This past Friday, indie singer-songwriter Madeleine Mayi released her newest single, “faithless,” a song that explores the aftermath of growing up in a religious environment and the complexities that come along with it.
If the name Madeleine Mayi sounds familiar, it may be because we recently covered one of her sets at South By Southwest this past March: she was also featured on Staged Haze back in 2021 as one of the musicians featured in our ‘Artist of The Month’ series.
Like many young adults raised in the United States, Mayi started to become acclimated to a world outside of her sheltered community, as she mentions in the opening verse of the song that “she grew up inside a bubble, where the people stay the same.” After I first heard this song, I instantly related. I grew up in a bubble of my own: a suburb of Chicago where everything felt incredibly contained and everyone was happy and healthy. It wasn’t until moving to the city for college that I was fully immersed in the real world and the hardships that the majority of American society faced: ones that I never had to worry about as a kid.
Madeleine explains familiar feelings to me over an email, mentioning that she had an experience similar to my own:
“It wasn’t until I got older and was able to really understand these huge complex issues, that things slowly started to change for me. Wether you grow up religious or not, so many people experience the feeling of moving from a small town to a big city and their eyes being opened to how life is different than what they were exposed to as a child. Once I moved to college and saw how big the world was, and how much joy is held in communities that were different than the one I knew growing up—everything changed,” she wrote.
As her world view began to open up, she was forced to look inward and question how religion impacted her perspective.
“This song is a commentary on a lot of hypocritical behavior I’ve encountered time and time again throughout my lifetime. I honestly think that Jesus would disapprove of the way that Christianity is being used in the world for personal and political gain. And reminding myself of what the song is really about, kept me brave enough to do it. The reason I had to put it out was because if I heard this song from another artist, it would mean a lot to me.“
Despite the song’s content being quite heavy in nature, Mayi and producer Joe Avio make interesting choices sonically, including moments that build like an indie pop song before transitioning into billowing guitar riffs that make me think of artists like The Japanese House or The 1975. The juxtaposition between the lyrics and the production seem to be intentional, allowing the listener (or at least myself) to pick up on these stylistic choices as a metaphor for the context of the lyrics.
Mayi is opening up for two Taking Back Sunday shows this week in California and will be performing at School Night in Los Angeles on Monday, April 22.
Listen to “faithless” here.
0 comments on “Indie Singer-Songwriter Madeleine Mayi Tackles The Complexities of Religion in New Single “faithless””