About Madi Diaz's New Person, Old Place
Today, Nashville-based songwriter Madi Diaz releases her new single/video, “New Person, Old Place.”
Madi recently marked a full restart of her career with the evocative “Man In Me,” a first offering showing how she’s capable of distilling profound feelings with ease. While “Man In Me” took Madi through her first steps of a really hard time, “New Person Old Place” presents her further down the road, after processing the pain and loss of a breakup. She uses specific diction to describe feelings that are typically hard to verbalize: “I used to stay up on the off chance that you might call me back // I used to go shopping for pain go through pictures it’s all I had // I’d sift through our memories and live there even when I wasn’t sad // I used to, I used to, but now I don’t do that.”
Madi elaborates: “This was a moment I realized I wanted to start to learn how to do it not better, not worse, but just different… and then something shifted. Something in my heart finally knocked loose and I was breathing deeper. It’s hard as hell, breaking patterns and unlearning all the old shit, trying to shut all the doors that I used to open to let all the same hurt happen over and over. I’m at least learning to find new doors. ‘New Person, Old Place’ is a mantra. A line that I’m casting into the future so that I have something to guide me forward. It’s something of a reminder that if my heart is the house that I carry with me wherever I go, I can take it somewhere new, or I can do the same old thing I always do but backwards or with a cartwheel, and I can repaint and I can rearrange the furniture. I can clean the mirrors so I see myself true and clear.”
The “New Person, Old Place” video was directed by $ECK and shot in Madi’s pickup truck throughout Nashville. The video follows Madi on a journey to the salvage yard, driving different versions of herself there to face her history.
"['Man In Me' is] a minimal ballad with no significant drum track to speak of, but that doesn’t prevent it from erupting into loud, dramatic swells.” - Stereogum
“Soaring and yearning in all the right places, if a quiet emotional rollercoaster is your bag,
this is it.” - DIY
"if you like Big Thief or Madi's recent tourmate Angel Olsen, you'll probably like this haunting, climactic song too.” - Brooklyn Vegan