SPOTLIGHT: On ‘Weird Faith,’ Madi Diaz Sings From the Anxiety of New Beginnings

EDITOR’S NOTE: Madi Diaz is No Depression’s Spotlight artist for February 2024. Look for more about her and her new album, Weird Faith, out Feb. 9 on ANTI-, all month long.

“I’m doing my damnedest to claim my crazy right now.”

Madi Diaz is embracing the turmoil. The kind, at the start of a relationship, that sends you into a spiral imagining the myriad ways your life could change, for better or worse, if things progress. What should just be a time of joy and excitement is easily derailed by the potentialities, the all-consuming “what-ifs” that make the future look either awful or exhilarating. If you suppress them, they eat away at you, but if you say them out loud, you’re nuts, especially if you’re a woman. You’re deemed too needy or possessive or detached from reality. You’re called crazy.

Diaz knows this feeling well, and maybe more than any artist over the past few years, she is a master of articulating it. Though she’s no Nashville novice, in 2021, her acclaimed and devastating fourth record, History of a Feeling, turned out to be a breakthrough. It led to sold-out headlining shows plus a lucrative gig opening for Harry Styles and as a member of his Love on Tour band. Now, on the cusp of releasing her anticipated follow-up, Weird Faith, coming Feb. 9 on ANTI-, Diaz wants to give dignified voice to the chaotic inner dialogue that plagues new beginnings.

“The whole last record was in the crying,” she says, referencing the well-documented, brutal breakup she chronicled across History of Feeling, one that left her gutted and broken. “This record is very much more in the initial fucking gut punch of the feeling and trying to move through that.”

It might sound masochistic to refer to falling in love as a gut punch, but for Diaz, it kind of is. Or it was in the relationship that came in the aftermath of History of a Feeling, followed loosely on Weird Faith from beginning to its eventual end. “I remember when I was walking into my last relationship, I was terrified probably right up until the end, honestly, which is maybe too bad on some level. I remember my friends being like, ‘No this is the good part, you enjoy this part, you are falling in love with a person.’ And I’m like, ‘Nope, I’m fucking gonna die.’ I skipped right over the butterflies and I’m in a free fall because I already just know that I wanna give this person everything. You’re spinning off into every fucking fantasy within striking distance,” she says. “When you’re in love, you’re trying on so many different lives.”

No Flowers

Diaz’s songwriting is raw and direct. There are “no flowers planted around” the thing that happened, as she says. She doesn’t know any other way.

“I do feel like there is an art to talking about the art that you made where you are telling the story of what happened without saying what happened,” she says. “I’ve gotten braver in my 30s to just say the thing. … I’m a pretty transparent, truth-on-my-sleeve person, so it’s hard for me to hold back certain things. … It’s tough, but that’s why we write the song.”

Produced by Sam Cohen, Weird Faith is sonically raw, too. Sparse arrangements of piano, drums, and guitars are gritty and textured, as Diaz’s vocals alternate between stark and almost hymnal in their power.

“That was my initial intention, to see how much we could get done with as little as possible,” she says. “Really cool stuff has happened for me musically when I try to tie one arm behind my back and see how much I can do by myself.” She and bandmate Konrad Snyder even did a few tracks with just the two of them, playing “a little more punky, garage-y, like a 13-year-old would,” she explains. “You’re, like, banging ’cause you’re just emotional. You don’t know how to play it, but you have a thing to get out! And that was the spirit of the record. The record is a little bit of the meltdown and maybe not knowing how to say it so gracefully or play it so gracefully.”

Weird Faith album cover

Weird Faith sinks into all the cracks of a person’s psyche as they navigate the uneven terrain of intimacy. It aims to find out what happens when the dust settles and you’re at the start of something again, pushing through the discomfort to give it another try. “This is your brain on love,” Diaz seems to be saying in these songs. She takes the adage of needing to suffer in the name of great art and flips it on its head a million times over, proving what often goes unsaid: Even a functional relationship is still muddled by anxiety and insecurity.

“The whole record is written from a pretty reactive, triggered moment. It’s very charged and I tried to kind of stay in that. It’s in the process of talking myself through this very intense feeling that I self-soothe,” she says. “The path of finding the songs for the record became like, which are the ones that feel like the reactive trigger points of the landmines that I’ve been walking through, in my relationship with myself or my new relationship with this other person?”

In the zippy “Girlfriend,” she digs into the murky feelings toward a boyfriend’s ex. Album opener “Same Risk” makes a slow-build anthem out of the emotional and physical negotiation between two lovers. Torch song “Get to Know Me” wonders if all the shadow parts of a person — negativity, belligerence, jealousy — keep them from being lovable. “For Months Now” and the Kacey Musgraves-assisted “Don’t Do Me Good” poke at a partnership past its expiration date. Album closer “Obsessive Thoughts” is a primal, bursting-at-the-seams epic that asks, “Is it hard to love me / cause I exist intensely?” and begs to be blasted at full volume for the ideal scream-along.

“I think with my last relationship, I dreamed a lot bigger than I had ever even allowed myself to dream with a person,” she says. “And it’s hard to do all of that mining in yourself and not completely attach all of those things to the other person so that when your relationship is this sinking ship, it doesn’t all go down with that. I’m actually super fucking grateful for that relationship showing me how much I still want, and how much I can still want.”

‘Nothing Is a Waste of Time’

Through a sometimes darkly humorous lens, Diaz captures the humiliating and awkward hots and colds of letting someone in, messing up, saying the wrong thing, revealing your flaws. “You have to laugh at it! … It just is silly that we are so resilient, that we are so malleable. We can acclimate to anything, and we can contain so much,” Diaz says. “I think the laughter also is a bit of a relief. It’s a bit of an, ‘Oof, thank God that we’re all human, thank God that we’re only human.’ Everyone should write a book. Life is so long and strange and winding and it’s just so comforting that that’s the thing that binds all of us together.”

Take “KFM,” a little acronymic twist on the popular game “Fuck Marry Kill,” which Diaz turns into a cheeky head-spinner and one of the album’s catchiest earworms:

I can be a dick
You don’t know when to quit
Dishing it out comes with taking it
I don’t do ‘on my knees’
You don’t do ‘just to please’
At least we both know we’re not faking it …
I don’t know if I wanna kill fuck marry you forever
God I wanna kill fuck marry you forever

Songs like the title track (co-written with one of her heroes, Lori McKenna) and “God Person” try to make sense of what it means to have faith outside of organized religion. “I’m not a God person / But I’m never not searching,” she sings in the latter. Maybe that means having faith in another person or the natural world or the beauty of art. Or maybe it means having faith in yourself and your own ability to be awed, even when it feels impossible.

“My awe is too present to not want to explore a little bit on some level. I’m a very spiritual person, I’m a privately spiritual person,” she says. “I don’t really talk about faith a whole lot, which is hilarious that the record is called Weird Faith. But I have a lot of it.”

Diaz has found herself in awe a lot lately, playing to 90,000 people at London’s Wembley Stadium with Styles, seeing her songs sung back to her by fans in packed clubs, on a camping trip she took with her dad to North Carolina’s Outer Banks. She feels it when she’s walking in the woods or traveling the world, on the edge of a cliff or in a historic church. Even, somehow, when she’s standing in line at the drugstore or sitting in traffic.

“I don’t know why, I’ve been walking through my life recently with this mantra in my head: ‘Nothing is a waste of time,’” she says, referencing a lyric in “Kiss the Wall,” a haunting tune on Weird Faith co-written with Savana Santos. “[As] I’m waiting for the next song to hit me or waiting to go on tour, or like, ‘Why isn’t my life happening?’ You’re still on the path, we’re all moving forward, nothing is a waste of time.”

It is an impressively soft landing for an artist who has been at this as long as Diaz has, and who has weathered so many stops and starts, from Nashville in her early 20s to a lengthy stint in Los Angeles, and then back to Nashville in 2017. “My career has not been a fucking easy career. I’ve fought for every inch of ground that I’m standing on,” she says. “It’s been a challenge for me to not brace myself waiting for the next fallout. And to not carry the last 15 years of baggage forward with me in this very blatantly obviously new chapter of things.”

She captured this sentiment perfectly in a recent Instagram post where she recalled the time a label passed on her at 32 because they were “concerned about my age,” she wrote. In the accompanying photo, she is smiling, giving the finger.

The Weird Faith tour signals another new beginning, one where she hopes to tap into a feeling that overcame her on stage last summer as she was playing maracas and singing backup for Styles: “I realized at some point I feel miserable in my body. Why does it feel like I’m hurting? Why am I bracing myself? Why does this show feel like something I’m trying to get through right now?” It unlocked something within her and, just as quickly as it came, she let it go. “What would happen if you just actually had fun? Give yourself permission.”

A few weeks ago, she played an opening set for a friend in Nashville and felt the impact of that revelation. “I was able to actually be in my body, sing some of these new songs and try to get back to that feeling. And continue to massage myself into releasing the death grip that I have on the moment, squeezing the joy out of the thing.”

Though she may never fully be able to process how her songs — born from the deeply personal frustration and pain of intense growth — have resonated with so many, releasing them and seeing them take on new life will always be cathartic. It is a reminder that like faith, love and heartbreak are as enduring as the cycle of the moon, waxing and waning, beginning and ending and beginning again.

“I hope to always fall into that magic purely by accident, now until forever.”