How Kacey Musgraves and Harry Styles Collaborator Madi Diaz Turned Heartbreak Into Her Raw LP 'Fatal Optimist' (Exclusive)

Madi Diaz needed a reason to "take all of my guts and splay them out on the table" — and her latest album allowed her that opportunity.

While the Nashville-based singer-songwriter has never shied away from navigating heartbreak and grief over her nearly 20-year career, Fatal Optimist — her seventh studio album — is perhaps her most introspective and stripped-back work yet.

In 2021, Diaz, now 39, found herself in the throes of sunsetting a relationship with someone she thought she was going to marry. "I was just kind of in the pain of it," she tells PEOPLE of the beginnings of the album at the Arlo Hotel in New York City.

While Fatal Optimist began from a place of hurt, Diaz realized she isn't capable of succumbing to a feeling of doom.

"[The album] started out as just me being like, 'But why do I do this? Why do I even bother loving somebody if it's going to hurt so much at some point or all throughout or in little pieces?' And it's because you hope that love is going to win. Always," she says.

Diaz’s relentlessly sanguine perspective is the driving force behind Fatal Optimist. 

Despite releasing six albums prior, along with a handful of EPs, she found herself shocked by how this project came to fruition. "It's fun to, in this stage of the game, 20 years into the thing, be like, ‘Oh my God, it happened differently again.'"

After coming off a European tour and going through a devastating heartbreak, Diaz ventured to a songwriters’ residency on an island off the Northeast coast in September 2023. For two weeks, Diaz was largely isolated and found herself poring through journals. Once the idea for Fatal Optimist surfaced, it was all clear to her. "I was like, 'I'm writing a record. This is happening," she recalls.

With Fatal Optimist, which features songs co-written by Tenille Townes and Wrabel, Diaz found inspiration in her North stars — Joni Mitchell’s 1971 classic Blue and Patty Griffin’s 1996 debut Living with Ghosts. She aspired to make a record that was unapologetic, sparse and vulnerable. "All of the songs and records up until this point have kind of always seemed to want more than that," she says. 

For Diaz, Fatal Optimist is a departure from her sixth record, 2024’s Weird Faith. When she was writing that album, she believed that every song was a love song. "It feels a little bit more like a plea," she says, noting Fatal Optimist, while "darker" feels "more resolved."

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Perhaps that stems from the idea of being a "fatal optimist," which, to her, feels like a "dare." "It really does feel like a challenge and the f---ing decision that you make, especially when you are in a relationship and you are in a committed marriage, partnership, whatever, you still choose optimism, you still choose your partner, you still choose to walk this thing with a person," she explains. 

From the inaugural track "Hope Less," Diaz confronts how much she was giving to her ex — and how much it was costing her. "It wasn't just time and energy. It was literally in shrinking my desires and not speaking out loud as much. You know what I mean? Not dreaming about the future as much, not talking about what I wanted, and kind of allowing his avoidance and his fear of things to inform how I was moving through my world, which is just awful," she says.

The album’s yearning lead single "Feel Something" digs deeper into the core of what she was feeling amid breakup limbo. The tender follow-up "Ambivalence" speaks "a little bit less pointedly at the specifics of my entanglement, my enmeshment and that specific break up."

Despite how much the end of that romance rattled her, Diaz hasn’t lost hope about what kind of love might be possible in the future. "This one kind really taught me that so much has to do with right place, right time, and that so many things that we experience throughout life are just lighting a bottle," she says. "Everything is just so rare."

Elsewhere on the record, Diaz explores the internal battle of not being able to hold a grudge at an ex out of kindness in the cutting "Why’d You Have to Bring Me Flowers" (My toxic trait is hanging on / Your toxic trait is showing up"); the effects of isolation and avoidance on the visceral "Lone Wolf" ("Tell me what you learned / Out there running through your head"); and her lineage over lush guitar strumming on "Heavy Metal" ("I'm starting to look just like my mother / In this photograph we're the same age / Of course I rage, I'm her daughter / When s--- gets hard I go harder").

The timing — and ambition — of Fatal Optimist feels like a turning point for Diaz whose prolific career has reached new heights in recent years. She’s penned songs for Kesha and collaborated with Miranda Lambert and toured with Little Big Town, Waxahatchee, and My Morning Jacket. 

After performing as an opening act for Harry Styles in 2022, the following year, he sent Diaz a DM asking her to join his Love on Tour band. Singing backup vocals, particularly on Styles’ tour, was life-changing for her. “I don't know if I would've been able to access that part of myself when it's about me. When it's my show, my songs are f---ing sad," she laughs. Now, she’s able to tap into joy while performing in a way she couldn’t before.

Diaz also notably admired how Styles, 31, treated everyone around him. "He remembers everybody's name, he remembers what every single person, every cog in the wheel, does, and goes out of his way to make people feel important and seen and special in their role, which I just think is a really beautiful way to operate," she explains.

In 2024, she enlisted her friend Kacey Musgraves for the resonant duet "Don't Do Me Good,” which was featured on Weird Faith. "It's such a delicate thing. I know that we both respect each other's world so much and we both work a lot; we ride horses together. So, it was really an interesting line to broach asking her, but she was just immediately like, 'F---ing duh,'" Diaz recalls.

Later in the year, she earned her first Grammy nominations: Best Folk Album for Weird Faith and Best Americana Performance for "Don't Do Me Good.” Diaz thought it was a "complete accident," and it was Musgraves, 37, who called and told her the good news.

"She called me to be like, 'We're nominated together,' and I'm just outside on the street in Dallas just screaming, 'What? What?' And then I go inside, and then my manager calls me and he's like, 'Oh my God, it's two. It's f---ing two,'" recalls Diaz.

She was also behind one of the most powerful tracks on Maren Morris’ Intermission EP, which was also featured on her 2025 album Dreamsicle — "This Is How a Woman Leaves." The track emerged as a heartbroken Diaz was vacuuming her ex's house the day she was moving out because she wanted it to be nice for when he came home. In the midst of cleaning, her friend called and Diaz reassured her she was "fine" several times and was vacuuming. "And she was like, ‘Okay, that was a choice, and that's okay. That's how a woman leaves," says Diaz.

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Inspired by the concept, Diaz ended up writing the song with Sarah Buxton. Once she heard through the grapevine that Morris, 35, was going through a similar heartbreak, Diaz thought she would be the powerhouse needed for the track. "I knew that her voice was just so giant and I was just like, 'This song needs a racehorse. This song needs a full-on muscle singer,'" she recalls. The pair ended up finishing the track together — and worked on about a half-dozen other songs.

The sparks of success have been reinvigorating for Diaz, who has long-been considered an underrated gem in Nashville. Back in 2017, Diaz recalls she was bartending and toying with equine massage therapy and simultaneously found herself starting over with her music. "I had walked away from pretty much everything at that point. I had no management, I had no publisher, I had no money, it felt like I hadn't toured in forever, I was writing, but nothing was really happening," recalls Diaz. She was forced to "go inward and really soul search" to see if she really wanted to continue making music. "I really had nothing to lose," she recalls.

Now, Diaz is confident that she followed the right path — it drove her to write songs that were more personal than ever. "I feel like I know that I've gotten better," she says, "and I am grateful to have a longer career arc because I can hold all the things that are coming at me now better, better than I would've if I was 25."

Fatal Optimist is out now.