Somewhat over a yr in the past, Madi Diaz lay in mattress in an house close to Dodger Stadium sweating out a gnarly case of COVID-19.
The Nashville-based singer and songwriter had traveled to Los Angeles to document the follow-up to her album “Bizarre Religion,” which got here out in early 2024 and would go on to earn two Grammy nominations, together with one for a fantastically bummed-out duet along with her pal Kacey Musgraves. However after three or 4 days of labor within the studio, Diaz grew to become sick simply because the Dodgers have been battling the Mets in final October’s Nationwide League Championship Sequence.
“I might actually see the stadium lights — there have been drones in all places and other people honking and lighting issues on fireplace,” she recollects. “I used to be identical to, Why, L.A. — why?”
Her struggling in a metropolis she as soon as known as house was value it: “Deadly Optimist,” the LP Diaz ultimately accomplished in time to launch this month, is certainly one of 2025’s most gripping — a bravely stripped-down set of songs about heartbreak and renewal organized for little greater than Diaz’s confiding voice and her folky acoustic guitar.
Within the album’s opener, “Hope Much less,” she wonders how far she is perhaps prepared to go to accommodate a lover’s neglect; “Good Liar” examines the self-deception essential to hold placing up with it. But Diaz additionally thinks by way of the hurt she’s doled out, as in “Flirting” (“I can’t change what occurred, the second was simply what it was / Nothing to me, one thing to you”).
After which there’s the gutting “Heavy Metallic,” wherein she acknowledges that enduring the ache of a breakup has ready her to cope with the inevitability of the following one.
“This document is me going through myself and going, ‘I’ve to remain in my physique for this whole track,’ ” Diaz, 39, says on a current afternoon throughout a return journey to L.A.
What makes the unguardedness of the music much more exceptional is that “Deadly Optimist” comes greater than a decade and a half right into a twisty-turny profession which may’ve left Diaz extra leathered than she sounds right here.
Past making her personal albums — “Deadly Optimist” is her sixth since she moved to Nashville in 2008 — she’s written songs for commercials and TV reveals and for different artists together with Maren Morris and Little Huge City; she’s sung backup for Miranda Lambert and Parker McCollum and even performed guitar in Harry Types’ band on tour in 2023.
But in a young new track like “Really feel One thing,” about longing to “be somebody who doesn’t know your center identify,” Diaz’s singing reveals each bruise.
“Music is a life drive for Madi,” says Bethany Cosentino, the Finest Coast frontwoman who tapped Diaz as a songwriting companion for her 2023 solo album, “Pure Catastrophe.” “She has to do it, and it’s so genuine and so actual and so uncooked as a result of it’s not coming from this place of ‘Effectively, guess I gotta go make one other document.’ ”
“If she doesn’t put these feelings someplace,” Cosentino provides, “I feel she’ll implode.”
Which doesn’t imply that placing out a document as weak as “Deadly Optimist” hasn’t felt scary.
“I used to be gonna say it’s just like the emperor’s new garments,” Diaz says with amusing over espresso in Griffith Park. “However I know I’m not sporting any garments.” Wearing shorts and a denim shirt, her hair tucked beneath a ball cap, she sits at a picnic desk outdoors a café she appreciated when she lived in L.A. from 2012 to 2017.
“For a second, I used to be like, Rattling, I want I’d introduced my climbing footwear — might’ve gone as much as the highest,” she says. “I might completely have completed that as my masochistic 28-year-old self. Hike within the warmth of the day? Let’s go.”
Diaz factors to a few touchstones for her LP’s bare-bones strategy, amongst them Patty Griffin’s “Dwelling With Ghosts” — “a star in Orion’s Belt,” as she places it — and “clearly Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue,’ ” she says. “That’s only a duh.”
Like Mitchell, Diaz achieves a readability of thought in her songs that solely intensifies the heartache; additionally like Mitchell (to not point out Taylor Swift), she will be able to describe a companion’s failings with unsparing precision.
“Some ‘I’m sorry’s’ are so egocentric / And also you simply act like you’ll be able to’t assist it,” she sings in “Why’d You Must Convey Me Flowers,” certainly one of a handful of what she jokingly calls “people diss tracks” on “Deadly Optimist.” It goes on: “Bulls— smile, in denial / We’ve been circling the block / We’ve been in a downward spiral.”
“There are positively a pair songs on this document the place I felt apologetic as I used to be writing it,” she says. “Then after I completed it was identical to: It needed to be completed.” She grins. “They’re robust,” she says of her exes. “They’ll be advantageous.”
Requested whether or not any of her songs specific her emotions in a approach she wasn’t able to doing with the ex in query, she nods.
“I’d say I might get about midway there in actual life,” she says. “It’s nearly like I couldn’t end the thought inside the relationship, and that was the sign that we couldn’t go onward. Or that I couldn’t go onward.”
Has writing about love taught her something about herself and what she needs?
“I journey so much — I’m all over,” she says. “And I actually like to come back and go as I please. But it surely’s humorous: On reflection, I feel possibly I used to be chasing a relationship that was somewhat extra conventional, though I don’t know if I can really be that approach. In order that’s a bizarre factor to pay attention to.”
Madi Diaz in Pasadena.
(Annie Noelker / For The Instances)
Diaz grew up home-schooled in a Quaker family in rural Pennsylvania and discovered to play piano and guitar when she was younger; when she was a young person, her expertise took her to Philadelphia’s Paul Inexperienced College of Rock, whose founder was later accused of abuse and sexual misconduct by dozens of former college students, together with Diaz. (“It was a extremely poisonous place,” she informed the New York Instances.)
She studied at Berklee Faculty of Music in Boston earlier than dropping out and heading to Nashville, the place she began making her identify as a singer-songwriter working on the intersection of nation and pop. After just a few years of fruitful grinding, she got here to L.A. to “see how excessive the ceiling was,” she says, and shortly fell in with a bunch of musician pals.
“We used to like going to the Smog Cutter,” she says of the shuttered Silver Lake dive bar, “to have a pair Bud Lights and sing Mariah Carey actually poorly.”
Diaz was earning money writing songs — Connie Britton sang certainly one of her tunes on the soapy ABC sequence “Nashville” — however she struggled to attain the type of liftoff she was in search of as an artist. “Turned out the ceiling was fairly excessive,” she says now with amusing.
Together with the skilled frustrations got here “a nuclear explosion of a breakup” with a fellow songwriter, Teddy Geiger. “They have been going by way of an enormous identification shift,” Diaz says of Geiger, who got here out as transgender, “and we labored in the identical business, and it simply type of felt like there wasn’t a spot for me right here.”
Diaz returned to Nashville, which didn’t instantly super-charge her profession. “I used to be bartending at Wilburn Avenue Tavern and making Jack White nachos,” she recollects. “He would by no means bear in mind this, however I bear in mind. I used to be like, That is my life now.”
In actual fact, her acclaimed 2021 album “Historical past of a Feeling” — with songs impressed by the sophisticated dynamics of her and Geiger’s break up — lastly introduced the type of consideration she’d been working towards. She signed with the revered indie label Anti- (whose different acts embody Waxahatchee and MJ Lenderman) and scored the street gig with Types after he reached out through DM; she additionally grew to become an in-demand presence in Nashville’s close-knit songwriting scene.
“I don’t know of anyone on the town that doesn’t love Madi,” says Little Huge City’s Karen Fairchild, who provides that Diaz “has instincts about melodies which might be all her personal. Generally I’m considering, ‘How’s she gonna match that into the phrasing?’ However she all the time does.”
For “Deadly Optimist,” Diaz took an preliminary cross at recording her songs with a full band earlier than deciding they known as for the minimalist setup she landed on along with her co-producer, Gabe Wax, at his studio in Burbank.
“We did it with no headphones, no click on observe, no grid,” she says. “It hurries up and slows down, and it goes out and in of tune as devices do.” (One unlikely sonic inspiration was a singles assortment by the pioneering riot grrrl band Bikini Kill, which she hailed for its “still-kind-of-figuring-it-out power.”)
Diaz describes herself as a perfectionist however says “Deadly Optimist” was about “looking for our approach by way of the cracks of imperfection to interrupt the bottom and sit on the floor. I really feel so proud that we let it reside there.”
She’s touring behind the album this fall, enjoying solo reveals — together with a Nov. 20 date on the Highland Park Ebell Membership — meant to protect the album’s solitary vibe.
“I don’t know if I’d actually thought that by way of after I made the choice,” she says with amusing.
Pretty much as good as she is on her personal — and for all of the torment she is aware of one other relationship is prone to maintain — “I’m a die-hard loyalist,” Diaz says. “I’m nonetheless in search of connection greater than the rest.”
