Madi Diaz is an artist who cuts to the emotional core of her own experiences with startling precision. Her last two albums, 2021’s History of a Feeling and 2024’s two-time Grammy-nominated Weird Faith, set off a breakthrough for the professional songwriter. These records won over critics, audiences, and other collaborators with well-crafted songs and a compelling arc: first there’s the difficult breakup, then a mourning period and slowly, a sense of reinvention; when love comes around again, Weird Faith seemed to say, it’s worth fighting through the fear and uncertainty. Fatal Optimist, the Nashville singer-songwriter’s forthcoming LP, could be considered the final chapter in this heartache trilogy, and also its rawest entry. This time Diaz is asking audiences to lean closer in to hear what she has to say. After ending a relationship with someone she once envisioned marrying, Diaz turned away from everyone and everything she knew and took herself to an island. This heartbreak felt different. Every one of them does. Admittedly, she was embarrassed to be in this position again. How was she going to write about this? "I put myself on an island,” Diaz wrote in her journal during that time. “I was already describing myself as an emotional island swimming in so much of an ocean of feelings... It was the perfect physical manifestation, alone with all of my disappointment. ” She began to navigate isolation, and the good things that can come from it. Although people often warn others about isolating, Madi's time alone emerged as a powerful, insightful period of introspection. Rage, embarrassment and romantic grief shifted into inner wholeness and the pieces of Fatal Optimist started falling into place. “I didn’t know that I hadn’t chosen myself yet,” she says. “The only person I’m never gonna leave is myself.” Solitude called to Diaz again during the initial recording sessions for Fatal Optimist. After entering a New Jersey studio with friends to flesh out the songs, she later realized it wasn’t right. The album needed to sound like isolation, to mirror her experience of being completely alone. She wanted to capture the sound of self-soothing. Diaz started over in Southern California with a new co-producer, Gabe Wax (Soccer Mommy, Zach Bryan) at his Infinite Family Studio. “This was the first time in my career that I stayed in this heavy place with the songs after leaving the studio, ” she says, “rather than trying to escape it.” While you’ll find subtle accompaniment from an occasional baritone guitar or bass, Fatal Optimist comes down to Diaz alone in a room with her acoustic guitar. This is her Unplugged moment, her stripped-down version, the Madi Diaz album most likely to haunt you with its starkness. Simplicity can be much more difficult to nail than camouflaging a song with layers of production. It is exactly what these songs needed. Song by song, she traces the phases of dissolution and rebirth like the moon waxing and waning in the night sky for all to see. Opener “Hope Less” unpacks the experience of being offered less than you deserve and trying miserably to shrink your needs. On “Ambivalence,” Diaz makes a meal out of a shitty feeling and turns that four-syllable word into a quietly anthemic chorus about not being sure if crumbs are enough. The romantic spell is fully broken on “Feel Something, ” where Diaz captures the futility of reaching for emotional connection after it’s already been lost. Instead of calling her ex she wrote this song. It captures the oscillating emotions of post-break-up limbo with energetic acoustic strumming, languid electric guitar, and a final declaration, "Fuck my life, goddamnit I might!" She moves confidently and quickly in hervocal style, showcasing her mastering the craft of phrasing: ”I used to think I needed to read your mind/I’m only gonna find what I’m gonna find, and then we’ll fuck and then we’ll fight.” The sparse, devastating “Heavy Metal” was a late addition to the album. It pulls off the songwriting trick of cleverly repurposing a common phrase into a personal mantra: her heart is not precious like gold or silver, it’s built to endure pain and battle like heavy metal and her mother. Here her voice aches with vulnerability. “I really wanted to write a song that feels as hardcore as I am, ” she says. “I am emotionally heavy metal, but everything comes out soft.” It’s not like there aren’t moments of weakness, backslides, as Diaz waits for time to heal all wounds. She chronicles her not-so-proud moments with just as much gall-force clarity, grabbing the listener from the very first line on melancholic country song “Why’d You Have to Bring Me Flowers”: “My toxic trait is hanging on, your toxic trait is showing up.” Just because Diaz chose herself doesn’t mean her heart isn’t broken, too. But she takes it as a sign that, at her core, she still believes in love. The closing title track speaks to her innate hope for something magical despite all the known risks. Here, Diaz is enveloped by a noisy, full-band rock sound for the first time on the album, as if to switch from black and white to technicolor just in time for the story’s cathartic ending. “Making the record felt like walking through fire alone, ” she explains of the sonic shift, “the reward was getting my friends back and the color back into my world and getting to have this communal sound.” In Diaz’s words, “Fatal Optimism is the innate hope for something magical. It’s the weird faith that kicks in while knowing that there is just plain risk that comes with wanting someone or something. It’s when you have no control over the outcome, but still choose to experience every moment that happens, and put your whole heart in it.”

Jamie Floyd is a 2x Grammy-nominated independent songwriter & recording artist. She has written songs recorded by Kelly Clarkson, Kesha, Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, Ingrid Andress, Ronnie Dunn, Madi Diaz, Sturgill Simpson, Ty Herndon, Ashley Monroe, Miranda Lambert, and more. She is also the composer of three musicals in development for Broadway out of New York, and she just released her new single “Sad Girls Do.” It was featured on Spotify’s “Fresh Finds Country: Best of 2023” playlist and “Fresh Finds,” which highlights the best of all-genre independent releases.

Based in Los Angeles, Jones has co-written tracks for some of the industry’s biggest names, collectively garnering billions of streams. She contributed to several #1 albums, including “People You Know” off Selena Gomez’s Rare, “Look At Us Now” off Celine Dion’s Courage, “Happy” off P!nk’s Hurts 2B Human, “Polaroid” off Keith Urban’s The Speed of Now Part 1, and “Roaring 20s” off the 2x-Platinum Pray for the Wicked by Panic! At The Disco. Jones has also collaborated with BLACKPINK, Maisie Peters, Little Big Town, Mickey Guyton, and more. Additionally, Jones co-wrote several singles for popstar Sabrina Carpenter, including Platinum-certified “Nonsense” off Carpenter’s acclaimed Emails I Can’t Send, which was included in Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 Best Albums of 2022. Other Sabrina Carpetner cuts include "Espresso" and "Dont's Smile." Jones also co-wrote “Lottery” by rapper-singer Latto feat. LU KALA, as well as country star Kelsea Ballerini’s Platinum-certified, 2021 ASCAP Country Award-winning song “Hole in the Bottle.”

Tenille Townes vividly recalls the first time she walked through the East Nashville church her producer, Jay Joyce, had transformed into a studio. A congregation of instruments — a cluster of guitars here, an organ over there — silently stood, waiting for them to get to work. She immediately felt at home in the musical sanctuary. “He had yellow flowers on the stand by where the mic was set up, and was like, ‘Okay let’s do this!’” she remembers. “Within one minute of arriving, I had my guitar out. We were jumping in. We really built these songs from the ground up.” Born in Grande Prairie, Alberta, the 26-year-old singer-songwriter earned accolades for her wise-beyond-her-years ballads before she moved to Nashville in 2013. After years of taking in sets at the Bluebird Café and pushing herself in writing sessions, she started winning over Music Row with the songs that would eventually shape her acoustic EP, Living Room Worktapes. Each track told a potent story: her buoyant voice soared over love songs like “White Horse” and “Where You Are” with their clever choruses, but “Jersey on the Wall (I’m Just Asking),” in which she questions her faith after a senseless tragedy, and “Somebody’s Daughter,” an empathetic look into the life of a stranger, proved she had the range to write through life’s most difficult challenges. “My way of processing how I feel is writing songs and diving into music,” she says of her tendency to put herself in the listener’s shoes. “I like to write from that observer perspective because it gives me an opportunity to process my emotions. I like to be that storyteller and that witness because it makes me feel like I belong in a situation, but I’m also stepping away from it and zooming out a little bit.” After signing with Columbia Nashville, Tenille connected with Joyce in the fall of 2017. He expanded her bare-boned tunes into full-bodied anthems, a craft he’d previously perfected through work with Eric Church, Miranda Lambert, Little Big Town and more. “Somebody’s Daughter” grew deafening with thunderous drums, handclaps and a reverberating electric guitar line, while “White Horse” and “Where You Are” popped with driving beats and galloping arrangements as well. By the spring of April 2018, Townes was, again, jumping in. Columbia Nashville released Living Room Worktapes by way of introduction. The revamped version of “Somebody’s Daughter” followed as her first single that fall, which quickly reached No. 29 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs Chart. Her amplified sound got the welcome it deserved as she opened for Lambert, Little Big Town and Dierks Bentley on the road, and she took home four honors at the 2019 Canadian Country Music Association Awards. February 2020 delivered her Road to the Lemonade Stand EP; that served as a first taste of The Lemonade Stand, which Columbia Nashville will release in partnership with RCA Records on June 26. Named for a line from “Somebody’s Daughter,” Townes has savored the gradual build to her full-length debut as it encouraged her to reach new depths in her music while forging a deeper connection with her listeners. “These songs really have grown with me, and they have so much more meaning now because I’ve been able to play them for people,” she says. When she heads to the merch table after her sets, fans often open up about their own struggles. They hear themselves in “Jersey on the Wall (I’m Just Asking)” in particular. These conversations are sacred to Townes, and remind her how crucial it is to connect with strangers, to feel their pain and her own. “It takes an insurmountable amount of courage to talk to someone you’ve never met before and tell them about one of the greatest losses in your life, and the fact that you have questions for God, too,” she says. “It’s probably been the most beautiful part of this whole adventure, the idea of learning how so many of us feel similar things. These songs are showing that.” In addition to the previously heard tracks, The Lemonade Stand features her most poignant ballad yet — one she’s never shared before. Townes once again communes with a higher power on “When I Meet My Maker” as she considers life after death over ethereal guitar. She wore her dearly departed great-grandmother’s earrings to the studio when she recorded the song she wrote for her. “We moved over towards the altar of the church, which felt really special to me,” she remembers. “Jaxon, one of the assistant engineers, grabbed an acoustic guitar, and Jay was playing electric. The three of us played it, just to run it, and we all looked at each other when it was finished: ‘What just happened?’” The trio realized the first take captured a breakthrough, and Townes considers it her most vulnerable work on the album. “I definitely felt [my great-grandmother] in the church that day,” she says. “That really came from the gut of emotion for me.” The Lemonade Stand offers levity, too, and holds space for cheerful flirtations and hope, especially in pop-country confection “Holding Out For the One” or the romantic dance of “The Way You Look Tonight.” But one ballad, album closer “The Most Beautiful Things,” strikes an uplifting balance between light and dark, the weight of the world and the promise of hope. Townes marvels at her appreciation for the simple things most take for granted: “Why do we close our eyes/When we pray, cry, kiss, dream/Maybe the most beautiful things in this life are felt and never seen.” Engineer Jason Hall’s young daughter, Amelia, came into the studio to sing along with the refrain, and her little voice moved Townes to tears. This, for her, was the heart of The Lemonade Stand: she and Joyce built these songs from the ground up, but on the foundation of her childhood dream to reach others through music. “I remember being that seven year old kid who sat in the backseat of the car and read along to the lyric booklets in all my favorite records, just dreaming of getting to make something like this someday,” she says. “That moment for me is the biggest full circle, to hear her at the end of this project. I hope people feel reminded of that little kid or dreamer that they used to be, and that they feel they’re not alone.”