“When I started writing the songs that ended up making the album, I didn’t know I was writing an album. I started playing guitar when I was eight years old and it was then I knew I wanted to be a songwriter. Unfortunately, music and art didn’t tie in with my family’s values, so there was a lot that stood in the way of me exercising my abilities and desires.
So, I was an on again, off again musician until I got to Chicago at eighteen. Once I accepted the fact that I wanted to create my own music, these songs started pouring out of me in an effort to unpack the life I had and what I thought I wanted to build. In a lot of ways, this album has been in process since I was eight years old without me fully knowing it. So, I’d say this album was inspired by fate and how when you acknowledge destiny you cannot deny it, although that truth doesn’t always result in peace.
At the time I was writing the songs, I thought I was trying to understand myself romantically. What was I like to love, what did I need from it? But now that I have a number of years between myself then and now, I realize it’s an album largely about processing loss during a coming of age. I had been feeling like a life I desired was unattainable and living inside of a dream.”
With her latest album, Uma Bloo’s Molly Madden is trying to trick herself. Due March 23rd via Earth Libraries, Don’t Drive Into the Smoke encapsulates a core of intense grief within layers of more familiar love and heartbreak. By opening her explorations in the form of immaculately layered indie rock epic, the Chicago-based artist and the listener can face the depths of pain together. “It’s about needing love so bad, getting shards of it here and there, and then watching yourself from above as you spill all over the place,” she says. “Love and lust are great deceivers, fantastic distractions from getting to the heart of the pain.”
NEW LP OUT NOW https://link.earthlibraries.com/umabloo
What do you think is the most important aspect of your life right now?
As always, the health and well-being of myself and my loved ones.
What makes this LP special in your opinion?/ What inspired the LP?
I’m going to answer these questions together because the reason why I made the album is simultaneously why it is special to me.
I wouldn’t say there was a singular thing that inspired me to write these songs together, life and art rarely work like that in my experience. But, in a nutshell, I wrote most of these songs after escaping a constrictive, conservative culture by moving to Chicago. I came to the city to attend acting school and ended up burlesque dancing, both of which helped me past my stage fright. I had been playing guitar on and off since I was a kid; growing up I was frightened of how powerful writing music felt to me, so I struggled to stay consistent with my practice and didn’t share with many people that I was a songwriter. But by the time I moved to the city I was overflowing with song ideas and visions of who I wanted to be on stage, so it was only a matter of time until I got the confidence to start putting myself out there. Because of the long process there is a lot of cathartic release that can be felt across the album. It’s a sonic documentation of beginning to live authentically for the first time.
What are some of the core messages here?
I think that’ll be best determined by the listener but echoing what I said earlier I think the main story is about escaping limiting circumstances and deeply experiencing both the positive and negative consequences of that newfound freedom.
How do you think tik tok and social media are contributing to change an artist’s career?
There is a lot to be said about how social media is impacting the life and reality for artists ranging from distressing to exciting. I don’t think we’ll really know the extent of the changes for another couple decades where we can retroactively examine this huge shift.
The main thing I’ve been trying to focus on in terms of new media comes from some advice I got in acting school. One of my professors was trying to help us take the pressure off auditioning by reframing it as an opportunity to perform.
Actors will sometimes go years without being cast in projects so making sure to take full advantage of every time you get to perform, even if it’s just a two-minute audition. Adjacently with social media, there is always a stage open for whoever to express themselves. So, if you can’t get booked or published or whatever you’re seeking, at the very least you have an online profile where you can share even half-done pieces that people can engage with. The stage is ever present now and the artist can use that or subvert it however they like.
What excites you about your life?
That it will keep going for another forty years or end tomorrow.
