Madi Diaz: A little bit country, a little bit pop, and beloved by both

The country-pop musician Madi Diaz in Central Park in New York, Sept. 11, 2025. The singer and songwriter, based in Nashville, Tenn., has written songs for Maren Morris and toured with Harry Styles. Her new album, “Fatal Optimist,” was released in October. (OK McCausland/The New York Times)

By MARISSA R. MOSS

Madi Diaz was sure she’d do something eventually with the blue toilet, sink and bathtub that now sit idle in her driveway.

“I bought them off Facebook Marketplace at 1 a.m. in a van somewhere in Montana, I think,” the singer and songwriter said, seated at a picnic table in her yard wearing a white tank top and jeans on a muggy, late-summer day. Or maybe it was Ireland while touring with Kacey Musgraves, or Italy while playing as a member of Harry Styles’ band? The past few years have been such a blur, but she had every intention of installing the pieces at her cream-colored cottage when things settled down. Because in Diaz’s world, there’s always a vision, even if it doesn’t work out.

The Nashville, Tennessee-based musician has been trying to make this house a home, though it hasn’t been easy: Between her relentless touring schedule and writing songs for her new album, “Fatal Optimist” (out last month), she’s barely been here long enough to take care of her lawn. “I’ll probably power wash this house and stay forever,” Diaz said, sipping coffee from a ceramic mug made by her mother. “Make it look a bit less like a haunted woman lives here.”

Diaz hasn’t always been this sure that her roots belong in Nashville, but for well over a decade the city has embraced her as a vital, connective force, managing to thread the needle between the country and pop worlds without really belonging to either. Her vocals have appeared on songs by Musgraves, Miranda Lambert and Charlie Worsham, her songs cut by Maren Morris and Kesha, praised for their emotional qualities. She’s toured with Waxahatchee, My Morning Jacket and Little Big Town, and her 2024 album, “Weird Faith,” was nominated for two Grammys.

“Madi has one of my favorite voices in this world, but it’s matched equally by her pen game,” Morris said, praising her “brilliant poetic lens.”

In the wake of all the attention and accolades, Diaz decided to make something ambitious in intimacy and lyricism, not pop bombast. “Fatal Optimist” is deeply sparse and stripped-down, driven primarily by Diaz’s strong yet uncannily tender voice and acoustic guitar, so bare you can hear her fingers slide and stick on the strings.

“I could’ve seen myself getting stuck in my head and being like, man, we’ve really got to show out now,” said Diaz, who attended the Grammys with Musgraves and ate hot wings afterward in her dress. “But I’d already decided this was the direction.”

Diaz can trace her resolve (or, as she put it, her “relentlessness”) to her childhood in rural Pennsylvania, where she was homeschooled by her musical parents. Her father taught her how to play Alice in Chains songs on guitar, and she was drawn to Sheryl Crow and the Chicks. At 15 she was admitted to the Paul Green School of Rock, now infamous for the accusations of sexual abuse and misconduct made public against Green by former students, including Diaz.

“It was a really toxic place, and it took me a long time to find my voice,” she said. “I was afraid of my own power, and the power of an emotional lyric. That it’s not stupid to be vulnerable.”

Diaz attended Berklee College of Music in Boston but dropped out when her scholarship ended. She made good friends there, though: Worsham and Kyle Ryan, who went on to become Musgraves’ bandleader. Diaz and Ryan moved to Nashville together as a musical duo, and he still lives nearby. They exchange cookies at Christmas.

“Everybody who heard Madi sing was hypnotized,” Worsham said. “She wrote songs that have this ache.”

Nashville was good to Diaz initially, but she got antsy. “My mom is Peruvian, and I missed hearing Spanish,” she said; Diaz soon moved to Los Angeles in 2012, but the city wasn’t all she’d envisioned. Though she had “a hot girl moment” as part of a rock duo called Riothorse Royale, everything else stalled. Her personal life did too, when her two-year relationship with songwriter Teddy Geiger ended. Diaz would go on to write the 2021 album “History of a Feeling” to process her emotions about the breakup with Geiger, who came out as transgender and transitioned after they split. Her ability to carry both empathy for the pain Geiger weathered while putting weight to her own experience was striking, and the indie label Anti- signed on to release the project.

“It’s hard to talk about pain, and it’s hard to talk about people and love changing,” Diaz said, who ended up moving back to Tennessee in 2017. It was still her home, and she realized she was more connected to the Nashville songwriting community than anything else. “It just felt like part of my DNA, though it’s not very cool,” she added, recalling times she felt out of place around the indie and rock musicians on her label. “They don’t understand it. They’re like, ‘What’s a writers’ round?’”

Styles knew, apparently. He invited Diaz to be a part of his Love on Tour band in 2023 via DM; the message was so shocking that Diaz just replied “HA.” She eventually said yes, and she and Styles ended up connecting over Patty Griffin and Joni Mitchell, and the books they were reading (at one point, Styles had picked up the feminist text “Women Who Run With the Wolves”).

It was the thrill of a lifetime, but while her career was surging, her personal life was splintering: Diaz and her partner, whom she’d hoped to marry, separated. After the Styles tour ended, she found it hard to go back home. “When I finally walked into this house and opened my suitcase, I just started bawling,” she said. “There was no avoiding it, and I didn’t know how to celebrate what just happened either. It was so massive, and it felt like everything hurt.”

She also returned in constant physical pain, caused by how she angled her hip while playing the guitar. It took seven months to get a diagnosis, and the agony drove her to the brink: “I said, ‘If this is what life is, I don’t want to do it.’”

Diaz always prided herself on her optimism, though there needed to be limits, and what was the bright side of so much hurt? It was making her ambivalent, indecisive, even capable of lying to herself to search for it. But that optimism was beautiful, too, in a world that often sees the worst in people first. While out on tour, she wrote in her journal: “I just feel like I’m fatally optimistic.”

The songs for the new album started to come at a songwriting retreat in Nantucket, pushed to the surface by solitude. “‘Fatal Optimist’ is almost a parental advisory warning,” Diaz said. “Be careful what you say to me because I’m going to believe you, and believe the best in you.”