The Unique Voices Club #6: Madi Davis

Every Friday, I write a post about unique singing voices not commonly heard in mainstream music in an effort to educate emerging artists and music lovers and inspire them to embrace their own quirks. This week I'm writing on Madi Davis.

Image Credit: Jessica Waffles (what a name!)

Madi Davis just released a new song solo for the first time since 2018! Perfect timing while I'm sitting down to write this post. I grew up on the old-school jazz of Ella Fitzgerald among others like Hugh Masekela, so naturally I fell in love with her jazzy sound. She classifies her sound as Neo-Folk now, with songwriting reminiscent of Joni Mitchell and Neo-Soul/R&B melodic sensibilities. And Pharrell Williams (her Voice coach) describes her as urban folk, which I visualize as buskers like the ones in T stations in Boston playing acoustic guitar amid the background of bustling city life and boomboxes. She draws from a diverse amount of influences including those who genre-bend like James Blake and other writers from the '70s.

Madi had a song show up on my New Music Friday Spotify playlist some weeks ago, the Steve Winwood/Esperanza Spalding-sounding "Connect" with UK jazz fusion collective TUCAN. As a lifelong fan of the Yellowjackets, I'm truly transported back to their Dreamland album with the electric guitars, 5/4 drum beat interlude and dissonant blues chords. And her vocals just soak over the song in a retro fashion.

Her newest offering (5 months old now), "Werewolf," is a synthetic harp-y piano ballad with a much richer vocal where she truly leans into the alto element of her voice. The lyrics (which are conveniently on the single cover since you can't find them online) are full of metaphors from the idea a werewolf tearing apart its prey, the narrator, who enjoys the experience that one might not expect from an animal being attacked. The bridge, "it's funny how we choose to be the worst thing/that's what I want to be" clearly describes the human experience of putting ourselves in situations where we suffer for no reason and sometimes to choose to stay in. In my defence, sometimes that makes you stronger, but then again my dad also used to tell me growing up that martyrdom doesn't earn you brownie points (usually said when I wanted to go to school despite being sick out of my mind).

Even listening to her 2014 self-titled EP and 2016 album About the Waves while writing this, there's a marked change between her teenage artist self and her new stuff nowadays. And not just her voice, where she utilized a lot of cascading runs and a higher part in her register. Some of her songs reflect the common teenage problems of finding your identity, relationships and navigating complex emotions. While she still deals with complex emotions in this new song (as folk music does), she's definitely evolved. And not just musically. She left her trademark hat behind for a pixie cut. And I can't wait to see how she continues to mature artistically.

Hopefully you'll be inspired to follow Madi's career as well after reading this post. Her covers of The Four Seasons' "Big Girls Don't Cry" (a personal guilty pleasure listen of mine) and Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" both charted on the Billboard Hot 100 list while she was on The Voice back in 2015, so we'll see the places she goes after ending her hiatus. (How I miss when singing competitions did studio versions of performances.) Of course Pharrell can vouch for her because America valued her uniqueness enough to see to it that she was the last remaining member of his team until the semi-finals. And her cover of "Songbird" by Fleetwood Mac was a song I learned when I first got voice lessons (video permanently documented in my Instagram; studio version pending). Among other things, she's opened for Sawyer Fredericks (who I've written about a lot on this blog), and performed at NFL games, Rockwood Music Hall, the Paul McCartney Auditorium (there's a photo of her standing next to him!) and also at the Zanzibar Club in Liverpool. And she's easing her way back to performing again, with a supporting act thing that happened in 2023. Subscribe to her social media and mailing list so you can keep up to date with what's she up to!

That's it for this week's Unique Voices Club education. If you want more posts like this directly to your inbox, use the form at the bottom of the page, and I'll see you next week!

Stay educated,

Alexia