Me & Madi

Madi is a super talented songwriter, singer and producer. We met Madi during our work for Enough is Enough and got to witness her brilliance in firsthand. Following that we art directed her song ‘Dirty Word’ which was great fun. Here is more about Madi….

Tell us a bit about yourself please Maddie.

I’m Maddie (aka MADI – my artist name), and I’m a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer. I make electro art pop for weirdos – and for me that involves a lot of visuals as well, like costume, videos, projections etc.

Do you think personal branding and online presence is important? And why? 

Definitely. I made the decision in 2018 to step away from performing and releasing music for a while to rebuild myself as MADI (I’d been performing as Maddie Jones before). I’d started writing in a really ‘complete’ way, where I wrote nearly all the parts and recorded them, before anyone else heard the song. So, I had a much clearer stylistic vision in mind, and that meant that my branding and visuals really needed to match up as well. I think it’s really useful on both sides (as artist, and audience) to get a clear impression of what someone is about as quickly as possible. There’s so much competing for our attention that you don’t want to miss something that you would be into, because it’s not presented the right way. Online presence is something I’ve been working more on recently as well. For a while, I think a lot of artists treated social media as just somewhere to shout about their gigs or releases, but now it’s more about creating proper content for people to engage with, who may never come to a gig in person. It’s more of a worldwide thing. People want more, and more regularly – so I’m trying to move with that. And obviously in the current pandemic, online has proved to be more important than anything!

How did you find the creative process of your music video ‘Dirty (Word)’? 

I’m really into the visual elements that surround music, like the theatricality of the live show, and the scope for music videos to be short films in their own right. I wanted to work with Pinar (the director) on this song’s video, as we’ve talked about music and video concepts lots of times, and her artistry fits in perfectly with the themes of the song (feminism, sexism, objectification). She is a performer, writer, artist and many other things, so her ability to get inside the song, and push it into totally new visual ideas is amazing. Opening up a song to collaboration can be hard, but with Pinar and the team for Dirty (Word) it was all just how you would want it to be.   

As a musician what is your most asked question? And how do you feel about that? Honestly…

Usually, ‘what are your influences?’. What people really want to know is who do you sound like, because that makes it easier to understand the context. It’s a bad question though, because it assumes that you’re only influenced by things which are stylistically most similar to you, which isn’t true. A lot of artists I’m influenced by, like David Bowie for instance, I don’t actually sound anything like. You can be influenced in many different ways, and it’s not just a case of loving an artist, and then making music that sounds exactly like them, there’s no point to that.

Thank you Madi! Check out Madi’s music here!