If you kept up with the world of electronic dance music in 2016 there’s a good chance you’ve already been introduced to Madi. The Los Angeles artist began her career as a featured vocalist collaborating with some of the most renowned EDM acts, amassing thousands of followers and tens of millions of streams. Two years ago, Madi Walsh took matters into her own hands and ventured out of the electronic dance world to one of dark-wave and art-pop. The solo project was developed while Madi attended the University of Southern California where she studied Music Industry and commemorates the self-realization that she needed to tell her story.
Many themes unfold throughout her new album Forsaken, a celebration and journey of self-love. The genre-spanning project reflects on her self-proclaimed unconventional upbringing and coming to terms with herself. From a production standpoint, the notable songs are ‘Nostalgia’ and ‘Lady Love’, where experimental synths complement her confident proclamations in their hooks. As we dive deeper into the album, her vulnerability emerges in tracks like ‘Holy’ and ‘Jessy’ where she shines a light on mental health and pays homage to a late-friend. Madi recognizes and confronts her demons with grace and care as she transitions into her skin as an empowered musician and woman.
I had the opportunity to chat with Madi about her musical background, experiences with mental illness, and the new album Forsaken, out now.
What has the Madi project evolved into over the years and where is it currently at with this new project?
"It’s been interesting especially if you’ve followed my lifestyle. I started out freelancing and top-lining, so I’ve always wanted my own project but didn’t feel like I got the chance. It was always serving favors for other people. If anything, this project has been me focusing on myself and my own story instead of making songs and narrations off other people and other DJs. It’s also been a progression just maturing and growing as not only a songwriter but a woman. That’s why shifting from EDM which is very male-dominated so to speak into a solo project, I want that female empowerment to shine through and I don’t want that to sound cliché. I want my power to be tasteful and classy so that’s what this project is more about.”
Your early career is impressive being featured on songs from some of the most acclaimed EDM artists, did you intentionally want to pay homage to those sounds on this project and will your future projects always hone back to an electronic sound?
I was raised in a very non-conventional music household. A lot of people get raised on the Beatles and Americana, but my dad brought a lot of new wave and Depeche Mode, Kraftwerk, and Pink Floyd. My mom brought a lot of reggae so my growing up influences have always been electronic and a fusion of other things. If innovation is a thing, we are going to channel it into it. I wasn’t ever very glued to country or rock, I was very engrossed in dark, electronic, and even metal.
Through my upbringing, breaking into the EDM world was very easy for me because it felt familiar and I guess you could say much of my sound now is based on my early childhood. I do want a hybrid of the Flume, glitchy aspects but with the class of Banks and FKA twigs. I feel like my project would be empty without the electronic aspect and empty without the songwriter aspect as well.
I have GANZ, who is a producer that I’ve followed for a long time and thought he was a partner in crime, on this project which abounded off my featured stuff. He executively produced the whole project, there were certain tracks that I brought in because I produce as well, and he just revamped. It was a really back and forth effort.
What does your creative process look like? How did you decide what backing production will accompany your vocals and not overpower it with these massive synths and kicks?
My creative process starts in different environments, for example, going to a session which means I am in pitch mode, meaning it’s not for me it’s normal for the other person. When I do get a chance to write for myself it takes off the pressure. A lot of my lyrics are inspired by my life and the very intrusive thoughts that I have. Normally I just jot down these thoughts on a note on my phone, my phone notes are insane. There’s a lot of phrases, feelings, and very strong metaphors that I just come up with based on my own moping.
More often than not, I’ll produce something off these notes myself and hand it off to a producer who I trust and know will do it justice. If the production is too overpowering or too underwhelming, I’ll pass it around. I never feel like a song is ever just mine, it’s very much someone else’s song as it is mine. The production adds a thousand times more emotion than lyrics sometimes. I am more greatly affected by production and believe that’s what triggers the emotion first.
Throughout the album there are some gorgeously expressed recurring themes of rebirth, self-loathing and finally self-love, what does this project mean to you?
The transition from self-loathing to self-love is really what this project is about. I had started this solo project in 2018, I released an EP last year with Moving Castle but at the time I didn’t really know what I wanted to say. I had a messy childhood and messed up things that happened to me that I talk about so that EP was about that experience and the medical journey I went through. After that, I asked myself ‘what’s next’? (laughs)
I hate to exploit my 5150 experience, but it took that honesty to find my purpose in what a solo project should be. There’s a lot of people that speak out about mental illness and talk about what I talk about but there’s never a focus on those stigmatized disorders and trying to de-villainizing them. For me, it was hard coming out of the hospital being like ‘where are normal people that are doing well that have these disorders’ because we hear the worst of the worst.
I wanted to be a role model and have this project set the example to show that you can be accountable for your health and inspiring but still not have your shit together completely. I’ve had the weirdest life that it’s like I really want to write a book one day based on the experiences I’ve been through. The stuff I’ve been through is weird like it seems fictional. If someone could feel that deceased already, like I felt dead already, so if I could feel a lot more in tune with myself now even at 22 hopefully it helps someone else.
'Jessy' is one of the most vulnerable tracks on the project, can you give a bit of background into this song?
It’s funny because everyone I’ve sent this to in the industry loves this song and I have a very difficult time giving background to it. Before I was hospitalized in 2018, a friend from high school passed away and it is the way someone would not want to die. I wasn’t necessarily close with her but her death really affected me in that I became very suicidal right after. I processed her death heavily, just the fact that someone so young could go that way so fast, it made me question my youthfulness and everything that’s happened that year.
The first half of that song was a poem I wrote after her death. I had a notebook and wrote a poem to cope. The second that GANZ sent me the production I was like ‘I need to work this poem into a song, this is hers’. One of the other verses is me calling out some ghosts of my past, that section is meant for me to say the things that I didn’t get to say to my ex-boyfriend and the line is ‘would you be tough enough to handle it?’ like telling my parents that I wasn’t okay so it’s kind of like a callout. The overall song is a tribute to suicide awareness, mental health, and most importantly a tribute to Jessy. Each verse is special in its own timing because each verse is a different stage of my grief and a different stage of how I coped through that year.
I’m curious how these sounds would sound acoustically, do you have any plans to release or perform any acoustic or stripped-down versions of any of the songs?
I would love to. I wanted to do this before with my last project but that never happened. Before the pandemic, I played out a ton and had a more stripped live setup. A few months down the line, I’d love to have a cool stripped-down session of one of the songs. A lot of people are tuning into those YouTube sessions nowadays so I would love to.
Once the world resumes back to normal, what is the Madi live experience going to look like?
We were supposed to play Electric Forrest and we were so stoked to play. I would love to hop on a support tour, the dream would be to open for Glass Animals. The dream is to hop on the tour of someone I really admire because I still need to learn a lot. I’ve only really played at festivals like hopping on stage, singing, and hopping off.
I’d love to gain some experience on the East Coast and go with a band that can show me the ropes of how to stay healthy on tour and how to stay sane and maintain relationships. I’d love to do some on-stage installations because I go into full adrenaline mode and my mania really pops out, literally, when I’m playing live. I want to give my heart and soul into live, like when I saw Banks play for the first time she had done something so different in her choreography that I was like ‘ok I can’t just do a boring show even I have to think more stylistically.
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