
Madi Diaz
To Madi Diaz, “Nothing is a waste of time.” The Nashville-based songwriter chants this self-affirming phrase on “Kiss the Wall,” a song from her sixth record Weird Faith, which arrives Friday. In a culture obsessed with efficiency and outcomes, Diaz finds this sentiment a comforting thought.
“For me, ‘Nothing is a waste of time’ has been such a huge mantra,” she tells the Scene. “Whether it’s in a relationship or whether it’s standing in an endless line at Walgreens, I just have to tell myself that this is part of a bigger story.”
Diaz, now 38, jump-started her career in Nashville in the Aughts, then zig-zagged between Music City and Los Angeles before settling down here in 2017. Despite her prolific output as an artist, songwriter and session musician, she flew under the radar for most of her early career. In 2021, her fifth LP History of a Feeling significantlygrew the industry veteran’s fan base and landed her opening dates for Harry Styles in North America. The British pop star then asked Diaz to join his touring band, and she rocked out with Styles as a guitarist and vocalist on his stadium tour across Europe in 2023.
Diaz decamped to upstate New York to record Weird Faith with Sam Cohen, whom she knew through his work as a producer for Kevin Morby. She chose New York as a means to push herself outside her comfort zone in Nashville.
“I wanted to explore beyond the path between my house and Crema off Trinity and my friend Konrad’s house,” she says. Konrad Snyder co-produced the album with Cohen, and Diaz served as executive producer. Traversing the plains of indie rock, folk and pop, Diaz finds a taut sound for her deeply personal record. Her specialty as a songwriter is creating intimate moments of a grand scale through her cathartic, sing-along hooks. The songs would sound just as at home in a sold-out arena as they would alone in the car on a late-night drive.
“I wrote the whole record inside of my last relationship, and really thought I was writing a record of super syrupy love songs,” she says. “It’s funny to listen back and listen to what the songs are very blatantly saying.”
Diaz writes about the complex contours of intimacy, and her songs seem almost incapable of hiding any of the anxiety of falling in love. Weird Faith doesn’t feel sugar-coated. Instead, the record conveys the beautiful messiness of sustaining a long-term relationship.
Diaz says Weird Faith was written during a time when she found herself stepping on a lot of “personal landmines.” When the bomb goes off, she writes a song. That frantic energy is abundant on album opener “Same Risk,” in which she asks her partner, “Are we taking the same risk? / ’Cause I’m standing here naked / Saying you can have it all.” The song embodies the paranoia of being more invested in a relationship than your partner. Ideally the hurt would be distributed equally between the partners if things go south, but there’s no way of knowing what a future fallout might look like. Accordingly, images of domestic bliss feel hopeful but fraught on “Everything Almost,” co-written with Olivia Barton. Diaz sings: “I had a dream there was a baby inside me / One hand on my belly and the other one pointing / Ordering you around the house like a bitch / And you just laughing and taking it.”

Her duet with Kacey Musgraves, “Don’t Do Me Good,” is a country-tinged song about the all-too-familiar sense of hopelessness creeping up on a relationship. Both women take turns singing while the beat sways on: “I know lovin’ you / It don’t do me good.” The love is already at its end, yet the breakup drags on; for Diaz, even self-awareness can’t stave off the crush of heartbreak. “Those big relationships in your life when you’re introducing people to your parents, and spending holidays with their families … it’s hard to walk out of stuff like that and remember how much you’ve been kind of gifted throughout that process, and have that be the headline,” she says.
For Diaz, the headline is that the relationship shone light on new places inside her and helped her discover the things she wants in life. She says she sees a future “being stationary,” one where she grows a garden and builds a family. It’s not easy to be hopeful at the end of a relationship, and Diaz gets that. “It’s hard not to completely make that [future] specific to the relationship that you’re in, and have that part of yourself die with the relationship that dies.”
Yet Diaz knows that if “nothing is a waste of time,” then the past isn’t meant to be erased or resented. It should be held with love while moving onto what’s next. On the title track, she sings: “You’ve got to have a heart of gold / You’ve got to have a weird faith.” This is another mantra, born on the other side of healing and written from a place of wisdom.
“‘Weird Faith’ for me is about finding the resilience and curiosity to keep walking forward,” she says of the song, “because I want to see what happens next.”