Sometimes you just need to blow off some steam. For an artist like Madi Diaz, it’s almost essential and can come in nearly any form. Like, for instance, a full-album cover of a pop-punk epic.
As a two-time Grammy nominee—blending folk and indie rock over blunt, probing lyrics—Diaz’s new remake of Blink 182’s Enema of the State definitely counts as a surprise. She had just released the incisive Fatal Optimist in late 2025, opening up about the torturous banality of another heartbreak. But almost as soon as it was finished, she was moving on.
Her Enema of the Garden State (out now) was created in tandem with her studio album, and captured in raw, guitar-vocal style on an old school four-track recorder. After scouring her very sense of being for Fatal Optimist, this was almost the complete opposite: A project done for fun with close friends, rekindling the joy of singing songs you love, years after they imprinted on you. Like a portal back to her teenaged bedroom, Diaz tells American Songwriter the work “felt like summer camp.”
Known for lyrics of blunt beauty (and a touch of dry sarcasm), her unexpected passion project actually works quite well. Whatever Blink 182 was best known for, their unabashed immaturity was backed up by real songwriting prowess. From awkward anthems like “What’s My Age Again?” and “All the Small Things” to the still-devastating “Adam’s Song,” Diaz calls Enema of the State (1999) “hilarious and perfect,” and set out to capture its coming-of-age brilliance in a hushed acoustic whisper. Each spastic singalong turns into a loser’s lullaby.
Once the idea got into her head, Diaz says she couldn’t help herself. It might even be “self sabotage,” since it competes for attention with her studio set. But it was worth it.
“Every once in a while there are records I’ll have on repeat,” she explains. “For some reason, for weeks at a time, it’s the only thing I want to listen to because it’s the best thing ever and perfect. And I was in that cycle with Enema of the State.”
Diaz is used to mixing things up. Over seven albums she’s collaborated with everyone from Kasey Musgraves to S.G. Goodman, while also singing backup vocals for Miranda Lambert, and recently touring in Harry Styles’ band. Fatal Optimist was written after that globe-trotting run, when Diaz came home to a disappointing breakup. Featuring a minimalist sound of its own (albeit more refined), her writing revolved around the exhaustion of knowing she’d been let down again—and yet still feeling like good things are coming. Looking back, she thinks that Fatal Optimist’s headspace went beyond her romantic reality.
“I think it’s a pretty constant state of being,” she says. “It started out being about my relational love life, and then it’s like, ‘Well, I guess also it feels like a state of being in a creative field.’ And then ‘Well, I guess it actually is a state of being in a capitalist society, or a state of being as a woman in a patriarchal fuck tunnel.’ ‘Well, it’s actually a state of being for a citizen of the fucking North American shit hole.’
“It’s just a state of being as a person breathing air,” Diaz says. “There’s a lot of dissonance right now and I think it started out as a state of mind, and then it has become a daily challenge—or like a shitty dare.”
The stripped down, methodical approach to both of her recent albums finds Diaz at an inflection point. These days, she’s intent on letting the songs themselves “do the heavy lifting,” and embracing a less-is-more ethos. It defies easy categorization, and that’s kind of the point. Whether it takes the form of pop punk or folk rock, it’s the writing that matters. The creative satisfaction.
“I think it all comes down to trying to catch all of the feelings and wrap them in that one line, that we can’t figure out why it’s every feeling we’ve ever had in our lives,” she describes. “Sometimes I’ll listen to Bruce Springsteen and he’ll say one thing that just hits me, and then I listen to SZA and she says one thing. I don’t have to know anything else about the song, that one perfect line is the allowance for absolutely everything.”
Diaz is still on the search for that one line every day. And after Fatal Optimist and Enema of the Garden State, she feels like it could come from anywhere.
“It’s been such a funky couple of years,” she says. “I’ve seen a lot and I think it’s been really beautiful and really ugly. Getting to the other side of a lot of things and just looking at who I’m sitting with, I’m like, ‘Damn, I really want the next 10 years to feel beautiful and fruitful and fun.’ And even if we don’t win, at least it’s with a bunch of people I really like hanging out with.”
The post Madi Diaz’s Surprise Album is a Love Letter to Blink-182—and the Power of Great Songwriting appeared first on American Songwriter.
Go To Source | Author: Chris Parton
« 4 Ballads From the 1960s That Give Me Instant Goosebumps Every Time