FEATURE: Spotlight: Madi Diaz — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Madi Diaz

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WITH a string of dates…

announced across North America, Madi Diaz has a very busy start to this year. The Connecticut-born artist is no newbie to the music scene, though she may be new to some people in the U.K. I do not hear her played as much as she should. I wanted to spotlight this amazing artist who releases her new album, Weird Faith, on 9th February. This is an album that I would urge everyone to check out:

“Madi Diaz has been making records and writing songs professionally since the mid 2000s, but it wasn't until she released 2021's History Of A Feeling that she felt the glare of wider notoriety. It wasn't her debut album, but it certainly felt like it. She made her daytime and night time television debuts, embarked on her first solo tour since 2012, and supported Waxahatchee and Angel Olsen on tour, and also collaborated with them on record. Harry Styles handpicked Diaz to open for him in arenas and stadiums in North America, and was so taken by her captivating live show, he asked her to be a member of his touring band, to sing alongside him all over Europe and the UK, as well as continuing to open the show in various cities. After three months on the road touring internationally, Diaz is back in Nashville, and gearing up to release her new album, Weird Faith, perched on the precipice of her moment. Featuring Kacey Musgraves and produced by Sam Cohen and Konrad Snyder, the album feels expansive and exploratory, showcasing her growth as a songwriter and speaking earnestly about the fears that come from falling in love again”.

I am going to get to a couple of interviews with Madi Diaz. I want to go back to 2021. Give some run-up and context to where she is now. Diaz spoke with SPIN about her album, History of a Feeling, and how it has been a long process and journey. I am fairly new to Madi Diaz’s album, so I am interested looking back and getting a sense of where this amazing artist has come from - and how, with each album, something extraordinary and unique is revealed:

“For Madi Diaz, the journey of History Of A Feeling has been a long one. She can hardly believe it herself. “2014…how is that simultaneously two seconds and like 5 million years ago?” she asks SPIN over Zoom from her Nashville home.

Diaz, who is perched on her red and white couch, glows as the sun pierces through the window behind her. It makes sense that she’s embraced such tranquility, considering she was “white-knuckling a Zen approach” to everything early on in the pandemic. “I didn’t have a publishing or label deal or any sort of foundation there at that point,” she recalls. “So it was tough, and it was scary, but it was also very strange the way that the cards started to just naturally fall.”

And they did. In February, the singer-songwriter signed to ANTI- Records. And seven years since her last full-length album, Phantom, Diaz shared her new LP, History Of A Feeling, on Aug. 27. The folk-pop album, anchored by honky-tonk guitar riffs and wistful lyrics, took shape gradually as Diaz went through her own healing process.

In 2017, Diaz endured a painful breakup. After the split, her partner came out as transgender. “When you’re in a super codependent relationship it’s weird [and it] hurts, and you don’t know how to untangle your feelings from their feelings,” she explains. Just a few months later, she relocated to Nashville for a fresh start, and what followed was a three-year process of compiling upwards of 150 songs. The result, History Of A Feeling, captures the heartbreak and growth Diaz experienced as she rebuilt her life. Whether it’s quiet rage (“I hope you fuck her with your eyes closed and think of me” on “Think of Me”) or the acceptance of a different future (“What used to work doesn’t work anymore” on “New Person, Old Place”), Diaz’s keen sense of self-awareness shines through each track.

Ahead of the LP’s release, Diaz spoke to SPIN about starting over in Nashville, having Kesha sing “Resentment” and still being known as a “new artist” 14 years into her career.

SPIN: When did you start making the record?

Madi Diaz: The first song that I officially wrote for the record was in a non-official sort of way. I wasn’t making the decision to start writing a record. I think as a writer, a creative person, it’s just the thing that I do to get through a day, or an experience, a feeling or a topic. I kind of have to chew on it, talk about it and figure out how to explain it to myself. The first song that ended up on the record dates back to fall of 2017 [in] October, but it was a long process that I wasn’t really aware of going through: just writing, existing and being, and growing day after day, which is kind of why there were 150 songs that were in the running. The accumulation of almost three years of writing and then getting to the point where it’s like, “Okay, now you get to do a thing. What are you going to do?

Which artists were you inspired by for this record?

I was listening to a lot of Patty Griffin’s earliest record, Living With Ghosts, and Joni Mitchell’s Blue is a record that I go back to almost seasonally and ruminate on the rawness of having the opportunity. The label and ANTI- didn’t really enter the conversation until the record was finished, so I really was more giving myself the opportunity to make this body of work and was kind of lucky to just have a production partner in Andrew Sarlo just wanting to make something that sounded like me. But I guess I’ve been through so many different versions of myself that I was really wanting, deeply desiring, something as raw as those records are because they’ve stuck with me for so long. Lori McKenna is another one that I always go back to over and over again.

You put out your last full-length album, Phantom, in 2014 followed by your 2017 EP, Okay to Be Alone. What accounted for the large gap in time between albums?

Life was happening, and Phantom was such a push in a pop direction that at the end of the day it didn’t really resonate with who I am as a person and an artist. [I was] kind of all over the place, pouring my energy into different projects and writing. For better or worse, I definitely love being an escape artist and figuring out how to not sit still, but when I moved back to Nashville there’s so much less going on here. That really forced the issue of “How did you get here, and what’s going on with you?”

Was there ever a point in time that you weren’t sure if you were going to release another record?

100%. I mean, I can’t believe I’m still here. That’s kind of how a lot of this feels. I was sitting with my A&R from the label when I was in L.A. playing shows, and he was like, “As a new artist this, that and the other.” It’s just funny at 35 after having been doing this for 14 years to still carry the torch of the new artist. I also feel really lucky to have some sort of outlet to put these feelings.

What’s the meaning behind the title of your new record?

History Of A Feeling came from retracing my steps and trying to figure out certain patterns that I found myself in and walking it backwards and realizing that on some level, regardless of the thing that I’m going through, my reaction to that doesn’t even necessarily have to do with the thing that’s happening. It has to do with the narrative that I’ve been writing for my life because of that one thing that happened all the way back there.

What made you choose “Man in Me” as the lead single?

I wanted to lead with that one because I had been trying to find more of a production role with myself, especially before I found [writer and producer] Andrew Sarlo, and we started working together. In the spirit of not losing the plot, I wanted to make sure that the recording was as close to a mirror as possible of what I was going through and what I was feeling in the moment. So it felt like leading with that was the best way to rip off the Band-Aid.

“Resentment” is a beautiful song that Kesha also sang on The High Road. What’s the story behind it?

”Resentment” happened early on in the process of writing. It’s just this funny song that you don’t even realize that you’re writing sometimes in your relationship. It’s just all the times that you say, “I don’t need you to talk about that right now.” Or “This just isn’t a good time.” Or “I shouldn’t express this thing that I’m feeling.” It can be the silent third partner in a relationship and can creep up out of nowhere.

Your long-term relationship ended between records. Is this entire album about that relationship?

The relationship is — or was — definitely the catalyst for a lot of change in my life, but most endings inspire beginnings, if not all. So I think 15% of this record [is] a retelling of some stuff after the fact that had to do very closely with the relationship. Really, 85% of that record is what happens when you’re just sitting by yourself after the fact.

How did moving to Nashville help inspire you?

Nashville is just the best. In the groups that I’ve had the fortune to be with, I’m friends with everybody that I wrote my record with, and sometimes we’d get together and just talk and not even write a song. Just having the space and the time gives room to have really honest conversations and allows a really organic process to happen. In L.A., I felt like I was at the point where I was so tired and beat down there. It kind of put this pressure on things in a way that I didn’t really feel super centered in the end of it.

When you were alone and back in Nashville, what did you rediscover about yourself?

It started with lots of margaritas and nachos six days a week for three months. There was a hazy period of whatever and my sweet friends showing up at my house with flowers and bathrobes. I was really lucky, and I am really lucky, to be surrounded just by a fucking incredible community of kind humans that aren’t afraid to hold pain with you, even if they have nothing to say or nothing to add”.

I will bring things up to date. Having supported Harry Styles in 2022, and with high-profile musician fans including Angel Olsen, there is no doubting the fact that Madi Diaz is a musical treasure. One who is much respected by her peers. Perhaps not as played in the U.K. as the U.S., I do hope that changes this year. I will end with an interview from Rolling Stone. They spoke Wirth Madi Diaz earlier this month. She has a lot of dates lined up. As someone used to life on the road, she was looking ahead to a new tour and her forthcoming album:

“Madi has a really pleasing way of keeping everything conversational,” her friend Kacey Musgraves tells Rolling Stone. “My favorite kind of songwriting.” The Nashville musicians have known each other for a long time, but became close in the pandemic — cooking, shopping for antiques, and joking about sharing a house together. “Madi and I will hit the occasional estate sale or go for a long walk and chat,” Musgraves says. “There’s also wine. And horses. We’re both horse girls through and through.”

Musgraves appears on the Weird Faith duet “Don’t Do Me Good,” a dazzling send-off to a lover with a potent chorus about finally throwing in the towel. “There’s something about her voice that just lifts the whole thing,” Diaz says. “I know Kacey’s speaking voice pretty exclusively, so it was fun to be in the studio and put the headphones on and then listen to that voice coming out of her mouth: ‘Oh, right! That’s my friend!’ ”

PHOTO CREDIT: Cheril Sanchez

Co-written with Ed Sheeran collaborator Amy Wadge, “Don’t Do Me Good” is easily one of the strongest songs in Diaz’s catalog. But she was hesitant to ask Musgraves to sing on it. “I was totally terrified to ask her, because that bridge feels comfortable for me and my friendship with, like, Courtney Marie Andrews,” Diaz says, naming an Americana peer. “But Kacey is in a completely different stratosphere. She’s a pop star.” (Hearing this quote, Musgraves laughs: “That’s ridiculous. We’re friends. I was like, ‘Absolutely. Duh. Yes.’ ”)

Many of Diaz’s friends these days are female musicians — something that wasn’t always the case for her. “With our generation, alpha females were taught to avoid each other in our twenties,” Diaz says. “Which is such a goddamn shame. It’s funny how that completely shifted in my thirties.”

Diaz grew up in a musical family in Norwalk, Connecticut (her dad plays in a Zappa cover band), and moved to Pennsylvania when she was seven; later, she studied at Berklee College of Music before dropping out to play gigs at the Bitter End in New York. She moved to Nashville in 2008, grinding it out as a songwriter, then moved to Los Angeles to play in bands, finally returning to Nashville in 2017.

“I did not literally think for two seconds about being a woman in the industry and how that would maybe, eventually, become difficult,” she says, thinking back to her early career. “It’s fucking different for women, and hopefully people will respect that at some point. I honestly don’t think that men do.”

Diaz names several musicians who tour with their children, from Maren Morris to Elle King to Margo Price (“a fucking badass”). “Or my friend Michaela Anne, who has a two-year-old — like, there are women that do tour with kids,” she adds. “Michaela Anne’s situation is very different than Maren Morris’ situation on the road. And they’re both doing it.”

But despite that line about parenthood in “Everything Almost,” she knows it’s not her time yet. She’s learning to live in the present, citing Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s 1946 memoir, Man’s Search for Meaning, as a recent inspiration.

“It’s about listening to what life is asking of you and responding to those questions,” she says. “And, like, life isn’t asking me to be a mother. Right now, it’s asking me to fucking carry my guitar two miles from LaGuardia Airport, and have a rat’s nest of cables in my carry-on bag that weighs 50 pounds. So I’m trying to be there”.

I am going to wrap up now. If you do not have Madi Diaz on your radar then make sure that you check her out. An incredible artist that has a string of wonderful albums under her belt, she releases Weird Faith next month. Shaping up already to be one of the best albums of this year, I am really interesting in listening to it. Although a lot of fresh and rising artists are getting attention as ones to watch in 2024, I do think there are artists who have been around a while not known everywhere. Ones that should be heralded too. Madi Diaz definitely fits into that category. She is truly…

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