Boston Globe Article about Madi Diaz

......"if she can make it there..."

At 22, Madi Diaz is on the verge of finding her sound, be it in Boston, New York, or Nashville

By Joan Anderman
Globe Staff / June 13, 2008

AUSTIN, Texas - It's a sweltering morning in the Lone Star state, where singer-songwriter Madi Diaz has traveled from Boston to ply her wares at the South by Southwest music festival.  Diaz and her team have scored a table in the lounge at the Four Seasons Hotel and are busily conferring amid the music business movers and shakers at the swankiest outpost in Austin.  But all is not as high-powered as it seems.

Diaz's team consists of her two-man band, Kyle Hurlbut and Adam Popick, and her manager, Ty Stiklorius, a novice who followed Diaz backstage after hearing her sing at the Bitter End in New York last year and offered up her services.  Diaz doesn't have any official appearances lined up here, only brief slots at two parties -- one hosted by Berklee College of Music, the other arranged by a guy named Phil who reached out on MySpace -- and a local radio station interview.  She has no badge, no showcase, and no real business here.

"We're making ourselves available," Diaz says.

"Even if you're not playing you're meeting people," notes Hurlbut.

"I've failed miserably," moans Stiklorious.

Diaz, lanky as a filly in shorts and sneakers, doesn't seem to care.  She's an "instant-gratification person," game for anything except standing still.

"We tried to get those potato chips with messages on them made to give away to people here," Diaz says. "But it didn't happen."

At 22, Madi Diaz is something of an anomaly: a seasoned newbie, jaded and wide-eyed all at once.  In one sense her career is just kicking into gear; during the past year she's taken on a manager and signed a publishing deal, and this spring she has begun making trips to Los Angeles and New York to perform for music supervisors and label executives.

But Diaz's resume stretches back to her early teens in Philadelphia, when she enrolled in Paul Green's now-famous after-school music program.  Diaz was featured as the precociously talented and preternaturally bullheaded teen to beat in "Rock School," the 2005 documentary about Green's rock 'n roll boot camp that inspired the Jack Black film "School of Rock."

At Berklee, Diaz's next stop, "she just stood out," says veteran songwriting professor Pat Pattison, who handpicked the budding tunesmith for weekly private tutorials and recommended her as the opening act for Linda Ronstadt at last year's Newport Folk Festival.  "She made some waves here."

Yet Diaz isn't quite ready for her close-up -- not for lack of talent, more like the opposite. Three months ago in Austin, singing literate folk songs at the off-grid party, Diaz was a smart coffeehouse songbird, poised to follow in the footsteps of Patty Griffin.  Last week she e-mailed me a rough mix of a sparkling new tune that smacked of indie-pop sensation Feist.  Diaz and Hurlbut have been holed up for a month in Nashville at Sugar Hill Records A&R exec Gary Paczosa's house, binge-writing with each other and an assortment of local pros.

"There are so many different directions to go in, indie and folk and Americana and that weird pop sound," says Diaz.  "It's all fun right now.  I go to sleep at 3 and get up at 7.  I'm exhausted and excited.  I'm floating."

Everyone seems to agree that floating is exactly what Diaz should be doing.  Even Paczosa -- who months ago offered Diaz a deal with Sugar Hill, an esteemed roots label, and is getting a little impatient waiting for an answer -- supports her freewheeling ways.

"I think she should be experimenting," says Paczosa, a Grammy-winning engineer who works with the Dixie Chicks, Alison Krauss, John Prine, and Nickel Creek.  He says that he hasn't been so moved by a singer since he first heard Shawn Colvin.  "How do you find the style and genre that you want to go and play until people don't want to hear it anymore?  You have to write a lot of songs, try things out, see what fits.  In Nashville you can do it every night, in living rooms, and clubs, and as part of a community."

Diaz and Hurlbut, who are strictly platonic music partners, were supposed to move to New York on June 1.  Three weeks ago they decided to stay put in Nashville and plunked down first and last month's rent on a sweet house in the "Brooklyn-y" part of town.  Either way, it was high time to get out of Boston.  She'll play farewell shows tomorrow at Toad and next Friday at Berklee's Cafe 939.

Diaz attended Berklee for three years and left last summer -- partly for financial reasons but also because she was feeling confused about her musical identity and needed a break from the pressure of school.  She watched movies at her apartment in Savin Hill, drove a pedi-cab, tended bar at the Pour House, and tried without much luck to break into the local club scene.

"Doors were kind of closed to me," Diaz says.  "I tried to contact people at the Lizard Lounge and Passim, sent e-mails and dropped off CDs, and never heard back.  It's a bummer that after months and months of trying, it's only been a couple of months that we've been welcomed.  And the only reason we got to play at all is because Dinty Child of Session Americana stepped out for us."

Child, a fixture in the Boston-Cambridge roots community for more than a quarter century, explains that booking agents are inundated with packages from musicians looking for a gig, and that Diaz's reputation as a campus darling didn't necessarily serve her well on the club circuit.

"It's hard to get noticed, and I think she was seen as 'one of those Berklee girls,' " says Child.  "But when I went to see her at a WERS show, she just bowled me over.  I invited her to sit in with Session Americana at the Lizard Lounge a few nights later, and I sent an e-mail to Matt [Smith, who books Club Passim] and said, 'I'm not drunk or on her payroll and I think you should give Madi Diaz a show.' "

Good gigs began trickling in, but not before Diaz -- frustrated with her inability to crack the local scene -- started going down to New York to play shows.  Back in March, in Austin, she said she felt compelled to immerse herself in New York's "absolute chaos," but on the phone from Nashville last week Diaz was, pardon the pun, singing a different tune.

"I'm in a completely different state of mind than I was two months ago," she said. "We've gotten fantastic gigs, and everyone is so encouraging.  We just found the place of our dreams for 900 bucks a month and can play music in the basement.  It would be stupid not to be here.  I think after a couple months of writing, whatever feels the most honest is what we'll go with.  It's flying by the seat of your pants.  I think it will work."

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com. For more on music, go to boston.com/ae/music/blog.