Love songs are “common,” as R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe once reasonably sniffed, and heartbreak songs are even more common, not just because they make better artistic drama but also because the unhappy ending is truer to life. (Or truer to death, the only end of every life.)
Madi Diaz’s History of a Feeling is a modern folk-rock heartbreak album with an aspect less common than the heartbreak itself: the sense that her former romantic partner was making changes that were significant beyond the breakup.
The second track, “Man in Me,” delves into gender fluidity through stark piano and indie-rough guitar, with Diaz as the title man addressing “the woman in” her lover; while the sixth track, “Woman in My Heart,” starts even more starkly before electrifying into a country-blues pondering of how the fluidity turns her guts and her mind inside out.
While Diaz churns and twists, she maintains a vocal steadiness she established on her first proper LP, 2007’s Skin and Bone—a steadiness that recalls Joni Mitchell’s self-possession, without the aloofness and with a sharp directness worthy of early Liz Phair.
Phair might wryly smile at how Diaz sings “Forgive and forget/Fuck you, fuck that” against soft acoustic-guitar accompaniment on “Rage,” the album’s opener. But there’s nothing wry about the wrung-out vulnerability of “Crying in Public,” especially when Diaz lunges angrily into each chorus.
Nor is there anything to smile about when she details a “fucked state of mind” in “Nervous,” a song that nevertheless contains enough foursquare pop catchiness that Camila Cabello could try to cover it. (Diaz’s co-production with Andrew Sarlo, who’s also helped out Courtney Marie Andrews and Bon Iver, always lets pretty things stay pretty and grungy things stay grungy.)
History of a Feeling fades out with “Do It Now,” and with Diaz offering the chance to love her or hurt her, immediately. Her music here is beautiful and painful, as love songs and heartbreak songs ought to be. Feelings are never entirely history.
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