Madi Diaz on Her Wrenching New Album & Collaborating With Stars From Harry Styles to Maren Morris

When Madi Diaz received her archetypal Grammy nominations past twelvemonth – for her sixth album, Weird Faith (best people album), and its Kacey Musgraves collaboration, “Don’t Do Me Good” (best American performance) – she breathed a suspiration of relief.

By this time, the singer-songwriter was already “about midway down the road” connected what would go her adjacent album, Fatal Optimism, and “one of my archetypal thoughts, aft the nomination, was, ‘Well, convey deity I already cognize however the adjacent happening sounds,'” she says. “I decidedly could spot however that could person gotten into my caput otherwise.”

Diaz’s records are littered with wrenching stories of emotion and loss, and the harrowing seeds of Fatal Optimism, retired today, were sown during a peculiarly gnarly breakup successful 2023, good earlier she received her plaudits from the Recording Academy. The relationship’s dissolution coincided with a the extremity of a peculiarly engaged touring streak wherever Diaz opened tours by Harry Styles, Kacey Musgraves and Waxahatchee, and she wanted to onslaught portion the affectional robust was hot.

“When thing is truthful beautifully dense, you person to constitute it down erstwhile it happens, oregon other you’re gonna suffer yourself successful the plot, and the communicative benignant of shifts,” says Diaz, 39. “It was like, ‘If I get it down now, it’s the astir distilled mentation of this heartache that I’m feeling, this truly empty, lonely, confused, swimming-back-to-myself benignant of feeling.'”

In a sense, Fatal Optimism is the astir distilled mentation of Diaz herself. While she initially recorded it with a afloat band, those sessions didn’t convey the material’s loneliness – truthful she scrapped them and linked with shaper Gabe Wax (Zach Bryan, Soccer Mommy), who helped steer mostly solo renditions of the songs. The last arrangements transmission the uneasy specificity of gutting tunes similar “If Time Does What It’s Supposed To” and “Why’d You Have to Bring Me Flowers.”

But there’s different mode Fatal Optimist is quintessentially Diaz: The musician, who was raised successful agrarian Pennsylvania and attended Boston’s Berklee College of Music earlier becoming a Nashville songwriting fixture, wrote astir each opus connected the medium with Music City peers, including Tenille Townes, Morgan Nagler (Phoebe Bridgers), and Steph Jones (Sabrina Carpenter).

“At the bosom of my heart, I americium a songwriter, storyteller person, and I’ve been truthful fortunate to ever person had the astir unthinkable collaborators,” Diaz says. “These friends of excavation are perpetually pushing themselves, and pushing maine to conscionable get amended and better.”

Diaz has plentifulness of acquisition connected the different broadside of the equation. Concurrent with her emergence arsenic an artist, she’s besides go an in-demand songwriter, collaborating with artists including Maren Morris and Kesha. “I tin beryllium a truly bully collaborator for different projects,” she says, “because I tin spot it going successful truthful galore antithetic directions – and I similar to person idiosyncratic purpose maine and say, ‘This is the bullseye. If we tin nail this, we’re f–king nailing it.'”

1. Homepage
2. Entertainment
3. Madi Diaz on Her Wrenching New Album & Collaborating With Stars From Harry Styles to Maren Morris