Madi Diaz touring with Harry, Antiquing with Kacey

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at this point in her career, Madi Diaz is realistic about life on the road. “I'm 37 years old and this shit is heavy,” laughs the Nashville songwriter. “I walk through the airport and carry a lot of pedals and cables. I push my guitar on the bathroom counter.” By the time she reaches the check-in counter, she dreads the task of telling an airline employee to let her bring her gear on the plane. “I'm just not a good fighter,” she adds. “I'm stubborn, but I don't have it umph inside me now”.

Maybe that's true when it comes to baggage, but it's certainly not true of Diaz's music. Just ask Harry Styles, who brought her on as an opening act for his 2022 Love on tour — and liked her so much he asked her to join his band in 2023. Other fans of her incredibly relatable folk-pop include Angel Olsen. Muna and Waxahatchee (all of whom collaborated with Diaz on the recordings of her excellent 2021 LP, Story of a feeling), and Kesha, who recorded a song she worked on in 2019. By all accounts, having umph it's Diaz's thing.

It's an unusually toasty October afternoon, and Diaz sits in the lobby of Manhattan's Ace Hotel, wearing a tank top under a button-down blouse. She says she's completely sleep deprived (she looks wide awake) and her bangs look like they were attacked by Edward Scissorhands (they look great). “You can tell how well I'm doing in real life by how many fucking horoscope podcasts and apps I have on my phone,” he jokes. “If I have more than two, it's not good.”

The night before, Diaz performed at the Beacon Theatre, opening for My Morning Jacket. The show at the ornate, 94-year-old venue was a bit overwhelming. “It's so romantic, I'm lost,” she says. “I started trying to talk between songs and one word literally came out backwards. I was looking at this statue of the golden lady. We're playing the fucking Beacon with these crazy horns. I just can't believe my ears.”

When he says “insane horns,” by the way, he's referring to Styles' touring horn section: saxophonist Lorren Chiodo, trombonist Kalia Vandever, and trumpeter Laura Bibbs. “They are the sweetest, best women,” says Diaz. “It was like a summer camp reunion.”

One of the songs Diaz performed on the horn is “Same Risk,” a brutally honest acoustic burn from her new album. Strange faith: “Do you think this could ruin your life?/Cause I can see it ruining mine.”

“I had just started dating my ex and I was freaking out,” Diaz explains. “You can't control anything. All I can do is just keep walking forward. It became my mantra.”

He expands on this idea in “Almost All,” another highlight, about giving almost all of yourself to a relationship — while keeping a small part just for you. Listening to it, you can understand why Diaz calls the track a “straight-up diary entry.” Densely detailed in bold lines, it's a fan favorite who will eventually know every word: “I had a dream that there was a baby inside me/One hand on my belly and the other pointing/Ordering you around the house like a bitch/And you just laugh and take it”.

“Madi has a really pleasant way of keeping things conversational,” says her friend Kacey Musgraves. Rolling rock. “My favorite kind of song.” The Nashville musicians have known each other for a long time, but have grown close during the pandemic — they cook, shop for antiques and joke about sharing a house together. “Maddy and I will do the occasional estate sale or go for a long walk and talk,” says Musgraves. “There is also wine. And horses. We're both horse girls through and through.”

Musgraves appears on Strange faith duet “Don't Do Me Good,” a dazzling send-up to a lover with a powerful chorus who wants to finally throw in the towel. “There's something about her voice that just lifts the whole thing,” says Diaz. “I know Kacey's speaking voice pretty exclusively, so it was fun to be in the studio and put on the headphones and then hear the voice come out of her mouth: 'Oh, right! That is my friend!”. ”

Co-written with Ed Sheeran collaborator Amy Wadge, “Don't Do Me Good” is easily one of the strongest songs in Diaz's catalog. But he was hesitant to ask Musgraves to sing over him. “I was totally terrified to ask her, because this bridge feels comfortable to me and my friendship with, like, Courtney Marie Andrews,” Diaz says, naming an American peer. “But Kacey is in a whole different stratosphere. He's a pop star.” (Hearing that quote, Musgraves laughs: “That's ridiculous. We're friends. I was like, 'Absolutely. Duh. Yeah.'”)

Many of Diaz's friends these days are female musicians — which wasn't always the case for her. “With our generation, alpha females were taught to avoid each other in our twenties,” says Diaz. “Which is such a damn shame. It's funny how that completely changed in my thirties.”

Diaz grew up in a musical family in Norwalk, Connecticut (her dad plays in a Zappa cover band) and moved to Pennsylvania when she was seven. later, she studied at Berklee College of Music before dropping out to play gigs at the Bitter End in New York. He moved to Nashville in 2008, developing it as a songwriter, then moved to Los Angeles to play in bands, and finally returned to Nashville in 2017.

“I literally didn't think for two seconds about being a woman in the industry and how that was going to be maybe, ultimately, difficult,” she says, recalling her early career. “It's completely different for women and hopefully people will respect that at some point. I honestly don't think men do.”

Diaz names a number of musicians who tour with their kids, from Maren Morris to Elle King and Margo Price (“a fucking badass”). “Or my friend Michaela Anne, who has a two-year-old — like, there are women who tour with kids,” she adds. “Michaela Anne's situation is very different from Maren Morris's situation on the street. And they both do.”

But despite the line about fatherhood in “Everything Almost,” she knows it's not her time yet. She learns to live in the present, drawing on Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl's 1946 memoir, Man's search for meaning, as a recent inspiration.

“It's about listening to what life is asking you and answering those questions,” he says. “And, like, life isn't asking me to be a mother. Right now, it requires me to carry my guitar two miles from LaGuardia Airport and have a rat's nest of wires in my 50-pound carry-on bag. So I try to be there.”