Madi

A little over a year ago, Madi Diaz lay in bed in an apartment near Dodger Stadium sweating out a gnarly case of COVID-19.

The Nashville-based singer and songwriter had traveled to Los Angeles to record the follow-up to her album “Weird Faith,” which came out in early 2024 and would go on to earn two Grammy nominations, including one for a beautifully bummed-out duet with her friend Kacey Musgraves. But after three or four days of work in the studio, Diaz became sick just as the Dodgers were battling the Mets in last October’s National League Championship Series.

“I could literally see the stadium lights — there were drones everywhere and people honking and lighting things on fire,” she recalls. “I was just like, Why, L.A. — why?”

Her suffering in a city she once called home was worth it: “Fatal Optimist,” the LP Diaz eventually completed in time to release this month, is one of 2025’s most gripping — a bravely stripped-down set of songs about heartbreak and renewal arranged for little more than Diaz’s confiding voice and her folky acoustic guitar.

In the album’s opener, “Hope Less,” she wonders how far she might be willing to go to accommodate a lover’s neglect; “Good Liar” examines the self-deception necessary to keep putting up with it. Yet Diaz also thinks through the harm she’s doled out, as in “Flirting” (“I can’t change what happened, the moment was just what it was / Nothing to me, something to you”).

And then there’s the gutting “Heavy Metal,” in which she acknowledges that enduring the pain of a breakup has prepared her to deal with the inevitability of the next one.

“This record is me facing myself and going, ‘I have to stay in my body for this entire song,’ ” Diaz, 39, says on a recent afternoon during a return trip to L.A.

What makes the unguardedness of the music even more remarkable is that “Fatal Optimist” comes more than a decade and a half into a twisty-turny career that might’ve left Diaz more leathered than she sounds here.

Beyond making her own albums — “Fatal Optimist” is her sixth since she moved to Nashville in 2008 — she’s written songs for commercials and TV shows and for other artists including Maren Morris and Little Big Town; she’s sung backup for Miranda Lambert and Parker McCollum and even played guitar in Harry Styles’ band on tour in 2023.

Yet in a tender new song like “Feel Something,” about longing to “be someone who doesn’t know your middle name,” Diaz’s singing reveals every bruise.

“Music is a life force for Madi,” says Bethany Cosentino, the Best Coast frontwoman who tapped Diaz as a songwriting partner for her 2023 solo album, “Natural Disaster.” “She has to do it, and it’s so authentic and so real and so raw because it’s not coming from this place of ‘Well, guess I gotta go make another record.’ ”

“If she doesn’t put those emotions somewhere,” Cosentino adds, “I think she’ll implode.”

Which doesn’t mean that putting out a record as vulnerable as “Fatal Optimist” hasn’t felt scary.

“I was gonna say it’s like the emperor’s new clothes,” Diaz says with a laugh over coffee in Griffith Park. “But I know I’m not wearing any clothes.” Dressed in shorts and a denim shirt, her hair tucked beneath a ball cap, she sits at a picnic table outside a café she liked when she lived in L.A. from 2012 to 2017.

“For a second, I was like, Damn, I wish I’d brought my hiking shoes — could’ve gone up to the top,” she says. “I would absolutely have done that as my masochistic 28-year-old self. Hike in the heat of the day? Let’s go.”

Diaz points to a couple of touchstones for her LP’s bare-bones approach, among them Patty Griffin’s “Living With Ghosts” — “a star in Orion’s Belt,” as she puts it — and “obviously Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue,’ ” she says. “That’s just a duh.”

Like Mitchell, Diaz achieves a clarity of thought in her songs that only intensifies the heartache; also like Mitchell (not to mention Taylor Swift), she can describe a partner’s failings with unsparing precision.

“Some ‘I’m sorry’s’ are so selfish / And you just act like you can’t help it,” she sings in “Why’d You Have to Bring Me Flowers,” one of a handful of what she jokingly calls “folk diss tracks” on “Fatal Optimist.” It goes on: “Bulls— smile, in denial / We’ve been circling the block / We’ve been in a downward spiral.”

“There are definitely a couple songs on this record where I felt apologetic as I was writing it,” she says. “Then when I finished it was just like: It had to be done.” She grins. “They’re tough,” she says of her exes. “They’ll be fine.”

Asked whether any of her songs express her feelings in a way she wasn’t capable of doing with the ex in question, she nods.

“I’d say I could get about halfway there in real life,” she says. “It’s almost like I couldn’t finish the thought within the relationship, and that was the signal that we couldn’t go onward. Or that I couldn’t go onward.”

Has writing about love taught her anything about herself and what she wants?

“I travel a lot — I’m all over the place,” she says. “And I really like to come and go as I please. But it’s funny: In retrospect, I think maybe I was chasing a relationship that was a little more traditional, even though I don’t know if I can actually be that way. So that’s a weird thing to be aware of.”

Madi Diaz in Pasadena.

(Annie Noelker / For The Times)

Diaz grew up home-schooled in a Quaker household in rural Pennsylvania and learned to play piano and guitar when she was young; when she was a teenager, her talent took her to Philadelphia’s Paul Green School of Rock, whose founder was later accused of abuse and sexual misconduct by dozens of former students, including Diaz. (“It was a really toxic place,” she told the New York Times.)

She studied at Berklee College of Music in Boston before dropping out and heading to Nashville, where she started making her name as a singer-songwriter operating at the intersection of country and pop. After a few years of fruitful grinding, she came to L.A. to “see how high the ceiling was,” she says, and quickly fell in with a group of musician friends.

“We used to love going to the Smog Cutter,” she says of the shuttered Silver Lake dive bar, “to have a couple Bud Lights and sing Mariah Carey really poorly.”

Diaz was making money writing songs — Connie Britton sang one of her tunes on the soapy ABC series “Nashville” — but she struggled to achieve the kind of liftoff she was looking for as an artist. “Turned out the ceiling was quite high,” she says now with a laugh.

Along with the professional frustrations came “a nuclear explosion of a breakup” with a fellow songwriter, Teddy Geiger. “They were going through a huge identity shift,” Diaz says of Geiger, who came out as transgender, “and we worked in the same industry, and it just kind of felt like there wasn’t a place for me here.”

Diaz returned to Nashville, which didn’t immediately super-charge her career. “I was bartending at Wilburn Street Tavern and making Jack White nachos,” she recalls. “He would never remember this, but I remember. I was like, This is my life now.”

In fact, her acclaimed 2021 album “History of a Feeling” — with songs inspired by the complicated dynamics of her and Geiger’s split — finally brought the kind of attention she’d been working toward. She signed with the respected indie label Anti- (whose other acts include Waxahatchee and MJ Lenderman) and scored the road gig with Styles after he reached out via DM; she also became an in-demand presence in Nashville’s close-knit songwriting scene.

“I don’t know of anybody in town that doesn’t love Madi,” says Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild, who adds that Diaz “has instincts about melodies that are all her own. Sometimes I’m thinking, ‘How’s she gonna fit that into the phrasing?’ But she always does.”

For “Fatal Optimist,” Diaz took an initial pass at recording her songs with a full band before deciding they called for the minimalist setup she landed on with her co-producer, Gabe Wax, at his studio in Burbank.

“We did it with no headphones, no click track, no grid,” she says. “It speeds up and slows down, and it goes in and out of tune as instruments do.” (One unlikely sonic inspiration was a singles collection by the pioneering riot grrrl band Bikini Kill, which she hailed for its “still-kind-of-figuring-it-out energy.”)

Diaz describes herself as a perfectionist but says “Fatal Optimist” was about “trying to find our way through the cracks of imperfection to break the ground and sit on the surface. I feel so proud that we let it live there.”

She’s touring behind the album this fall, playing solo shows — including a Nov. 20 date at the Highland Park Ebell Club — meant to preserve the album’s solitary vibe.

“I don’t know if I’d really thought that through when I made the decision,” she says with a laugh.

As good as she is on her own — and for all the torment she knows another relationship is likely to hold — “I’m a die-hard loyalist,” Diaz says. “I’m still looking for connection more than anything else.”