Madi Diaz on Her Wrenching New Album & Collaborating With Stars From Harry Styles to Maren Morris

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.