Since beginning their solo music career in 2017, Madge has been on the cutting edge of some of the most eye-catching movements in the underground music scene. Madge has consistently floored listeners with their unique blend of experimental electronic and pop music with a distinct DIY flavor. I had the pleasure of sitting down with one of the most interesting artists in today’s pop music climate.
Alex England: Madge, how are you?
Madge: I’m good, how are you?
AE: Oh I’m fantastic. I know you grew up Mormon, where did you spend your childhood?
M: I grew up in Utah!
AE: What kind of music was playing around you growing up?
M: Lots of classical music and jazz music, but that was specific to my family. Church music all the time, obviously, lots of church music. I remember listening to pop music when I was in fifth grade or something and feeling kind of guilty about it because I liked it so much, you know what I mean? It was never a rule that I wasn’t allowed to listen to it or anything, but my family just didn’t listen to it and it felt so forbidden and like the best thing I’d heard in my life.
AE: I feel like people who come from conservative, restrictive religions or upbringings often feel like a weight has been lifted off of their shoulders when they leave, almost as if they’re free. As a sort of out there creative and especially as a queer person, did you have a similar experience?
M: It’s a work in progress. That’s something I work on and feel every day still, whether I like to or not. As much as I’d like to feel free, I think it’s something that I’m chasing. It’s a feeling that I’m hopeful that I will arrive at and I think that leaving my religion is something that’s helped me find that feeling more, but there’s never been one moment in which I think “Oh, thank god I’m free now.”
AE: How did your family react when you left the church?
M: I had a really intense and sometimes negative relationship with my family during the leaving process. Now it’s something that’s still a little touchy and sensitive, I don’t really talk about it with them, but now I feel a level of acceptance and love from them on a level that I didn’t feel before.
AE: I know you’ve been active in music for quite a while, but your first release as Madge is as recent as 2018. How did Madge as a project come about?
M: It was kind of accidental, I just wanted to do a project in which I did everything from start to finish. My first single was birthed into the world in 2018, which was “Fight or Flight Club”, which I produced, wrote and mixed. I really just wanted to do everything and at that time I wasn’t seeing that being done, really, maybe except for Grimes. In a studio setting, I felt very unempowered and very out of my league and I thought “This is ridiculous, I know I’m good at this, there’s got to be a way for me to be involved in all parts of the process.” So I kind of did it on a whim and Madge was born that way. Since then, Madge has evolved and most of what I do is collaborative, mostly co-production. I still write the lyrics and melodies myself, but the origin of Madge came from the feeling of wanting to do everything from start to finish.
AE: A good portion of your music includes a lot of different textures and vocal effects that have become increasingly popular in the underground over the last few years, especially in the vein of, and I might be about to say a dirty word here -
M: Hyperpop.
AE: Exactly.
M: I’m moving away from hyperpop, but I will say that the stuff I was making in 2017 and came out in 2018 were those sounds before it was called hyperpop and most people I showed it to were not into it! Sorry for interrupting, I just got excited when you said hyperpop.
AE: No worries! When did you start experimenting with those glitchy, off-kilter sounds?
M: 2017. Just because it takes so long for music to come out, a lot of the stuff that you hear that’s kind of recent from me are probably sounds from three or four years ago. I originally started with the vocal effects because I was really insecure about my voice. I still struggle to consider myself a vocalist. I’m definitely a musician and by default, I sing my own songs because I write them, but I still struggle to identify as a vocalist. So glitching everything out, especially my vocals, was a way for me to kind of make my voice more of an instrument and more of a tool that could carry the song, rather than the song being about the sound of my voice. As far as the instrumentals sounding glitchy and weird, those are just the sounds that I like!
AE: The first song of yours that I found was “Fight or Flight Club” and according to Spotify, that’s your most popular solo song under the Madge moniker by some distance.
M: By a lot.
AE: It’s really interesting to me, and you mentioned this earlier, that it was your first single. When you were making it, did you ever think it would gain the traction that it did?
M: No, no, no. It was literally my first song, I had never put out a solo song ever and all of a sudden it just got organically curated into these huge playlists. I still don’t know how that happened, I have no idea how the algorithm or the playlists gods decided for that to happen. I do remember logging into my Spotify for Artists and watching the number get higher and higher and I was like “Wait, did I just make a song that’s turning me into an artist?” As much as I wanted that, I didn’t think it would happen. That was a very fun experience.
AE: Given that your first song became as popular as it did and your following songs didn’t live up to those numbers, did you ever have any feelings of disappointment following your subsequent releases?
M: Yeah, absolutely. In hindsight, I see how I could have done things differently, like release strategies or maybe working with people to help build a sound, but instead I just kind of spit out shit. I just wanted to release everything that I had and, for better or for worse, that’s how I did it. I think another huge factor in why my most recent stuff hasn’t had that same kind of traction has been the pandemic. So many people released projects and the streaming services kinda just went wacko during those times. Some people really popped off and others didn’t really get much of anything at all. But yeah, I can get in my head about it sometimes but it just is what it is.
AE: “Fight or Flight Club” in particular is very interesting to me because of the distinct juxtaposition between the sugary, vibrant instrumental and lyrics that deal with physical abuse. Was this a conscious decision or did it kind of just end up that way?
M: I think it was a combination. Most of my lyrics and sonics are a mix of happy accidents and intention. I do love flipping the script by making a really sweet song that has really sour lyrics, so there was some intention to it, but really I just had that melody in my head and those were the words that fit.
AE: You’ve also gained a bit of exposure with your collaborations, most notably on “Fun” with Kaskade, Mr. Tape and Brohug. I’ve always been very curious about how these songs come about. Can you give me a little insight into that?
M: So I’m from Utah and that’s how I know those guys. Kaskade is kind of in the circle of people that I’ve interacted with. Initially, with that song, I recorded my vocals in a closet, I didn’t think it was going to become a Kaskade song. Someone was just like “Hey Madge, do you wanna lay down some vocals to this beat” and I said why not, so I laid down some vocals and sent them over. Then three months later, someone sent me a video from EDC (Electric Daisy Carnival) in Miami and they were like “Is this you singing?” and I was completely surprised. The vocals got passed around and they liked it and the song did really well so I’ve since done more with that crew.
AE: Correct me if I’m wrong, but the most recent song with them was “Whatify”, right?
M: Correct. I love that song, it’s really different from other stuff I’ve put out and I actually recorded it around the same time as “Fun”, like a few years ago. It’s very much in a DIY style, the vocals you hear are very much a stream of consciousness, I didn’t write anything. I just said words into a mic and it turned into a song. I don’t know, I just liked it so much and I had to release it. I thought about passing it on to an EDM artist, which I’ve done with other stuff I’ve written, but I don’t know, it’s kind of this quirky little alien song that I love and I had to put it out.
AE: One thing about your discography that really catches my eye is your …Is Just A Girl EP. You’ve got reworkings of songs from Weezer to Coheed and Cambria to No Doubt on there. What was your thought process while developing that project?
M: Those songs just stand out in my mind as part of my musical consciousness and are songs that I remember hearing that stuck out as not church music or classical music. When I thought of songs that affected me when I heard them for the first time, it was probably these songs. And it’s not even a good Weezer song (Beverly Hills)! I don’t even particularly love these songs, to be honest, I don’t even listen to them. Actually, I do love the Death Cab song (The Sound of Settling), but they all just kinda stick out in my mind as touchpoints to when I started listening to mainstream music.
AE: I found that my personal favorite song of yours, “Romeo”, was included in a very obscure DJ mix made by former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne. Is this something that you were aware of when it happened and how did that happen?
M: I honestly don’t know. I found it so randomly, someone posted about David Byrne and I thought “What’s he up to?” and I went to his website and it was on the homepage in his monthly playlist. It was one of the craziest things of my career. Also, I’m so glad you like that song, that’s such a sleeper song and that’s another one that I completely self-produced and I love it. I think it’s such a funny, weird song and David Byrne likes it too!
AE: Fight or Flight Club and Ethanol were released two years apart, but from what I’m gathering, it sounds like they were recorded around the same time.
M: The sounds that I created for Ethanol were created immediately after Fight or Flight Club. A lot of the songs that you hear on Ethanol were made a long time ago, which is something about music that’s stressful. I’m sitting on some stuff right now that I’m so stoked about, but I might have to wait a year for it to come out and I might be bored of it in a year. I feel like I’m making sounds that are cool and edgy that I feel like are so different and sometimes I’m insecure that if I wait a year to put them out, they’ll just become a part of a bigger wave that’s going on and I feel like that kind of happened with Ethanol, to be honest.
AE: That’s really interesting because, to me, Flight or Fight Club and Ethanol sound very different. A song like “Alice” from Flight or Fight Club sounds very quirky and fun, while a song like “Ethanol” sounds much more focused and almost artsy, as silly as that may sound.
M: I definitely had a steep learning curve when it came to making music on my own. A lot of the songs on Fight or Flight Club were just demos and things I was messing around with. Also, the making of Fight or Flight Club was the first time I ever used a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) and fucked around and beep-booped my way to making a song. You can hear me learning to make music on that project and when I realized that I could make this my job, I spent a lot of time getting good at it. I also started collaborating with people and was learning more and more, so you can definitely hear progression between those two projects.
AE: Even within projects, your sound is incredibly diverse. Is this done with intention or is it just something that happens naturally through experimentation?
M: Everything about Madge is an experiment, to be honest. I’m still trying to figure out if I want to really dive into one direction or not. I’m trying to decide that right now with the stuff I’m making, whether I want to go more pop or go more fringe, but if I make a sound that I love and think is cool, I’m okay with putting it out as Madge.
AE: Ethanol and Fight or Flight Club are both six tracks long, while ...Is Just a Girl is five. Is there a reason these releases have been so brief?
M: It probably has to do with the people who have helped distribute everything, those are just kinda the numbers they’ve wanted. I’ve yet to release a full-length album, which is something I really want to do and I’m sitting on a lot of demos right now that lean more in that direction, but with the nature of the industry, I think it’s pretty difficult right now to get somebody to hop on board for 10 or 12 songs.
AE: Do you have a timetable for a full-length release?
M: So I have a three-song collab EP coming out in October that’s cool, it’s very hyperpop, it’ll kind of be the last triumphant thing I do in hyperpop. I’ve been making tons of music with some really incredible producers and I would hope to put out a full-length album next year.
AE: Madge, it’s been a pleasure, thank you so much for talking to me.
M: For sure, thank you!
Commentaires