From Dorm Room to Recording Room: Meet Maude Latour
Maude Latour first came to my attention on a fateful November day when the Spotify playlist gods brought her into my queue, and I've been hooked since.
Her sound is familiar, yet refreshing, a blend of Indie pop with a hint of Indie rock, all wrapped up in a self-made and self-defined package.
She’s the all-American scholar pop artist, drawing inspiration from her college life, her teenage years, and her oh-so-bittersweet relationships with fellow humans. Maude is ready to take on her journey to mainstream success
[UNPUBLISHED:] How did you first get into music?
[MAUDE:] My mother first made me start playing the violin, which was my first exposure to music, and since then I wanted to sing so badly. I would pass the other students taking voice lessons and I was just like “I wanna do that”, so I joined a choir, and I’ve been in choir ever since. From middle school to high school, even when I was moving around a lot, I was always in the choir. In high school I joined an acapella group, it was a “cool kid acapella group”. That’s where I met all of my closest friends, we would just sing on the weekends, harmonize and make medleys together on the subway and on the streets. Then I realized I could write personalized songs about my own life and that’s when I started doing it. Then I booked a couple of shows during high school, there were 5 people in the audience, but that’s what kickstarted the whole thing.
[UNPUBLISHED:] You’re currently studying at Columbia, how has it been keeping up your studies and a blossoming career during a pandemic?
[MAUDE:] Mental health comes first. Even with music, if I’m not inspired, I take that as a sign that I need to live more life and go out and meet people, so I never force myself to do things that aren’t happening naturally. It’s been hard, my music career has been the background of my college career so far. I feel like I’m studying my music career – all my classes contribute to my writing and my experiences in the world. I take a lot of religion, philosophy, English, poetry, and linguistics classes, and I just try to stay inspired, which is my life mission pretty much. The past few months it’s been getting much more stressful to do both of them and I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep doing both, I definitely keep music first. I would love to finish school, I have one year left, so I hope I don’t blow up too much in that time.
[UNPUBLISHED:] How do you think the pandemic has restricted you creatively?
[MAUDE:] I haven’t been in a recording session since it started, I’ve hardly recorded any new music, so that’s been frustrating. I’ve written a lot acoustically and on piano, I’ve made a lot more songs. It’s so inspiring to be in a room with someone, I miss being in the room, with no masks, with the producer being able to build a song out. That’s my favorite thing to do and I haven’t been able to in a year, so hopefully this summer I’ll be able to do it again.
[UNPUBLISHED:] You recently released Walk Backwards, was that also recorded pre-pandemic?
[MAUDE:] Yeah, it was, I changed some of the verses, which I did by recording myself with a microphone in my room. ‘Block Your Number’ was a song I made during the pandemic, that’s why it’s a little crazy. It’s probably one of my favorites for sure.
[UNPUBLISHED:] How do you break away from creative lows?
[MAUDE:] If I’m not writing I have to just keep living my life. I use music to help me go through life, and that just means that I don’t have enough life happening at that moment. I also really think that it’s important to be gentle with yourself, and don't force inspiration to happen. My primary job is to be ready to capture that inspiration when it happens. I sit down at a piano or a guitar almost every day, and just stream of consciousness and let out whatever comes to me. I often go back to themes I talk about a lot, like friendship. If I’m feeling low I write a song about my best friend. My main task in this job is to keep a healthy relationship with the music, everything I do is to keep a good relationship with it.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Who would be your dream collaboration?
[MAUDE:] The strokes for sure, I want to be on one of their songs so bad.
[UNPUBLISHED:] How do you usually write songs, what’s your process?
[MAUDE:] I always have a collection of titles I'm working from, and if I find a perfect title, I already know the song is coming – finding the title is 50% of the work. Then I know that everything else will fall into place, I just know when I see it. It’s also a lot of sitting at the piano, getting that stream of consciousness going, and being free with it. That's when I’ll start a voice memo and be like “oh that’s an idea” and really see what comes out. Then I usually fill in the lyrics and have a few phrases that come and stick together. My voice memos consist of 100s of songs that will never be heard, and ideas and little snippets of things.
[UNPUBLISHED:] How do you deal with the people you wrote songs about hearing them?
[MAUDE:] There are definitely consequences to writing songs like that, it’s just a consequence of being honest. Ultimately it’s worth it to be honest and to ruin a friendship. It makes it worth it to go through the pain. If you have the opportunity to take a moment and put it in a jar and keep it safe forever, you need to do it as accurately as possible, you owe it to yourself. I have ownership of my memories and experiences, and even if it involved another person, it belongs to me too and it’s me finding my own closure with moments that maybe I didn’t get closure in.
[UNPUBLISHED:] What’s the favorite song that you’ve written?
[MAUDE:] It might be ‘Furniture’, that one has such a special place in my heart because it has people’s names in it. I needed my own breakup song, which was exactly what it was. I used that song to get out of it, it was the song I needed the most, I played it for months to get through my breakup.
[UNPUBLISHED:] You're stranded on an island and you can only bring one album by one artist. What are you taking?
[MAUDE:] It might be Anti by Rihanna
[UNPUBLISHED:] What was your favorite childhood song?
[MAUDE:] Hollaback Girl by Gwen Stefani.
[UNPUBLISHED:] What are your big goals for 2021?
[MAUDE:] I want to go back into a studio and record so many songs and see how all the writing I’ve done in the past year translates to the music end. I want to bring these songs to the finish line, I’ve been writing them only on piano and they exist mostly in my head. I hope I will no longer be independent, maybe I’ll sign to a label.
