“I think songwriting is a form of connection. It’s me looking to be more connected with my deeper sense of self, and luckily, I think by proxy, I feel connected to the people that listen to it. Hopefully they will feel the same feeling where they can find that deeper connection within themselves in the songs.” Madi Diaz is telling me about her striking new album Fatal Optimism.
Following 2021’s breakthrough History of a Feeling and 2024’s two-time Grammy-nominated Weird Faith, Diaz is pulling in listeners closer. The Nashville based artist’s starkest and most revealing work Fatal Optimist is an oxymoron. It’s the hope that things will change and we will find love, it’s making yourself vulnerable even though it might end up hurting you, and it might end. It’s the recognition that we are all putting ourselves out there, whether it works out or not. In Diaz’s words, “Fatal Optimism is the innate hope for something magical. It’s the weird faith that kicks in while knowing that there is just plain risk that comes with wanting someone or something. It’s when you have no control over the outcome, but still choose to experience every moment that happens, and put your whole heart in it.”
Fatal Optimism is possessed of a brutal and moving clarity, haunting and piercing it wrestles with the complexities of love and whether believing is enough. when it comes to the heart and life in general.
“I feel like, especially in this social, political, environmental, and the emotional climate of the world. I think it takes a pretty intense optimism to just like be in a day, being in a life, being your story.” She explains.
“I think when it comes to relationships, love, friendship and family, and just trying to continue to grow and learn, I think your optimism has to be pretty, almost fatal. I don’t mean fatal optimism is like a cover-up. If you have to pull at your own optimism to decide to take a leap of faith, there’s something in you that must believe that something is going to work out.” She says
After ending a relationship with someone she once envisioned marrying, Diaz turned away from everyone and everything she knew and took herself to an island. After time alone emerged, she had a period of self-reflection, and anger, embarrassment and romantic grief shifted into sharp realisation, and the pieces of Fatal Optimist started to be pieced together.
Having tried to record the songs at home and with a band and in different studios, Fatal Optimism found a sound of its own, recorded with co-producer Gabe Wax (Soccer Mommy, Zach Bryan) at his Infinite Family Studio. “This was the first time in my career that I stayed in this heavy place with the songs after leaving the studio rather than trying to escape it,” she says. You can hear that, whilst there is an occasional bass or backing, Fatal Optimist is Diaz stripped bare, alone in a room with her acoustic guitar, motifs cycling underneath as the words pour out, it’s poignant and healing; the simplicity of each recording adds to the bare and honest nature of these songs.
These recordings reside with a real character of their own, you can hear each squeak of the floorboards, her hands moving across the fretboard, and how each strum of a guitar reverberates, and Diaz’s piercing meditations on the slowly dying out flame of love, it’s personal, moving and heartbreaking all at once. ” I really needed somebody to hold me to my own expectations with the record and how I wanted it to sound. Plus Gabe has a really lovely studio, and the rooms in there just sound so special. They’ve just got such an identity and such a DNA to them already. It’s crazy, even just talking in those rooms, the sound of your own voice is in a way not normal,”
“You want me to want less/I want you to need less” she sings on the haunting and enveloping opener ‘Hope Less’ there is probably no mistake that the title sounds like hopeless if its said quickly, it’s the sound of picking yourself up off the floor. At the same time, Diaz pulls out an evocative tone cuts you to the quick, as guitars rise and fall. There are shades of Bob Dylan by way of Cat Power in the way her words tumble out, poetic, self-aware, and dipped in emotional processing, a feeling that she is telling herself she can recover, she can live again, even the heartbreak has floored her.
On the gorgeous ‘Ambivalence’, Diaz makes a meal out of a shitty feeling and turns that four-syllable word into a quietly anthemic chorus that rocks you in the arms of a golden strum; it’s about not being sure if crumbs are enough. On the song’s chorus, she sings: “I can always count on you for one thing / You to dance my night away / You to dance my night away / You to dance my night away, ambivalence / Ambivalence.” In a contemplative and wistful tone that carves out a moment that’s both moving and heartbreaking all at once.
“Think about the famines that used to happen, the mass starvations in dust bowls, fires, and war. It can get pretty bleak out there.I don’t know, we’re just all looking for the little joys in life, just the heartache of this record is the more harrowing side of things, it’s fuck around and find out, the find out, that’s what this record is about.” She confides “But I think you know that doesn’t mean that we’re all not gonna do our best to love each other because love can empower, heal, change. Just because you lie doesn’t mean you’re a liar. Just because you fuck up, doesn’t mean you’re fucked up. It just means that we’re all learning, and this is all just part of the process.”
‘Heavy Metal’ is consumed with self-reflection; it hangs heavy with pain, it’s an excavation as each strum and line reveals another brutal truth to herself. There is also anger here “my toxic trait is hanging on/your toxic trait is showing up” she sings on ‘Why’d You Have to Bring Me Flowers’ comes to terms with the feeling that when your love interest saying the right things is like a sticking plaster to a gaping wound. While she calls herself the ‘queen of silver linings’ on ‘Good Liar’ as she learns to see through the she tells herself, peeling back those rose-tinted glasses, her habit to see the good even when it’s actually bad, to respect her own boundaries as someone offers her the crumbs off the table. It’s a form of therapy.
Diaz recently contributed a song to soundtrack for the TV show Buccaneers she praises the show, she also talks about what else she watches in her spare time. “I’d rather watch fucking Game of Thrones, just complete escapism, rather than the Summer I Turned Pretty it felt like almost AI like, to some extent. It’s too scripted, or too toxic, or too mind-numbing.” She also cites Great British Bake off as great comfort television.
With the mention of AI, talk turns to Robin Williams’ daughter responding to the bad AI videos of her father she is being constantly sent, and calls it the “end of art”: “I would be pissed. I would be full on the fuck mad,” Diaz expands “But I don’t think it’s the end of art or creativity. I just think that it’s adding a very unnecessary layer. It’s clogging the landscape. I guess, I’m a bit of a purist. I’m not here to experience robot art on Earth, like, I’m here to experience art on Earth, and human life on Earth.”
Even with two Grammy nominations and a string of name collaborations (Kacey Musgrave, Lizzy McAlpine), and soundtrack appearances, Diaz is just working away like everyone else in the industry; there is a balance in being an artist in this era. “There is business in anything.” She notes ” I don’t live in a mansion, I live in a saw house. I shop at Aldi. I’m a thrift store kit. I don’t have a jet!” She laughs.
“The bit of success that I’ve experienced in this career path has only been when I’ve really done a job of working out my own truth?” She explains, “Yeah, I’m really hoping that this record just continues to lay the foundation of a life spent stumbling upon deep, profound truths throughout my process.”
” I would love to write a K-pop number one. I would love to be a part of the mainstream in a way that empowers, what I consider to be my art. But yeah, I haven’t written a Robyn dance track yet.”
