In Conversation With… Madeline Merlo

Madeline Merlo is an upcoming singer and songwriter from Canada. She recently was featured on ‘Songland,’ with her song ‘Champagne Night‘ chosen by Lady Antebellum as their new radio single. Here, we chat to Madeline about the show and what’s up next. 

Hello, how are you doing? 

I’m good thanks, how are you doing?

Good! I feel like your quarantine has been a little bit more exciting than most people’s. Everything that’s happened in the last couple of weeks has been pretty amazing.

I know! Everyone’s like ‘oh I’m so bored,’ and I’ve literally never been busier, but it’s cool. I think at first I felt a little bad almost because it’s such a bad time, but then people were like ‘no, be happy, be healthy, be all of the things you want.’

We need good things like this, we need upbeat, happy songs right now. We need this kind of energy. 

Yeah, so I’ve been trying to ride that wave for sure. It’s so cool, it’s been so special.

For everyone who’s not familiar – hopefully Songland will start airing in the UK – watching the show, it’s such a cool concept. It does just exhibit the central country music tenet of putting the songwriter in the spotlight. What was that experience like, it must have been amazing? 

Yeah, it was so cool. I think that the show is really unique because it kind of peeks behind the curtain of the creation of songs. We all love music, music is everything and it’s so important but there’s no music without the song. Nobody thinks about where did these songs get created from. A lot of the times, the artist is the writer, but other times they’re not and nobody thinks about those people behind the curtain. I love the show, I was a fan of it. Casting had reached out to me a couple of years ago for season 1, I had sent them a lot of songs and they were like ‘we love you’ and then I never heard anything. I was like ‘oh ok.’ For season 2, they said that they remembered me from my submission from last year and did I have anything new. I was driving when my manager called me, I was like ‘erm, why don’t you give them that song I wrote three days ago.’ We sent them one song and that made it onto the show. It was serendipitous. The way that everything has happened has been really beautifully timed. Walking into it, it was a reality show and that’s not something I would ever have thought to do. I would fail miserably on The Bachelor or something. So, I was a bit nervous, but it was so beautiful and the experience of working with Shane.

I was going to say, apart from everything else, just the experience of working with Shane MacAnally must have been amazing!

For sure, and the way that it all happened too, I got a message that was like ‘ok your studio day is today. You’re going to have a car arrive and take you to Ryan Tedder’s writing compound in Hollywood.’ I show up at this mansion and I walk in and there’s all these little treehouse-y things. All Ryan’s writers are writing and me and Shane go into this beautiful place, there’s like a pool and we write the song together. I thought ‘this is the coolest day of my life.’

It must have been kind of weird, songwriting in front of the camera? 

Yeah, I think there’s a lot. Obviously the episode you can’t fit everything into. What you don’t see is, when you initially pitch your original song that’s like 30-40 minutes of Lady A giving their ideas, Shane talking, Ryan talking, us collaborating, the band pitching in, everyone working together. You only see a few minutes of that, but a lot of the lyric and melodic changes happened there. Charles with that ‘champagne night…’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v49PLu5zKDE

It did feel like a big, fast and organic change and it was a cool insight into the evolution of a song.

For sure, that’s a real writing session too. Sometimes you come in as a writer with an idea that isn’t that far along and then you bring it to your co-writers and you see everyone’s ears perk up and get to work and make changes to make it better. Shane and I spent hours and hours in the studio that day, which you see about one second of. That was a full day that we worked on the song, we were like ‘what can we do to this song, lyrically and melodically to make it so that Lady A choose it and love it.’

Absolutely, and making sure it fits for their voices! They obviously loved it, because the really exciting news was that they chose that song for country radio, which is a huge deal for any artist and songwriter. It must have been a very special moment.

It was, it was really special. It was really unexpected. No song from Songland has been a single, and they already had a song on the radio charts at the time so that was not what I was expecting them to say. I think it says a lot about them that that was their way of announcing that that was their single – their video with me. They didn’t have to do that, but it made that such a part of it. The aim for any songwriter is to have an act like Lady A take your song to radio, because it gives it the chance to be heard by the most amount of people possible. I just feel incredibly grateful and I get to see it climb. I couldn’t have played it out better.

 

Obviously, with your own music, you’ve released three singles recently – ‘Kiss, Kiss,’ ‘If You Never Broke My Heart’ and ‘It Didn’t.’ In terms of the evolution of your sound, I felt like there was a massive step up with these tracks, sonically, lyrically. Did you feel that? 

For sure. I moved to Nashville two and a half years ago, the first year I was here I spent a lot of time touring. The last big chunk of time, I feel like I’ve taken in leaps and bounds and I think if you want to be the best at anything, where can you go to learn their lessons and get that knowledge. If you want to write and sing and play country music, it’s Nashville. Vocally I’m better, the songs I was writing are better, the people I was working with were better, and so sonically I was more involved, I was more deliberate. I wanted everything to be perfect and the timing of Songland to give my own music a little shine was so perfect. It was so wild the way that it all worked out. Thank you for saying that, I feel like it’s a new step and it’s great to come out of the gates in the US with music that I’m really proud of.

Yeah, because obviously you were very successful in Canada and won so many accolades, but it’s a different game in the US. Was it a daunting decision?

Absolutely, I think in Canada the shows I was blessed to play, festival stages and big crowds. Now in Nashville, you’re trying to fill a 200 person room is a different thing and it was a big transition. Luckily, I’m crazy and I just have this thing in me that I have big dreams and whenever I’m feeling comfortable I need to shake it up and moving down was something I’d wanted to do for so long but fear kind of stands in your way. Financially and visas – there’s all of that to think about, but I had a publisher down here look at me and say ‘I think you’re great, I think you could be successful but you don’t live here.’ It was a switch in my head and I was like ‘ok I’m moving here.’ I made a list of all the things to do and I packed a U-Haul and moved. 

I think you have to have that attitude though if you’re going to make it in the industry. 

The thing is I wasn’t not afraid, I spent the first few months crying thinking ‘did I do the right thing, I have no friends, I’m in a new country.’ It was a whole different thing, but doing something brave and afraid are the same thing, just do it regardless of how you feel. 

The way you’ve been introduced recently is through the songwriting side of things. Have you always led with songwriting at the heart of what you do? 

Yeah, I wrote songs a lot as a kid. There’s a lot of home videos singing about camping with my friends. I was definitely like ‘I’m a singer’ and I started singing in a lot of competitions and stuff like that. I think when you look back, I did so much writing as well. It changed when I wrote a specific song. I think it was that moment where you get to that place, and you’ve been wanting to say this and you’d never heard a song say it that way. Then I just did, and I wrote a song called ‘Warpaint.’ It just meant so much to me. It was about my friend who took her own life, and all of the things that I wanted to say to her but didn’t get a chance to. It was like ‘I’ve never heard that perspective before.’ I was able to do that, the song didn’t feel negative or miserable. It felt hopeful and encouraging to me. That was the song that made me feel that I was capable of writing really important things. That was when I laser focussed in and I felt like it was a huge pillar of my artistry and something that I needed to do, that was completely different to other people. 

I guess sometimes you need that idea, of something that people haven’t heard about before.

Yeah! It was a definite game-changing song for me and also for my fans. Still to this day that’s a song that means so much to people, I hear about it a lot in meet and greets that that song impacted people. Is that not what we’re trying to do here, write music that makes people feel a certain type of way.

Absolutely! At the moment, obviously you can’t do so many Meet and Greets, but I know you’ve been doing a few livestreams and stuff with Palm Bay and some amazing things. Has it always been important to you to give back in that way?

Yeah, I think it’s just in my heart and it’s been something I’ve always loved to do. Using music as a platform, I just love to help other people and I think just how I grew up – my mom is the kind of woman where we’d just have random people at Christmas, it was in her nature that we’re just on this earth to help other people. I think any time I can help, it seems an obvious thing to do.

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Final Few

If there was a biopic written about your life, what would be the opening track?

Wow, what a question! I think it would be ‘I Wish’ by Stevie Wonder.

What is your quarantini?

I just moved into this new apartment and down the street, there’s a place with this beer that’s a sour beer, it’s kind of lime-y flavoured. 

What record are you playing on repeat at the moment?

I’ve been really into the Dua Lipa record.

What song do you hate to admit that you love?

I like some cheesy music. 90s Spice Girls all that, it’s game over for me when that comes on. 

What record, book and thing would you bring to a desert island?

I’d bring Tapestry by Carole King or Rumours by Fleetwood Mac, book I’d bring The War of Art, and my guitar.

Complete the sentence…

Music is… everything.

Country music is… powerful.

Madeline Merlo is… kind!

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