Below is a transcript of the podcast:
Welcome to Music By Design, the podcast where we explore human design through the music we love.
In season one, we got curious about why we love the music we do, and now in season two, we will go deeper with more interviews with songwriters and musicians from central New York and beyond.
Join me, Anna, with intention on this musical exploration of energetics, creativity, storytelling, and life.
Before we begin today’s episode, I wanted to let you know about a free resource that is now available.
If you go to the show notes, you can get your very own Valentine’s date mini report.
This is the first time I have available a mini report that includes two charts.
So you can run the data for both you and your partner and get a fun little recommendation on a way to plan and maybe spice up your Valentine’s Day date night this year.
Grab it in the show notes.
Hey everyone, hello, how are you doing?
I hope you are weathering the storm of the solar plexus process.
All right, just a couple quick things before we get into the episode today.
First, the solar plexus process.
If you have not already, I highly encourage you to go over to patreon.com/musicbydesign and download the Solar Plexus Process Guide that I have created for all of you to use to lean into in this time.
I am releasing this episode a day early, which happens to be on the day that the sun moves out of Gate 49, which I talked about in the last episode.
And we are now in Gate 30.
And this is the Gate of Passion and Desire.
It is called the Clinging Fire.
This is my Earth Gate, my Personality or Conscious Earth Gate in my design.
And as my teacher Karen always says, if this is defined in your design, it’s going to make everything else burn hotter.
I love this Gate description in the Gene Keys.
He calls it from Bhakti to Shakti.
And if you are at all familiar with what Bhakti and Shakti are, if you practice like Kundalini Yoga or do mantra, basically Bhakti is about devotion.
And usually, it’s specifically about devotion to the God, goddess, source, Shiva, that sort of thing.
But Shakti, Shakti is the feminine side of that.
So in Bhakti, we are sending our devotion upwards.
In Shakti, we are sending our devotion inwards.
It’s cool.
So since the sun is in this Gate 30, that means the earth is in Gate 29, which is my sun gate.
So we’re almost kind of feeling the opposite from Shakti to Bhakti.
So what are you devoting your passion and energy to?
And just know that things can be a little extra hot.
We also have Mercury is also in Gate 30 right now, about to exit Gate 30, but it’s there.
So we’re getting a little extra dose of this Gate 30.
There’s more about Gate 30 in the Solar Plexus Process Guide you can find in the Patreon page.
Related to the Patreon page is, with this episode, Maddy Walsh, who are interviewing, has agreed to donate a merch fun grab bag for the Patreon folks.
So we’re going to do a giveaway.
You have the next four weeks to get your booty over to the Patreon page, become a member, and you will automatically be entered into the drawing to win a bunch of merch.
If you are already a member, you will automatically get entered.
I don’t have the merch yet.
I’m going to be going to a Maddy Walsh and the Blind Spots show that you can go to too if you want.
It’s happening in Ithaca, New York at the Foundation of Light on Saturday, February 15th.
All kinds of info is in the show notes.
If you want to buy a ticket ahead of time, it’s only $15.
You just send her a Venmo with your name and you get your ticket.
And then I think they’ll also be selling tickets day of.
But I know that Foundation of Light is kind of a smaller venue and it’s very intimate.
So it’s possible they might sell out.
I know that they have a really big following and I’m so excited to go see her live for the first time in like over 10 years.
So, yeah, everything in the show notes.
All those links are in the show notes.
And as you already heard, I still have the Valentine’s date report available for you.
If you have not gotten it already, why are you waiting for it?
It’s free.
It’s easy to do.
Click the link in the show notes.
You just enter in your birth info and your partner’s birth info and you get this cute little report.
And I know you’re going to love it.
So what are you waiting for?
Okay, I think that’s it.
So enjoy this really awesome conversation with Maddy Walsh.
Welcome, everyone, to this episode of Music By Design.
I am your host, Anna Kinney, from Anna With Intention.
Today, I have a fantastic guest.
Her name is Maddy Walsh.
She lives in the Ithaca, New York area, and I’ve been a fan of hers for a very long time.
And coming up on this interview, I dove back into her music again, and found some really cool newer music that she’s come out with.
And I’m just super excited to chat with her about all things music and songwriting, and being a woman and a person and a human being in this world.
So Maddy Walsh is the lead singer, co-songwriter, and co-founder of the nationally touring Ithaca, New York based Moxie Rock band, Maddy Walsh and the Blind Spots, with whom she has released four records, several singles, and accompanying music videos.
She also has released three solo albums in the last few years, and has been working with a nine-piece band of fantastic regional musicians to execute the shows in support of these newer records.
Maddy also has an acoustic duet with her father called Mad Daddy, with whom she released the EP That Good Life in 2018.
Maddy Walsh holds a bachelor’s degree in English and Creative Writing from the State University of New York at Binghamton, as well as a master’s degree in the same field, with a concentration in poetry and creative non-fiction from California State University at Sacramento.
She finds her greatest joys in music, travel, yoga, kids, red wine, thrift shopping, driving around with her partner in all things.
Mike Suave, is it Suave or Suave?
People call him both, so either side.
And her baby boy, Rody Rocket.
While Walsh often writes music for joy, dancing, and connection, her catalog also showcases her fierce sense of social justice and empathy within our conflicted political climate and complicated world.
She’s got a heart as big as her voice and the two walk hand in hand through her songs.
Welcome Maddy Walsh to the podcast.
Thank you, Anna.
I appreciate you having me.
Yeah.
Thank you for coming on and accepting my invite.
As I mentioned, I have, I think the first time I saw the Blind, Maddy Walsh and the Blind Spots was in Sterling stage, probably 2012 or 2013.
It was very early on.
Yeah.
It’s cool.
A lot of the folks that I’ve, a lot of the creators I’ve already interviewed on the podcast, I discovered all at Sterling stage right around that same time, that 2012, 2013 time, professional victims and root shock and you guys, and just so many amazing bands were just in the local regional scene at that time.
Yeah.
I wonder what that is.
It’s just a potent time for lots of new groups coming out.
We were really hitting our stride and starting to tour a lot right around 2013.
Yeah.
The timeline of the Blind Spots, I feel like there were a couple of different things possibly that happened both collectively as well as personally for you, and maybe the rest of the band.
I find that a lot of times as bands form, when you’re in your 20s, and then everybody starts to get older, and we get married, and start having kids, and then, not that the band falls apart, but just other priorities take place, and things get tightened down.
I noticed that the Blind Spots, I hadn’t seen much about the band in a while, but I saw you’ve been producing a lot of solo stuff.
What’s that timeline journey been like?
Well, I think, so we, I guess we formed in 2008, late 2008, and then really sort of hit our stride touring-wise, with the introduction of a new drummer, Mike Parker, who had been in the band Ayurveda, and they were really actively touring when he left that project.
So immediately, he was really a, he was a driving force, literal driving force, he drove the van.
But he was like, all right, right away we need a van, we need a trailer.
You know, we need to like up our marketing.
And so that was around 2012, 2013.
And so we started touring nationally then.
We had mostly been regionally performing before that point.
And then I would say we went pretty hard for several years.
We went out west a few times, up and down the East Coast, multiple times a year.
We admittedly were escaping a good chunk of winter.
So we would go down to Florida and play shows just around the whole state of Florida in February and March.
And the Virginia Key Grassroots Festival, which they just closed out that festival after 10 years.
But it was the sister festival to the Finger Lakes Grassroots Festival.
They started having that in Miami, and so that became a tour anchor for us for a bunch of years.
And so we were pretty active right up until the pandemic.
We had a tour booked.
We got home from a tour south.
I think our last show was in Nashville in late January 2020, and came home to this crazy news.
And we, everybody, actually we were all sick, and probably had COVID.
But there were no tests for it or not enough knowledge about it then.
And so we had just purchased a brand new tour vehicle, a new van, presumably so that we would be very busy on the road, and everything shut down after we got home from that one tour.
So I will say that it’s been a, I think a lot of bands experience this.
It’s like an incredibly slow restart that I never could have anticipated, even though the more active, the shut down portion of the pandemic has long since ended.
It was a time for a lot of priority shifting for people.
And so, like for example, our bass player at the time had moved to Ithaca from Plattsburgh, so five, six hours away to be in the band.
And he found himself in the weirdest position, like not seeing anybody, not potted up with anybody.
And he was living in a cylindrical room at a five-star hotel that was owned by some friends of ours.
And it was just weird.
Like he was in a very weird existence.
And he was like, I’m going to go back to Plattsburgh for a little while.
As soon as things open up, I will move back to Ithaca and we’ll start playing.
But there was never that exultant, just like, it’s over.
There wasn’t that like big moment where we could just like definitively return to our lives.
And so while he was up there, he got a girlfriend and a couple of dogs and a job.
And I think that happened to a lot of people.
And I think also if you’re not during this very weird time that we all experience together, if you’re not the songwriter and you’re a player who, you might absolutely love music, but it could be one of the many things that you love.
And for the songwriters, songwriters are the ones who persist because it’s their material and it’s their life path.
And we do our best to find people along the way who believe in the goal, believe in the dream and will help us execute it through the live shows.
But I think for a lot of those people, they were like, man, that life is actually really hard compared to all these other things.
And I love it.
But like all of a sudden, I’m working this job and I’m making like quote unquote normal money and I can afford things that I couldn’t afford while I was touring in a band for all these years.
And actually, I don’t like to sleep on the floor with my face by the dog bowl anymore.
And so a lot of people, their priorities were either shifted or reformed and they started doing other things.
Where for Swamv and me, we’re the songwriters and this is our project.
So it was a really slow restart.
So during the pandemic, when Chris left back up to the North Country, we still were able to play a couple of shows around here, but we weren’t on tour.
So we just hired some of our friends.
We’re like, let’s make the best of this.
We’re all still sort of on lockdown, not able to tour yet.
So let’s just play with some very talented musician friends who do have full-time jobs and can’t tour.
Then when things opened up enough, we limped along with those players because we love them and they’re friends of ours.
But what we really needed was a unit that was fully committed the way that we were in 2019.
So it took a while and we finally have it.
We finally have a unit of people who’s ready to go, and we started touring again just this past March.
We’re about to leave at the end of January for a tour down south and are finally more active.
But it was just a lot of renegotiating.
I also had a baby who’s going to be a year and a half on January 3rd, which was not like I didn’t have a pandemic baby that happened afterwards.
But just a lot of people during the pandemic and post pandemic priorities shifting around and just reexamining what they want out of life from a larger zoomed out perspective.
For me, it hasn’t changed.
I’m thankful that when I had to sit in my home alone with Swab, we weren’t like, oh God, I actually hate spending this much time with you.
I actually hate this couch, and I hate this house, and it happened to a lot of people.
So thankfully, that didn’t happen to us.
We actually, I think because the negatives of the whole experience are so glaringly obvious, we can point to some of the positives.
That was that we had all of this time that we never would have given ourselves to be alone, and to not be booking shows, to not be promoting shows, and we were just home.
We ate a lot of pasta, and drank a lot of wine, and enjoyed each other’s company, and wrote songs.
We put out a record.
We had just finished a record that we didn’t get to put out before the pandemic, and then we wrote another one that was our pandemic record.
So I don’t know if for the people who have been following us really actively, if it looks like we took some kind of break, we never really took a break, but there was less touring because we were with a unit of people like some of them couldn’t tour.
And now we’re finally, I feel like we’re on solid ground again.
So you’re still touring as Maddy Walsh and the Blind Spots, but with a whole new band basically besides you and your husband.
Yeah.
Over time, I mean, usually it’s only ever like a player.
I mean, when you’ve been in a band for this long, 16 years, there’s a lot of change over.
You look at a band like Don of the Buffalo that’s been together for over 40 years, and the only two people who persist in that group is our Taryn Evans and Jeb Pryor who are the songwriters.
So again, that’s like an example of everybody else kind of flowing in and out of the organization when it makes sense.
And I think I wouldn’t speak for them, but I’ll say from our perspective, that’s totally natural.
When it first happened, when our first like original member had to leave to go do something else with his life, it felt so heavy, like a breakup.
It felt like very devastating.
And I just have a very different perspective on that now, where people should be doing this because it’s the thing that they want to do the most.
And if it ever becomes something that’s burdensome or doesn’t feel like the right fit, it is definitely time to move on because it’s not easy.
It’s not an easy thing to do.
And if you don’t love it more than anything, definitely find something else to do in your life.
For suave in me, Leonard Cohen talks about it as a condemnation, which I love so much.
It’s so dark and so funny to me.
It is something that if you are compelled to live this life, and if you have to write songs, and if you feel this is undoubtedly your path, then you just pursue it no matter how hard it is, and you put the pieces together in order to make it work.
But if you have other options, then probably you should do those.
Unless you’re like a 17-year-old kid, and you just hit your stride right away, and finances are great, then that’s a different kind of magic that I don’t have in my life.
Right.
Not everybody has Taylor Swift’s dad, who’s like a stockbroker and works for major banks and can payroll things along the way.
Say, sure, let’s move to Nashville.
Right.
And got things started.
I once heard that in order, I mean, it’s like not musicians across the board, but for people in that sort of world, I mean, not that anyone’s in Taylor Swift’s world anymore, but in like the pop world, $300,000 is what you need in order to get started.
And at first I was like, that is preposterous.
And then I started to think about all the little things that if I were given $300,000 today, like how quickly that would go, like the fantastic publicist, the great management team, the tour manager, all of like, you know, the great tour bus, like $300,000 is nothing.
And it can get spent.
I mean, this career will just suck up whatever finances become available because there’s just so much to it now, especially, you know, in 2024, 2025, where online presence is so important.
So anyways, $300,000.
That’s what you need in order to get a solid start.
Yeah, yeah.
No, and I felt that I’m more of a hobby musician myself.
And yeah, the lockdown did make it really abundantly clear too that, yeah, for somebody like me, I’m the kind of person though that my husband and I were great for playing the dinner music at the dinner hour at the local cafe or pub.
Like that’s, you know, Maddy Walsh and the Blind Spots are not going to be playing that venue.
So we’re the kind of little piece that fills in some of the more local things.
And that’s fine.
And I love it.
And I love being able to just not have that pressure on it to sustain me.
Like it once did.
And it was, yeah, put all my relationships under a lot of stress.
And it just wasn’t, it was still fun.
But it was, there was a lot of worry and a lot of anxiety around it.
And yeah, I didn’t want music to have that for me.
Yeah.
So I would like to hear your kind of musical history background.
Like, when was the first time you wrote a song?
Or like, what was your household like growing up as far as what the musical culture was like?
Did your parents play or sing?
Or were they just, what was that like growing up?
Yeah.
My dad is a musician.
He also, you know, he had a more responsible job when I was growing up.
He was a high school English teacher, but he played shows and had bands.
And so I grew up around a lot of music.
He’s one of seven brothers and sisters, all of whom are musical in some way or another.
He plays guitar and piano and does write his own songs and has put out a number of records, self-produced records.
More recently, he taught himself how to use Logic Pro.
And so that’s how he’s recording his stuff.
So there was a lot of music in our house.
I think, I mean, just an image growing up.
My dad always had an acoustic guitar strapped on, you know, walking around.
That’s just like, you know, in our house that he built, a very funky house out in the woods.
He built with some friends.
That was just like a, you know, very visceral image from my memory.
He’s always, you know, having this guitar around.
And we had an upright piano in our stairwell that actually became my piano when I finally moved in and like bought my own house.
So I started playing.
I think I wanted to learn the Janis Joplin version of Summertime.
And he was like, oh, that’s good.
This is easy.
I can teach you this one.
And so he taught me, you know, some left hand on the piano.
And that got me started.
I’ve always been writing, but I actually was writing more poetry, fiction and nonfiction until and like up like right through college, really.
And I didn’t write my first song until I was like 21, 22.
And I formed a band in Sacramento, where I was going to grad school just basically to do some recording.
I was I grew up around a lot of bonfires.
It was like, you know, small town.
This is what you do on the weekends.
Like you have a bonfire and you play guitars badly around campfires.
And I was one of the only ones who sang.
It was a lot of dudes with guitars, and I was the only one who sang.
I guess I say dudes with guitars all the time.
But I meet a guy and he’s like, yeah, I play music.
I’m like, let me guess, guitar.
Right?
No way.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that was some good training too.
And it was like I met my first, who’s now still my best female friend who lives out in Oregon.
The first time that she was the other female voice around a campfire.
She plays guitar and sings a little bit, but mostly plays guitar.
We stayed up until the sunrise playing music together.
And then she called me the next morning after, I like snuck off and went home and she was like, we should hang out more.
And I was like, yes, yes.
So that was, it was nice to have a female comrade and all of that too.
And we still play music together when we get together.
So that was, you know, some good training around campfires and then formed my first band when I was in Sacramento for grad school, basically to record and I recorded my first solo album in my living room, with some very crude equipment and a bass player that I met through an open mic.
And then I moved home.
I moved home from California in 2008 at the very beginning of the year and I met Suave in like February or March of that year.
And he was, he was pretty smart.
He learned all the original songs off of my solo record before our first rehearsal together.
He really wanted the job.
So we started collaborating.
We started as an acoustic duet.
We played some shows up in the North country where he has his roots.
And quickly decided that we didn’t want to play Coffee Houses.
We wanted to play bigger stages, festivals and stuff.
So we added some players and then pretty much my whole musical life since then has revolved around the Blind Spots.
I do have the solo, the acoustic side project with my dad.
And I have formed that larger band for the solo records to release those and do some shows and support.
And that kind of came up because, well, we had a producer who was not that interested.
He wasn’t working very quickly, basically.
And we had this record done.
And I think he was just unmotivated, but he was such a part of our organization that I was like, I’m not going to be held hostage to your pace.
So I have all these other songs already.
So that’s why we started recording the solo record.
And the solo work still is Suave and me co-writing.
But it was just with different players and certainly a different producer because we just wanted to move quicker.
And so that’s how that started.
And that’s just still something that’s there if I want it.
But again, I’m refocused on the Blind Spots because that’s like, what I’ve poured most of my energy and love into for the past 16 years.
And we do have a unit that’s ready to tour and fully functional.
So yeah, I guess that’s the whole history.
I also did a side project because of those grassroots festivals down in Miami.
We met a lot of fantastic musicians.
It’s a really rich area, just rich with so much art and culture and great, really fantastic musicians.
And so this band called Afro Beta, they’re like a synth pop duo, Cuban.
And we started collaborating with them.
So we called that Maddy Walsh and Miami Wisdom.
And we released a Harry Styles cover with those guys.
And we’re working on, right now, we haven’t announced it yet, but the song Hey Boy, which is still one of our most, you know, our fan favorites.
And we’re working up a remix of that with Afro Beta for Hey Boy’s 10 year anniversary, which is 2025.
And that’ll be like, it’ll have some Spanish influence on it, some Spanish lyrics and some of that Miami flavor.
So that’s sort of like the whole, the whole history really, most of it has been spent on the Blind Spots though, and still is.
Yeah, cool.
Thank you for all of that.
That was fantastic.
So as I have been binging and re-listening and listening to some of the newer stuff for the first time, there, when I listened, I actually started with your solo albums, Human Made Thing and The Tunnel Sessions.
I started with those two first and really love both of those albums.
I love them.
I think they’re great.
Thank you.
Then I was like, okay, now I’m going to go back and I’m going to start with the first Blind Spots album that’s on Spotify here and I’m going to listen all the way through because I’m always curious how much, especially when an artist does solo versus with a band.
A lot of times when an artist goes solo, they’re trying to say things that maybe they hadn’t really said before.
Or like you said, like it said in your bio, that it feels like the Blind Spots is the connection and fun and dance and more of the party music and that the Maddy Walsh solo stuff was more of the very clear and to the point, very clear message you’re getting across.
But I did find that, you know, you do put, you have these messages and these themes throughout all of the album.
The Blind Spots ones, I felt like they were more, a little bit more shrouded, some of the deeper meanings.
But having listened to the solo stuff first, like they pop right out for me right away.
And I would love to hear about kind of like where you draw your inspiration from and maybe how do the words come in.
You have this background in creative writing, so you obviously have some sort of writing practice, maybe.
Do you have like a daily writing practice or how do you know when something’s going to become a song versus just something that you’re just writing?
What’s that like?
How does this stuff come through for you?
So I don’t have a, well, I shouldn’t say that.
For about three years, I read the book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, which is a total, it’s like a journey and a commitment.
They’re writing prompts every day.
She asks that her readers commit to writing three pages of just stream of consciousness, long form, like you’re actually writing it out every morning, which give or take, it’s like 30 minutes of writing.
So I did that for over three years after reading her book.
And there were a couple of days that I missed here or there.
And it’s really not about, you’re not writing well.
You’re just like, it’s the spew in the morning.
And what I found, well, a bunch of things I found.
One very important observation, I guess, is that you would find yourself, I would find myself repeating things that I wanted, like the repetition itself, writing about the same thing over and over again, unearthed, like, okay, this has become very clear.
This is an issue of mine, like, I’m super hung up on this, or this is something I really, really want to do.
So the repetition, like, just the, you know, forcing yourself, the regimen of writing every single morning, a lot of that came through.
My handwriting also got a lot worse because you’re just, like, scribbling away and it’s not supposed to be good and you’re not supposed to pause and think too much.
It’s just, it’s to sort of clear your head in the morning.
And I found it to be a super valuable practice.
It stopped as soon as I had a baby.
And I don’t know if I’ll come back to it or not, but it was just like, you have to make some sacrifices.
And that was one thing I had to give up.
I also gave up my nighttime reading.
I am used to read for at least a half an hour to an hour right before bed every single night, no matter where we were on tour or whatever or in a tent.
But yeah, I’ve given that up too, at least for right now.
That’s just not happening right now.
So as far as writing, knowing whether or not it’s a song, I definitely don’t have a normal practice for songwriting.
I do think that there’s something very mystical.
You’ve said earlier that the lightning bolts, is it like something like that?
Often it is, but because Suave and I get our best results when we’re co-writing, and he is constantly playing guitar, he’ll, if he stumbles on something that he really likes, he’ll record it and say like, I think this is something.
Because I always have something that I’m working on, whether it’s poetry or some non-fiction, I can pull from that.
Or I may be inspired by his particular, it might sound like something to me.
It might sound like a party or like sitting by a pond at sunrise or something.
So it can come from that too.
I hesitate to say that there’s definitely no one way to do it, even for one artist.
I have heard certain artists like Paul Simon was a very structured songwriter and he would carve out like, okay, I start at this time in the morning and I work for like this many hours and then I break for lunch and then I come back to it.
And I’m sure, I mean, obviously, his catalog speaks for itself like that works for him.
But I don’t have a specific, I certainly don’t have a schedule.
And we were gifted this really amazing opportunity.
Well, we applied for it and we got it.
But there was a writing retreat sort of, it’s called Belusa Hatchey and it’s in North Florida.
And it’s this incredible property that was owned by Stetson Kennedy who was an author and activist.
And he was really good friends with Woody Guthrie.
And so Woody came to stay at this property with him a lot.
And he wrote something like 80 songs there.
And he wrote the, the first draft of his autobiography there.
And so Suave and I, when I was pregnant, we did the, we did the, not internship or not, not retreat either.
There’s another word for this.
But anyway, it’s escaping me.
But so, so you stay there for two weeks, no expectations other than that you have the space and time to write and create.
You get a small stipend and then you do a show at the end of it.
And so that was the most structured writing, like stint of time that I had ever had in my life.
I was like, this is my job.
This these two weeks is my job.
Like we, we get up, we have coffee, and then we just like get to it.
And that was a total gift.
Four songs and a bunch of poetry came out of, of that stay.
And you know, some starts of other things too that will eventually probably get flushed out.
But that was, yeah, other than that, that’s like, I mean, that’s a writer’s dream to be like put in this beautiful home on this river with like cypress trees coming out of it and these osprey nests on the top.
And like, here’s your job for two whole weeks.
And it was really magical.
But other than that, writing comes, especially songwriting comes to me in a bunch of different ways.
It can start with a drum beat, it can start with a particular lyric.
But again, because Suave and I work together, a lot of it will start with like a riff that he has decided that he likes and wants to pass on.
And then I’ll begin working on melody and lyrics.
Was that the case for most of the solo albums as well?
Yeah, some of those.
So, so human made thing, a lot of that was written together.
Like, it’s often we’ll, like we’ll work on something together and then we’ll part ways for a little bit so that I can get some quiet time and actually think about what I want to say and develop melody and stuff.
But yeah, much the same way.
When we found each other as songwriters, I don’t like to think about it as like us becoming each other’s crutch, but we each got to lean in to our strengths.
He really wanted to play more guitar and he didn’t want to sing as much.
He only sang in his previous band by default, really because he was the one who was willing to do it.
But he would tell you he’s not like a natural singer.
I think he’s a great singer and he’s not using that muscle as much anymore, but it has really allowed him to become one of the best guitar players I know, because that’s the way that we work now.
And where I was playing piano and guitar in a limited way before, just to write my own songs, now I’m really able to lean into melody and lyrics, which is my first love.
So we do work well together in that way.
We do the actual process, we do part ways a lot and come back together.
But I think the partnership has been working for many years, and so probably we’ll continue.
Oh, so cool.
I loved listening to all of that.
And I’m like, you probably see my eyes darting back and forth.
So I’m like, looking at your chart, I also pulled up, I have Paul Simon’s chart on my computer as well as.
You have the very similar, you were born within like plus or minus one or two days of like three or four other musicians, whose charts I’ve looked at.
And this is a really cool thing.
So there’s a couple of different things.
I’m going to see which one I want to pull in first.
I guess I’ll talk about that first.
So you were born in early January.
At the very beginning of the year, last year, I released, I think it was my episode four, I released with Jess Novak.
She was born on January like seventh, eighth or ninth.
And the two of you have the same like sun and earth placements.
Cool.
And that sun placement is called Gate 54.
Gate 54 is the archetype of ambition.
And I found that some of the most successful musicians out there have this gate either somewhere prominently like in their sun or somewhere in their design.
And it seems to be a pretty, a pretty significant component of what energetically is driving you to like as you were saying, like I was thinking as you were talking about, like it basically the idea of like shit or get off the pot, like you know what COVID kind of instilled in a lot of us.
Musicians and songwriters is like, hey, if this is not, if you are not driven by this, yeah, you could still play music, obviously, you know, absolutely do what you want.
But if you’re not driven by this, it’s going to make it really apparent.
And we also call Gate 54 the Gate of Drive, ambition.
It’s this thing in the chart here.
You have what we call your definition, the colored in parts, these shapes.
You have the sacral, the root, and the spleen defined, and they’re all connected together in what we call single definition.
So you’ve got that Gate 54, your son is right here in the root center, and it connects to the spleenic center.
The root center in human design terms, I know you’re probably familiar with chakras and that stuff.
In human design, the root center operates in pulses.
It’s either on or it’s off.
There is no halfway, if you try to push through when the root is off, you burn yourself out basically.
And being that your sun gate is this gate of drive and ambition, and you also have six out of nine of the gates that are in the root, six out of nine of them are defined, and you have this expression.
And so this on-off pulse is a huge theme in the songwriting, as well as probably much of the rest of your life.
If you’re on, you’re on.
When you’re off, you’re off, and you have to honor both of those.
And what is the way you were talking about how, yeah, it’s not really like Paul Simon, whereas Paul Simon does not have that root defined, but he does have the Ajna center defined to the throat, to the identity, to like, he’s got a bunch of centers with a lot of energy all defined in his chart.
And that Ajna, people that I have talked to, including my husband and many other people, people have the Ajna and or the head definition there, they say that it is just like this constant stream.
There is just constantly thought streaming through.
So for him, he had to, or else he would have probably gone nuts.
He had to sit down all day, every day and just get it out onto his paper.
Whereas somebody like you, people like you and I, where we have the head and Ajna open and undefined, we can write for five minutes or 20 minutes, or we could make ourselves write for an hour, but eventually we empty out.
Somebody like Paul Simon never empties out when it comes to that thought stream.
That makes sense.
It really just really beautifully follows what you were describing and that difference there.
For you, like I said, a lot of yours is this pulse on off.
It’s on, it’s on, it’s off, it’s off.
There’s a lot of that theme there.
A couple other artists I know of that have that Gate 54 and The Sun, I believe Dave Matthews and I think Elvis.
Cool.
There’s like, I could probably just keep doing the research and just come up with this long list of really successful prolific musicians who-
I think Elvis, I think his birthday is January 6th.
I know David Bowie’s is right around mine too, maybe the 8th.
Yeah.
So I think this is really cool.
Something else that I really love about looking at your design, some of the other artists that I’ve interviewed, including like Jess Novak and Jess Brown from Root Shock.
These are women, including yourself, that I look up to and I admire the power and strength of your voice is incredible.
And of the three of you, I don’t think any of you, well, Jess Brown did have some vocal training, but not a lot.
And it’s just part of this natural gift that you have, this just incredible voice.
And when I look at your chart, all of you have the throat center completely open.
And in the human design realm, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have a throat.
It just means that it’s kind of like your throat center is pulling in energy from like all around you and then expressing out.
And it’s almost like you’re not even pulling the energy and force there from yourself.
It’s kind of you’re pulling it from the environment, from the people around you.
Like the bigger the crowd, the more powerful the voice almost.
And I feel like it’s very similar to in the type of message that your lyrics convey.
Along with those other ladies, they have a lot to do with social justice, empowerment, very deep, soul-centered ideas and concepts and themes that they may not necessarily be about you, but it’s more like you’re speaking a message for everyone.
How does that land and how can you expand upon that a little bit?
Yeah, that resonates in a huge way.
When people ask the very large question of what inspires me or what drives me to write, I always cite human connection.
Human-made thing was largely about that, the entire record.
Even the song that was about touring, Lighthouse, is about coming home.
It’s about the beauty of getting out there and all of these, the people, the experiences and the connections with the people that you meet on the road and then the beauty of coming home too.
And so both things, which I love them equally, I need both of them, are driven by connection to other people.
And the title track itself is absolutely about feeling the dread from our very conflicted political climate, but also a refusal to succumb to this idea that we aren’t worth saving as a people, as animals, like that we still have so much good inside of us.
And so I’m super inspired by people connecting to each other and lifting each other up.
This is sort of like a very black and white way to look at people.
But when I’m trying to wrap my brain around how some of us are so bought and sold on the incoming president, and how some people have this visceral repulsion to him and his ideas, to me, I’ll think through the whole thing over and over and over again in all of my confusion, and always return to this idea that there are two kinds of people, one who believes instinctually that they are better than other people and so deserve more, and then there are people who believe instinctually that we are created equal and that everybody should have the same shot.
If you see somebody behind you who’s lagging behind, your instinct is to reach back and pull them up so that you are on the same level, you’re on the same playing field, that you have the same opportunities.
And then, you know, the other folks are using people in order to advance themselves.
And I know that is very black and white and we’re such complex creatures and there’s so much more to it, but I get caught in that frame of mind and I start to look at the people around me who are constantly being of service and constantly trying to be connectors and constantly trying to help, look for the helpers, you know, that’s what inspires me the most.
Yeah.
Love that.
I wanted to read some of the lyrics from Human, Human Made Thing, which is the title track of the album, really just struck me and grabbed me.
And in particular, this, this, I think I guess we would call it the chorus.
It says, every time I get frustrated, I turn my face away from it, but the dread, it draws me back.
I am one believes in people, I am one who needs to keep the faith that we are worth saving.
What really, I mean, not only is that such an incredible, like inquiry, you know, for anyone listening is to like think about, you know, what that means.
What really stood out to me as someone who studies this human design system, and I was trying to guess what your design was based on just listening to your lyrics.
It’s just like a fun game I like to play with myself.
And the word frustrated is what leapt out at me in human design.
If you have a defined state role, which you do, you have these emotional themes that kind of show up as these guides as to help you know, like when you’re in alignment and things are working out smoothly, and to know when maybe something’s not in alignment, or you just need to take a break, and it’s frustration and satisfaction.
Those are the two signature themes.
And so it’s perfect.
Every time I get frustrated, I turn my face away from it.
And that’s it.
That’s what we do when we have a defined state.
We’ll use that frustration as like a little signal like, okay, it just means you take a break.
Doesn’t mean you’re saying no forever.
It just means, okay, it’s just a signal.
All right, I’m giving too much of my energy to something that’s maybe the timing is not right, or maybe there’s a component that I have to wait for.
And it usually has a lot to do with timing, but the dread draws you back.
What’s this dread about for you?
I think mostly in that moment when I was writing this chorus, I was thinking about the sense of responsibility and not, you know, not putting your head in the sand for too long.
We all need to rest and take breaks.
But I, so, you know, again, I hate to keep talking about the pandemic because everybody’s so fucking tired of it.
But, you know, the idea that we all had this break in the beginning, we all had this like moment.
And I think a lot of artists went right to work and started writing, but it wasn’t that way for me.
It took me a little time to like realize what was happening and to rest for the first time in my working life with the Blind Spots.
In all those years, I had never taken a break.
And it was a forced break, but I eventually leaned into it.
And it took me a little while and a lot of quiet observation before I was able to look at everything that was happening and actually begin to lean into what I would call a sense of responsibility as a writer to speak to the moment.
And it was the essential workers, the nurses and doctors who were like getting sick themselves, potentially bringing sickness home to their families, working around the clock, that I ended up feeling so compelled to speak to or to thank at least.
And so that’s when the Tunnel Sessions, the solo record that we put together during the pandemic, that’s when those songs started to come together.
When I realized the dread sort of inspired that sense of like, this is the time the artists have to go to work.
And this like, you know, who’s going to thank them?
Who’s going to make sure that they know that we need them?
And so, yeah, so we wrote Hang In There for them.
And I think that that’s like the dread in that chorus anyway, is me saying like, I’m not gonna, yes, I might need to turn away for a second just to take care of myself or to rest, but I’m not gonna stay there.
I’ll come back and I’ll be real about, I’ll observe in a very real way what’s happening and I’ll try to respond.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, there’s so much more I see in your chart here that just kind of speaks to everything you just spoke about, it’s great.
But I was reminded of the phrase like, yeah, when the times get weird, the weird turn pro, right?
It’s kind of like, yeah, that was the time for where every artist, every musician was like, oh my God, I just got a check that covers my rent for a couple months, or I don’t even have to pay rent for a couple of months.
A lot of people didn’t even got that stuff waived or were able to work out deals.
It’s like, oh, I can actually, yeah, at rest and I’ll have the space to allow myself to witness and recognize when that pulse turns on.
I can actually leap into action.
So that leads me to actually, I’m curious, how is your environment set up to really, do you have anything around you that allows for the kind of grabbing of that creative pulse when it hits you?
For me, I get ideas and creative pulses all the time, usually when I’m driving or in inconvenient moments.
So what kind of ways do you support yourself when the pulse does come on, if you’re not necessarily in the right place for it?
You know, I find there’s some just really simple technology tools of the trade that have been instrumental in making sure that I can remember the spark and then work on it later.
And so voice memos in the iPhone, it’s so invaluable.
If I come up with a melody or a line as I’m driving, that’s one of those inconvenient but such a common place that ideas happen.
And Suave and I have talked about that for years.
We drive around to get ideas and to hash out things and, you know, make plans.
And I know it’s not a good use of gasoline, but if you think about the material that’s come from it, maybe it actually is.
We drive around a lot to, I mean, especially when we’re not on tour and we’re both very like motion inspired people, motion needing people.
And so just getting some miles under the tires is really helpful.
So I do use those voice memos a lot.
And I will get up to jot something down.
I’m very, very lucky to have two incredibly supportive parents who will watch our son anytime.
So if I’m like, we really need like two hours, whether it’s on the creative stuff or like I need two hours to be, you know, finish booking this and like respond to all these emails or whatever.
They’re incredibly supportive and helpful.
And I actually don’t think, I don’t know how.
I shouldn’t say I don’t think we could because certainly people just figure it out.
But I don’t know how we would be doing this without some support, without the village of people who have surrounded Rody and made him feel just like he’s, he’s always loved, always taken care of.
And then it gives me the creative freedom that I need.
Like, you know, if I need to carve out some time, I have people who can whisk the baby away and we can actually get back to creative work.
Yeah.
Yeah, that’s awesome.
As we were chatting about before we hit record, you know, you’ve got a huge, huge like family network as well as, you know, another thing I see in your design is you have a four in your profile and the four is all about creating community and intimate connection.
And it’s the networker, it’s the stabilizer.
It’s all about like needing those intimate connections in order to feel safe and secure.
You know, and not everybody has that, you know, not everybody has that really deep drive for that, you know, like the lone wolf folks.
But that’s a gift that just naturally happens to you.
I think it’s a beautiful tool to have energetically when, as the leader of a band, you kind of have a blind spot community.
You have a Maddy Walsh community that just, even with that break in touring and that break in the music with the lockdown and all of that, you can jump right back in, and everybody comes right back because there’s just this beautiful sense of community.
Jerry Garcia was also a 2-4 profile.
I think that was a big part of that whole culture that was created around them was this natural part to his energy that just draws people in and then people make the connections with each other.
We’re just about at the end of our time, but I wanted to ask you if you could share a little bit more about you indicated you have some songwriting workshops that you might be doing leading this summer.
Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Yeah, absolutely.
In the past, so really this only started through the grassroots organization, the festival.
So they do something now called Culture Camp, which is the entire week leading up to the festival.
Festival happens third week in July every summer.
And Culture Camp is now Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday leading up to the festival.
And it’s really cool.
Tara Nevins up down at the Buffalo organized it.
It was her brainchild.
And it’s a series of workshops.
It’s basically a camp, a music camp for adults, but kids do, anybody can come.
It’s any age.
And they do, you can bop around from songwriting workshops to, I’ve also taught Adult Singing, which was a funny title that they gave us that we had to figure out, like what is adult singing versus universal singing?
And banjo, different percussion instruments, like all kinds of things.
You can bop around these different workshops and then they have a nightly dinner with a different theme.
So like Cajun theme or Mexican theme, and then a dance at the end of that.
So it’s basically like a really deeper way to experience the festival and get to know some of the festival performers through workshops.
So I’ve taught both songwriting, and I shouldn’t say taught.
I’ve sort of, I would say I’ve led a songwriting workshop rather than, it’s because I do think songwriting itself can’t really be taught, but what you can do is present a bunch of different ideas about how it can be done, so that people can, you know, feel them out and say, oh, actually this one works for me.
I have a friend, Laura, who’s a great songwriter, but she works only, she works best from very specific prompts and she gives herself prompts and she looks them up.
And, you know, it’s the way that she juices herself up and can get writing.
And that’s never something that I’ve really played with all that much.
It’s not that I wouldn’t, but I just have never had need for it.
And when I’m writing a song, it’s because I feel absolutely compelled and there’s something I have to say.
I’m not like putting myself in these constraints so that I can get something out, like I have something to say already.
But for some people, especially if they’re feeling like sort of a dry period and they’re not feeling particularly creative, that’s really helpful.
So what I’ve done in these workshops, which are co-led with other songwriters, is just try to present all of these different things.
We mentioned Paul Simon earlier, and he has this very structured way of writing songs.
Other people are waiting for the inspiration, other people need prompts.
So that’s sort of more what it’s about.
This summer, we’re doing a camp that’s spearheaded by eBay.
I can’t think of his last name at the moment, but I can send this to you later.
It’s a camp for kids, I think it’s ages 10 to 15.
He’s got Claire Byrne from Driftwood coming in to teach, and Joey Arcuri also from Driftwood.
A number of other musicians who have played Grassroots Festival for a long time.
eBay is connected to that community.
We’ll be teaching children, and I think he does want me to focus heavily on songwriting, but I’m also going to focus a little bit on performance as a singer, microphone tactics and stuff like that.
So there’ll be other things.
But I am looking forward to working with that age group because they’re so open and they haven’t formed ideas yet about what it is to write songs or to be a performer.
Like they’ll just be so, like who knows where they’ll be.
And I think that’s going to be pretty cool.
With teaching adults both singing and songwriting, I think there are a lot of perceptions that they come in with already about like maybe what it’s supposed to be or what their own ability limitations are.
And so you kind of have to bust through that part and get people to like open back up, where I think kids are just open automatically.
So yeah, I don’t have one way of teaching songwriting, but I like to present a bunch of different ways that you can do it.
And then we try to write something together as a group or pair off in like groups of two or three, because I do think collaboration is super important too.
Yeah, absolutely.
So like I showed you in your chart, you have three of those centers colored in, defined, but you have six that are wide open.
Everything that’s undefined is where you are meant to take in energy from others.
And when you start looking at charts next to each other, you can see like, I’m kind of getting brief access to this energy from you and you’re giving, you know, you’re getting some brief access to this from me.
And there’s all this cool like electromagnetics that happen and all these cool things.
So absolutely something that I’ve recommended to folks who had like a block, what we call like writer’s block in the past.
If I look at their chart and I see that they’re, you know, have a lot of openness or especially up in the in the head of Najla, they have open and say, go sit in your car in a busy parking lot or go to a cafe and just sit there and wait, because as soon as you get within six feet of someone, their energy touches yours.
Yeah.
And all of a sudden things can drop in in that way.
And and they did that and they were like, oh, my God, that actually worked.
You know, and like for you and your husband, like you and your husband get together and then you need time to process and then you come back together again.
It’s like you’re naturally getting this kind of like touching in to that creative energy that each of you kind of has.
I would love to see his chart next to yours because I’m sure you have a lot of like complimentary pieces where he has some where you don’t and that sort of stuff.
And yeah, that’s so cool.
So awesome.
So the best places for people to connect to you would be like, what, Instagram and your websites.
Yeah.
Websites, Instagram.
I should have mentioned earlier when we’re talking about community, that the Patreon and I’m so grateful that you asked about it.
That actually has become, I’m using that more than I am social media right now because it just feels more authentic.
And I feel like I can share the intimacy of creative process and more creative work with people who definitely want to be there.
Rather than like the larger world where people like scroll past and it’s not really of interest, which can feel not so great to just cast yourself out there in this very public way.
So the Patreon is the way that I am connecting on a much deeper level with a small group of people.
And it has been really good for me.
I started it when I was beginning the recording process of the record that we’re about to release this summer.
And I was also pregnant.
So I was like, I’m about to release these two things.
Into the world, this like a child and this new record that I’m more proud of than anything I’ve done to date.
So I’m still, you know, the baby’s here, the record’s not, the record has been done for a while, but we’re just been waiting on it.
So that community has been really, not only has it just felt very supportive and is a way that I can connect with people on a more intimate level, but it’s kept me writing.
Every Wednesday, I do like a longer prose, non-fiction piece and I draw in poetry from other writers that I love, and create a short video that documents sort of whatever creative stuff that I’m working on, the band is working on.
So Patreon is the number one place.
It’s patreon.com/maddywalsh.
And then I’m also in all the other places.
I am not on X slash Twitter anymore.
I pulled both the band account and my account from there in November.
But we’re in Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Blue Sky now.
Okay.
And then when you guys start back on your tour, when does that start and whereabouts are you planning on heading for that?
We’re starting in North Carolina and then we’ll go down, I think the furthest south that we’re going this year is St.
Pete’s, which is on the Gulf Coast of Florida.
It’ll be just be two and a half weeks and then we’ll be home to do probably one hometown show in mid February.
So we leave for that tour on, I think the first show is the 28th possibly of January.
So it’s a quick one, quick down and back.
And then my husband and I escaped winter for a little bit also, so we’ll be gone for the month of March.
And we’re also playing a set.
It’ll be a duet set, not acoustic duet, but probably electric at Word of South, which is a big festival in Tallahassee, Florida.
So that’ll be sort of the tail end of our like excursion down south.
So the band tours, we bring everybody back home, drop everybody off, turn around and go back with just the three of us, Baby and Suavemi.
When and where is the hometown show?
We’re not, if it happens, it’s going to be on February 15th at the Foundation of Light in Ithaca, but it’s not confirmed yet.
Okay.
It’s a bunch of, there’s just some logistical things.
We have to get our own insurance on bringing in food and one day beer and wine permits.
So we’ve been trying to curate our own events rather than just playing at the clubs because they do feel it’s more memorable for people.
It’s a lot more work, but I think it’s a better experience overall.
And that is the four line beauty is that you want quality over quantity.
Yeah.
Cool.
Well, I would love to come.
Oh yeah.
Please come.
I hope if we can get everything locked in soon, then we’ll announce it as soon as possible.
I’m happy to add you to the list and come enjoy the show.
Yeah.
Tag me and let me know when everything gets solidified.
I would love to make it out.
Great.
Awesome.
Thank you so much for being with us today, Maddy.
My pleasure.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you.
And thank you to everybody listening.
And we’ll see you on the next one.
Hey, thanks again for being here.
If you could take a moment and rate and review and share the podcast with a friend who would enjoy it, I would be so grateful.
And if you yourself are a musician or songwriter who would like to be featured on the podcast, please go in the show notes and connect with me on email or Instagram.
Until next time, keep on rocking, my friends.
