Just a little over a yr in the past, Madi Diaz lay in mattress in an condo 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 “Weird Faith,” which got here out in early 2024 and would go on to earn two Grammy nominations, together with one for a superbly bummed-out duet along with her good friend Kacey Musgraves. However after three or 4 days of labor within the studio, Diaz turned sick simply because the Dodgers have been battling the Mets in final October’s Nationwide League Championship Sequence.
“I could literally see the stadium lights — there were drones everywhere and people honking and lighting things on fire,” she recollects. “I was just like, Why, L.A. — why?”
Her struggling in a metropolis she as soon as referred to as house was value it: “Fatal Optimist,” the LP Diaz finally accomplished in time to launch this month, is considered 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 Less,” she wonders how far she could be keen to go to accommodate a lover’s neglect; “Good Liar” examines the self-deception essential to preserve placing up with it. But Diaz additionally thinks by the hurt she’s doled out, as in “Flirting” (“I can’t change what happened, the moment was just what it was / Nothing to me, something to you”).
After which there’s the gutting “Heavy Metal,” wherein she acknowledges that enduring the ache of a breakup has ready her to cope with the inevitability of the subsequent one.
“This record is me facing myself and going, ‘I have to stay in my body for this entire song,’ ” Diaz, 39, says on a latest afternoon throughout a return journey to L.A.
What makes the unguardedness of the music much more exceptional is that “Fatal 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 — “Fatal 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 Large 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 music like “Feel Something,” about longing to “be someone who doesn’t know your middle name,” Diaz’s singing reveals each bruise.
“Music is a life force for Madi,” says Bethany Cosentino, the Greatest Coast frontwoman who tapped Diaz as a songwriting accomplice for her 2023 solo album, “Natural Disaster.” “She has to do it, and it’s so authentic and so real and so raw because it’s not coming from this place of ‘Well, guess I gotta go make another record.’ ”
“If she doesn’t put those emotions somewhere,” Cosentino provides, “I think she’ll implode.”
Which doesn’t imply that placing out a document as susceptible as “Fatal Optimist” hasn’t felt scary.
“I was gonna say it’s like the emperor’s new clothes,” Diaz says with fun over espresso in Griffith Park. “But I know I’m not wearing any clothes.” Wearing shorts and a denim shirt, her hair tucked beneath a ball cap, she sits at a picnic desk outdoors a café she favored when she lived in L.A. from 2012 to 2017.
“For a second, I was like, Damn, I wish I’d brought my hiking shoes — could’ve gone up to the top,” she says. “I would absolutely have done that as my masochistic 28-year-old self. Hike in the heat of the day? Let’s go.”
Diaz factors to a few touchstones for her LP’s bare-bones strategy, amongst them Patty Griffin’s “Living With Ghosts” — “a star in Orion’s Belt,” as she places it — and “obviously Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue,’ ” she says. “That’s just 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 accomplice’s failings with unsparing precision.
“Some ‘I’m sorry’s’ are so selfish / And you just act like you can’t help it,” she sings in “Why’d You Have to Bring Me Flowers,” considered one of a handful of what she jokingly calls “folk diss tracks” on “Fatal Optimist.” It goes on: “Bulls— smile, in denial / We’ve been circling the block / We’ve been in a downward spiral.”
“There are definitely a couple songs on this record where I felt apologetic as I was writing it,” she says. “Then when I finished it was just like: It had to be done.” She grins. “They’re tough,” she says of her exes. “They’ll be fine.”
Requested whether or not any of her songs categorical her emotions in a approach she wasn’t able to doing with the ex in query, she nods.
“I’d say I could get about halfway there in real life,” she says. “It’s almost like I couldn’t finish the thought within the relationship, and that was the signal 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 desires?
“I travel a lot — I’m all over the place,” she says. “And I really like to come and go as I please. But it’s funny: In retrospect, I think maybe I was chasing a relationship that was a little more traditional, even though I don’t know if I can actually be that way. So that’s a weird thing to be aware of.”
Madi Diaz in Pasadena.
(Annie Noelker / For The Occasions)
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 Faculty of Rock, whose founder was later accused of abuse and sexual misconduct by dozens of former college students, together with Diaz. (“It was a really toxic place,” she informed the New York Occasions.)
She studied at Berklee School 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 a couple of years of fruitful grinding, she got here to L.A. to “see how high the ceiling was,” she says, and shortly fell in with a gaggle of musician buddies.
“We used to love going to the Smog Cutter,” she says of the shuttered Silver Lake dive bar, “to have a couple Bud Lights and sing Mariah Carey really poorly.”
Diaz was creating wealth writing songs — Connie Britton sang considered one of her tunes on the soapy ABC collection “Nashville” — however she struggled to attain the form of liftoff she was in search of as an artist. “Turned out the ceiling was quite high,” she says now with fun.
Together with the skilled frustrations got here “a nuclear explosion of a breakup” with a fellow songwriter, Teddy Geiger. “They were going through a huge identity shift,” Diaz says of Geiger, who got here out as transgender, “and we worked in the same industry, and it just kind of felt like there wasn’t a place for me here.”
Diaz returned to Nashville, which didn’t instantly super-charge her profession. “I was bartending at Wilburn Street Tavern and making Jack White nachos,” she recollects. “He would never remember this, but I remember. I was like, This is my life now.”
The truth is, her acclaimed 2021 album “History of a Feeling” — with songs impressed by the sophisticated dynamics of her and Geiger’s cut up — lastly introduced the form 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 by way of DM; she additionally turned an in-demand presence in Nashville’s close-knit songwriting scene.
“I don’t know of anybody in town that doesn’t love Madi,” says Little Large City’s Karen Fairchild, who provides that Diaz “has instincts about melodies that are all her own. Sometimes I’m thinking, ‘How’s she gonna fit that into the phrasing?’ But she always does.”
For “Fatal Optimist,” Diaz took an preliminary cross at recording her songs with a full band earlier than deciding they referred to 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 track, no grid,” she says. “It speeds up and slows down, and it goes in and out of tune as instruments 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 energy.”)
Diaz describes herself as a perfectionist however says “Fatal Optimist” was about “trying to find our way through the cracks of imperfection to break the ground and sit on the surface. I feel so proud that we let it live 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 really thought that through when I made the decision,” she says with fun.
Nearly 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 still looking for connection more than anything else.”
