When Madi Diaz received her first Grammy nominations last year – for her sixth album, Weird Faith (best folk album), and its Kacey Musgraves collaboration, “Don’t Do Me Good” (best American performance) – she breathed a sigh of relief.
By this time, the singer-songwriter was already “about midway down the road” on what would become her next album, Fatal Optimism, and “one of my first thoughts, after the nomination, was, ‘Well, thank god I already know how the next thing sounds,'” she says. “I definitely could see how that could have gotten into my head otherwise.”
Diaz’s records are littered with wrenching stories of love and loss, and the harrowing seeds of Fatal Optimism, out today, were sown during a particularly gnarly breakup in 2023, well before she received her plaudits from the Recording Academy. The relationship’s dissolution coincided with a the end of a particularly busy touring streak where Diaz opened tours by Harry Styles, Kacey Musgraves and Waxahatchee, and she wanted to strike while the emotional iron was hot.
“When something is so beautifully dense, you have to write it down when it happens, or else you’re gonna lose yourself in the plot, and the narrative kind of shifts,” says Diaz, 39. “It was like, ‘If I get it down now, it’s the most distilled version of this heartache that I’m feeling, this really empty, lonely, confused, swimming-back-to-myself kind of feeling.'”
In a sense, Fatal Optimism is the most distilled version of Diaz herself. While she initially recorded it with a full band, those sessions didn’t convey the material’s loneliness – so she scrapped them and linked with producer Gabe Wax (Zach Bryan, Soccer Mommy), who helped steer largely solo renditions of the songs. The final arrangements channel the uneasy specificity of gutting tunes like “If Time Does What It’s Supposed To” and “Why’d You Have to Bring Me Flowers.”
But there’s another way Fatal Optimist is quintessentially Diaz: The musician, who was raised in rural Pennsylvania and attended Boston’s Berklee College of Music before becoming a Nashville songwriting fixture, wrote nearly every song on the album with Music City peers, including Tenille Townes, Morgan Nagler (Phoebe Bridgers), and Steph Jones (Sabrina Carpenter).
“At the heart of my heart, I am a songwriter, storyteller person, and I’ve been so fortunate to always have had the most incredible collaborators,” Diaz says. “These friends of mine are constantly pushing themselves, and pushing me to just get better and better.”
Diaz has plenty of experience on the other side of the equation. Concurrent with her rise as an artist, she’s also become an in-demand songwriter, collaborating with artists including Maren Morris and Kesha. “I can be a really good collaborator for other projects,” she says, “because I can see it going in so many different directions – and I like to have someone aim me and say, ‘This is the bullseye. If we can nail this, we’re f–king nailing it.'”
Here, Diaz discusses her winning collaborative moments, from singing backup for Miranda Lambert to bonding on tour with Harry Styles to pitching stars like Morris and Musgraves on her songs.
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Miranda Lambert, The Weight Of These Wings (background vocals, 2016)
It still is one of my favorite records to throw on. She’s just such a force of nature, and is just so fearless in her vocals and her voice and her writing and storytelling. A really close old college friend of mine [Eric Masse] – we were 18 when we met – ended up producing this record, and just cold-called me. He was like, “I’m producing this Miranda record, you gotta come through Nashville and sing on it.” We did well over half of the record in 48 hours. Miranda was actually, unfortunately, out of town. I was just like, “Oh my god, I’m gonna sing all over this artist that I look up to’s songs, and then she’s gonna come and she’s gonna be like, ‘What just happened? Who is this b–ch?'” But luckily, she f–ked with it.
She called me a couple months later. Gwen [Sebastian], the woman who sings [backup] for her typically, had a wedding or something that she was going to, and [Miranda] was like, “Do you want to come out on the road and sing Gwennie’s background parts? Can you play tambourine?” It was when she was on tour with Kenny Chesney, these stadium shows. I’ve never, like, walked down a truss before, and she would just grab my hand and yank me down the truss. She’s a badass.
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Kesha ft. Brian Wilson, Sturgill Simpson and Wrabel, “Resentment” (co-writer, 2019)
The fact that anything that I wrote would ever hit Wilson’s ears, especially now, is something so singular and so special. I really have Kesha to thank for that. At the top of 2018, Stephen Wrabel and I had become very, very close, and he made a trip to Nashville to see me and [songwriter] Jamie Floyd. The three of us wrote “Crying in Public” [later recorded by Diaz] and “Resentment” in one day in the basement of Creative Nation, this crappy, windowless room on Writers Row in Nashville.
Wrabel is very close friends with Kesha, and sent her [“Resentment”], just as a friend. Kesha was like, “Oh my god, I want to cut it.” And I was like, “We’re gonna ruin a pop star’s career.” [Laughs.] But she killed it. She had Sturgill sing and Wilson sing on it. And, you know, the song came and went and Kesha is thriving. Nothing horrible happened. She’s such an incredible songwriter and such an incredible artist. I’m such a huge fan of her new record.
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Little Big Town, “All Summer” (co-writer, 2022)
[Little Big Town’s] Karen Fairchild is just this, like, lioness. She’s someone that I really look up to and has had this beautiful, really long, really incredible, multifaceted career. She’s a f–king badass woman in the industry that does not give a shit how many obstacles she hits – she just keeps forging through. We started writing in 2020, and would go away quite a bit together. We connected in the [Florida] Panhandle; it’s a seven-hour drive from Nashville, and we could just go down there in our respective cars and spend time over a few days and write and hang out.
Time was weird back then – you couldn’t tell if [the pandemic] was gonna end tomorrow, if it would just stretch on into infinity – so it was really crazy, hanging in the balance with Karen Fairchild [and the songwriters] Sarah Buxton and Savana Santos. It was so fun to feel so understood and supported by Karen.
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Waxahatchee, Natalie Hemby, Courtney Marie Andrews, Angel Olsen, Same History, New Feelings EP (performer/writer, 2022)
I was so grateful to learn that Waxahatchee, Katie [Crutchfield], was a fan of mine – or, you know, liked any song that I’d ever written. I was psychotic about [Waxahatchee’s 2020 album] Saint Cloud. I literally listened to two records during 2020: Saint Cloud and Caroline Polachek’s first solo record. To have these people do their own interpretations of these songs [I had written], it was just special. It kind of opened a whole new dimension to a different heaviness or, like, a different world when they were singing it. We’re so lucky to have them in the world as women poets.
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Harry Styles (tour opener, 2022-23)
I was in Palm Springs, it was the second time he asked me to open for him, and he told this story about how he heard a song of mine on some random playlist, and then went down some rabbit hole [and found] my Tiny Desk performance. I still have no idea what song it is, and I still have no idea what playlist it is — because, you know, when you’re sitting there and you’re talking, there are nine million other things that you’re just talking about. I’m not gonna be like, [playful affect] “So tell me about what song. I’m just dying to know which song of mine.”
It still is so crazy to me that he found me in the f–king endless ocean of everything that’s out there. And he really is, like, hip to all the shit. I remember him talking about, like, a Whitney song while we were on tour two years ago, and I was just like, “What?” While we were on tour together, he was always reading some really beautiful, bizarre – like, he was reading [Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ 1992 book] Women Who Run With the Wolves. And I was like, “Who? What?” [Laughs.] There’s a deep dude in there.
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Bethany Cosentino, “For a Moment” (co-writer, 2023)
She’s such a badass. We met through my manager, actually. Bethany, she’s another one – she’s just a bad b–ch. She’s a force of nature. The things that she has done in her career, so early on [in Best Coast], [then] just kind of cruising into this whole other side of herself as a songwriter, like Sheryl Crow, war cry. It was so fun to hang with her and get to know her. She’s so multi-dimensional, and she’s just a good person.
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Madi Diaz ft. Kacey Musgraves, “Don’t Do Me Good” (performer, co-writer, 2024)
One of my really close friends, Kyle Ryan, became Kacey’s [music director], and put together her band for [her albums] Pageant Material and Golden Hour and was touring with her. I’d always known her peripherally, we’ve always been cool, but she’s a pop star, she’s busy doing her thing. During the pandemic in 2020, our [COVID] bubbles were very close to each other, and then fully, like, on top of each other. We just became buddies.
When I was making Weird Faith, I wrote “Don’t Do Me Good” with Amy Wadge. I was listening back to [recordings from the sessions] and I was like, this whole record is so lonely and sad. I would really love to have a [song] like, “sitting on the barstool, talking with my homegirl about this s–tty thing that’s happening” moment. Kacey was the first voice that I thought of.
I sent her this voice message that was just – I was so nervous. I sent her this bleeding heart [message], like, “I just f–king love you, and if you feel like you could [play on the song] it would be great, and if not, we can pretend this conversation never happened.” She sent me back a voice memo immediately, and was like, “B–ch, I’d f–kin’ love to, you weirdo, send me the f–king song.”
It was really fun [being in the] studio together. She is such a pro, and she’s so quick, and she knows exactly what she likes, and she knows exactly what she doesn’t like. It was just really fun to work with somebody that knows herself so well and knows her voice so well.
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Maren Morris, “This Is How a Woman Leaves” (co-writer, 2025)
I was vacuuming my ex’s house upon moving all of the rest of my s–t out. My friend calls me and she’s like, “What are you doing?” And I was like, “I’m vacuuming my ex’s.” She was like, “That is a choice. That is a choice that you are making, right now.” And I was like, “I just want it to look nice, I want it to feel good – or maybe, like, less s–tty.” And she was like, “You know, that’s OK. That’s how a woman leaves.” And I was like, I don’t know if I love that, like, totally. [Laughs.] But like that idea – that this is how a woman leaves – is f–king incredible.
I wrote it down, and it just sat for a little bit, and then I was hanging out with my friend Sarah Buxton, and we were both going through it and it was one of those songs that just fell out in moments. I remember sitting at the piano and turning around and looking at Buxton and being like, “This is a f–king huge chorus.”
Maren’s voice, immediately, it was like, her song. I never have somebody’s voice really, like, full inception, just take over the way hers did. [Maren and I] would send each other recipes, and we’ve been friends– we go to the same parties, we have the same friend group. I just sent her the voice memo and I was like, “Dude, I know we’re going through something similar and I just wanted to send this to you. So if you have any f–king inkling at all, or if this is you in any way, I’d love to finish it with you.” And she was like, “I’m laying on my hotel bed crying.” It was just the sweetest response.
On a cold-ass Nashville winter day, she came over, we finished the song. I have videos of her standing in my living room and singing. I have a fairly decent recording setup, but I had just moved back in – I was going through this breakup. The only headphones I could find were these gross, in-ear monitors. And I was just like, “I’m so sorry. this has been in my ear.” She was just like, “I don’t give a s–t, whatever.” Then I’m sitting in the corner, and she’s f–king just belting this song. I’m gonna remember that moment for my whole life.
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Parker McCollum, Parker McCollum (background vocals, 2025)
Frank Lidell and Eric Masse produced The Weight Of These Wings for Miranda and also produced this Parker McCollum record. Frank and Eric hit me up to sing. My favorite thing about being in the studio is, like, no one listen to the song, no one plan what we’re gonna do. We don’t have to map this thing out. The first cut, the second cut, the third cut are always the best to me. Anything more than that and this just becomes like a rehearsal and like we’re trying to perfect something, and that’s not the point of recording to me. I love that that’s the creed that Masse and Liddell work with. The couple of records that they’ve had me come and sing on and work on with them have just been that – they just throw me in the booth and they’re like, what’s your first thought? That was how that Parker McCollum record went.
I love harmonies so much. Like, if I could just do anything for the rest of my life, it would probably just be singing background to somebody else