, talk about the same things. If that makes me a terrorist, then I’m a terrorist.”

AFTER BUYING THEIR home in Brentwood, Maya and Bronfman, whom she met in New York shortly after the breakup of his band, the Exit, decided to build a recording studio in the house. “It was very grown-up,” Maya recalled when we were in L.A. Bronfman, who is tall, soft-spoken and protective of his fiancée, now works with Global Thermostat, a technology company that is working on ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and is a founder of Green Owl, an environmentally conscious record label and sustainable-clothing line. “Everyone got so freaked out when they heard we bought the house,” Maya continued. “When we moved in, we imported all our English friends. Suddenly, everyone was living with us — eight people at once. For the first time, I had something called the comfort of your own house, and it turned into a commune: they all came for two days, and they never left. My producer, Blaqstarr, was living there. And then Cherry, who sings with me, was staying with us. And Rusko, who was also producing, was there all the time. My brother arrived. And in the end, we had three people to a room. We ended up buying a second house for everyone to live in.”