Post by Angie, cover photo by Jayme Dee Satery

Never Have I Ever, debut album by Maddie Ross is highly concentrated late 90s/early 00s teen nostalgia. I’m sure you’re all well aware of this as it has been stated a thousand times by listeners since the album was released on May 10^th, but there’s nothing quite as emotionally cathartic as letting Maddie’s sound and lyrical genius warp you back to a tween-age rollercoaster of innocence, laughter, envy, insecurity, and unbridled joy. I’m extremely lucky to exist in the same time and place as someone as genuine as Maddie and you can read our chat below with about touring, book clubs, and working creatively with a romantic partner. Join me in blasting Never Have I Ever for the rest of the summer (and for the rest of forever.)

ANGIE: You’ve been wrapping up a tour with KT Tunstall this month. I love asking musicians what’s the best food they’ve eaten on while touring or silliest thing they’ve seen while on the long, open road.

MADDIE: Oh my gosh, everyone talks about how tour is a nightmare diet-wise, and I guess it can be. There have been a few stretches where we eat a lot of fast food or stop at a greasy diner. But my girlfriend and I love exploring new restaurants, and on the road we find ourselves in a new city almost every night with some pocket change for dinner from the venue. I’ve eaten garlic infused beef jerky from a gas station in Texas, Torchy’s Tacos in Austin, ridiculously good Italian and Chinese food in New York, poutine in Toronto, home cooked scrambled eggs from a local store in Minneapolis, and gourmet honey roasted Brussels sprouts in Milwaukee. We googled “best restaurant in Omaha” a week ago when we were there and the first result was an Italian place a minute away from where we were standing! We got flat bread, burrata, spaghetti & meatballs, and Cajun linguine for a very decent price. I’m recovering from some NYC chocolate gelato and fresh whipped cream as I type this.

ANGIE: I’m so desperate to taste some good NYC grub. Before going back on tour, you also recently performed at The LA Times’ Festival of Books. Are you a big reader? I got a library card in December and now I’m obsessed with trying to read as much as I can. Do you have any recommended reads? 

MADDIE: Wolfy, my partner and producer, and I both grew up in households that deeply respect books. We wish our son Zeus would read more, but he doesn’t speak English and doesn’t have thumbs for turning the pages. I loved The Power by Naomi Alderman. She is a protégé of Margaret Atwood, and the novel was highly conceptual and thought provoking. I just read “You” Caroline Kepnes, after watching the brilliant Netflix series featuring my friend, Kathryn Gallagher, and I blew through it. It’s a very fascinating first-person perspective of a narcissistic stalker-murder. My mom invited me to her book club meeting while I was in town recently. These women have met every single month for almost thirty years to discuss a different book. We read “Out Stealing Horses”, a beautiful 2003 novel translated from Norwegian that I highly recommend. In a local bookstore in my hometown of Novato, CA, I cam across a novel called “My Sister, The Serial Killer”, a hilarious, darkly comedic book by brand new Nigerian author Oyinkan Braithwaite.

ANGIE: I’m extremely impressed with how much you read! I will add all of these to my reading list ASAP. I’m also shocked that your mom has been apart of a book club for thirty years. I can’t imagine doing anything for more than three years; I truly admire her commitment. You work closely with your girlfriend, Wolfy, and both of you are extremely charismatic and kind people. In your interview with Teen Vogue, I read that one of the first demos you made together expressed lot of vulnerability and intimacy that took a lot of strength to share out. As someone who also works alongside my own partner on creative projects, do you have any tips for maintaining a good personal and project-based partner balance?

MADDIE: Thanks so much! Wolfy is the most talented, funniest, and smartest person I know. She’s also the most hard-working, driven, and passionate person I know. These qualities allow me to overcome any issues we have working together. [laughs] It helps that we went to music school together so we have similar musical backgrounds and that we started creating together before we began dating. But I think the main secret is just the mutual respect and patience we have toward one another. I know that I trust her taste and opinion, so if I can remove my ego and sensitivity from a conversation, her input can be insanely valuable. I prefer to be alone when I create, and we pass things back and forth several times before finally getting in a room together to finish something. And we’re not afraid to talk about our emotions to death and explore every corner of an emotional reaction one of us has, until we get to the bottom of what triggered it and how to solve it.

ANGIE: Your process with each other is really inspiring and sweet. I first heard your music back when my partner and I first met and they put “You’re Still My Sugar” on the very first playlist they made for me. I was extremely impressed with the professionalism and power that came through in your sound.

MADDIE: [explodes with happiness and excitement] I think making playlists is an essential part of falling in love. I ADORE that I was on their first playlist for you! I have a stack of burned CDs Wolfy made me for my drive home one summer in college. They were called: I Like You, I Love You, I Want You, and I Miss You. Each was curated appropriately.

“while this newfound power and platform is fantastic, it’s still fragile”

ANGIE: Your sound captures such a strong sense of nostalgia for those coming of age between the late 90s and late 2000s. The aesthetic of your music takes me back so strongly to being completely engrossed in the fantasies I saw on TV in shows like Zoey 101. I always tried so hard to place myself into the main heroine’s glitter jelly sandals, but something always felt off. Many other LGBT+ youth can relate to a similar experience. The wild and picture-perfect teen romances just never seemed plausible and a lot of my heart-fluttering and never-forget moments I thought I’d experience in high school are only just emerging in my early 20s. Do you think we are going in a better direction in terms of LGBT+ representation in adolescent media? In your Teen Vogue interview, you discussed how a lot of LGBT+ media relies heavily on “tragedy porn” and I completely agree. Do you think we’re moving away from that and growing past it or is it still a lingering problem in media?

MADDIE: I think we are making tremendous progress, and it’s because women, LGBT+ people, people of color, and people with disabilities are getting hired more, as well as creating their own jobs and their own content. You cannot tell someone’s story for them, and it’s our job as allies and humans to elevate underrepresented voices, not speak for them. All the queer-positive new media is making a great impact I think, and while this newfound power and platform is fantastic, it’s still fragile. We have to continue solidifying a place for all of these voices. I think [the topic of “tragedy porn”] still a lingering problem. Again, I think that as LGBT+ people gain more control over telling our stories, the less common it will become. We know how complex, rich, and meaningful our own lives are, and we would not recreate our own characters from a white, heteronormative lens that reduces us to tragic, hollow plot lines.

ANGIE: I completely agree about elevating the marginalized story and giving a voice to those previously ignored and erased. Also, in your Teen Vogue interview, you talked about how reclaiming the term “bubblegum pop” and enjoying it as a term for fun, positive music. In DIY, a lot of music focuses heavily on the emotional anguish of the artist, and although valid as a relatable form of emotional release, it’s so refreshing to have an artist create romantic, upbeat tracks I can dance to. And it’s extremely rare to have those tracks also express positive WLW experiences. Did you feel any pushback from the community/scene or did you find your fresh approach was openly accepted and embraced?

MADDIE: That’s an interesting question. I do feel like it’s been a little weird finding our place in a scene. We love pop music and make pop music, but obviously do not rub shoulders with major pop stars. Plus, our poppy music is guitar-driven and lyrically focused, which differs from the style dominating the current mainstream sound. We’re independent and use guitars and live instruments, but we don’t sound like contemporary indie rock. We are lesbians, but we don’t make dance music and we write about our sexuality from a very sunny, earnest, long-term relationship “happy ending” perspective. I appreciate all of the amazing feedback we’ve received, and hope that others doing the same thing will find us! For now, my community is the other artists I went to school with, play music with, and live near, and I hope that we can all lift each other up and go places together, no matter our genre, style or taste!

ANGIE: Continuing, the album is phenomenal and deserves every ounce of praise. It’s a total package. Personally, the tracks that made me weep like a baby on Never Have I Ever  were Take Me Home, The Riddle, It Was All A Bet, and Next To Me. What inspired these tracks and did they change at all from their original formats or demos?

MADDIE: No way, those are some of my favorites too! We actually made this album so quickly that we didn’t have time to stray too far from the demos! We wrote and recorded it in two months. I would get a track from Wolfy, write melody and lyrics to it, and then we’d be in the studio a few days later to get it done in time (we wanted the album out by the time we went back on tour with KT). The Riddle is unique because I wrote the lyrics from Wolfy’s perspective about what it’s like to date me!!  She had been listening to tons of Sugar Ray and knew she wanted to do something like that sonically. She also noticed a theme from music of that era of men complaining that women are confusing and impossible to understand *rolls eyes*. She thought it would be funny and playful to hear a woman singing about how girls are so confusing. Wolfy made me a track and gave me the melody, and just asked me to put words to it. As my therapist put it, I got to let my “inner critic” go wild, and I got to adopt some of Wolfy’s sense of humor, so it turned out different from any song I’ve ever written!

ANGIE: Two months! Whoa. Leading up to your release date, you released a music video for the single, Liv Tyler. There’s a storyline in the video about you being a new student at “Nerd High” and getting a nerd makeover to catch the attention of one of the cute nerdy girls. I thought this was such a clever play on the infamous makeover scenes in many teen romance movies like The Princess Diaries, which I loathed as little girl with huge curly hair and glasses. Who thought of this hilarious and charming bit?

MADDIE: My brilliant director and friend Zach Siegel came up with this concept! I wrote the song from the perspective of my younger self watching movies, TV shows, and commercials, forcing myself to relate to them and fit the mold that it cast. I think most of us probably grew up constantly consuming media and absorbing every little bit of pop culture fed to us. My album was inspired by this media, and Zach wanted to depict me fantasizing about it, recreating it in a very inclusive way that reflected me and my identity, as well as a range of other underrepresented identities. “She’s All That” was one of the first rom-coms I ever saw when I was very young, and it had a big impact on me. I sing about Freddy Prinze Jr. in the lyrics to this song. Obviously that movie centers around a heterosexual, white couple, so it felt obvious to flip those things around. But Zach wanted to acknowledge the unhealthy social dynamics and “cool” vs. “uncool” messaging as well, and he thought, “why don’t we do a reverse makeover?” The entire universe is opposite in our rendition. Fun fact: on our first day on set shooting the video, I met a very cool girl named Misha. She mentioned she had a blog called Hullabaloo, and I jumped for joy because I had read an article earlier that day on the site written by you, Angie! And now here we are!

ANGIE: Speaking of early 2000s era media, have you seen the Hulu Original, PEN15? I think you’d really enjoy it and I think your music totally belongs in the soundtrack for Season 2.

MADDIE: Wolfy and I LOVE LOVE LOVE PEN15. It would be a dream come true for any of our music to find a home on such a perfect show. It’s the most authentic representation of adolescence I’ve ever seen. Plus, I’ve never laughed harder at anything on television in my life than I did during Maya’s drum solo.

ANGIE: One of my favorite episodes of the series was the one where the girls confidence sky-rockets over sharing a stolen thong. I also lost at at the girls playing with the Sylvanian animals. What was your favorite early 2000s toy? I personally, was obsessed with my Tokyo Bratz Doll and their revolving sushi table.

MADDIE: I was all about Barbies. I spent all of my waking hours playing with them. I also frequently played vet with my animals, school with my dolls, Hot Wheels, Legos, and rode bikes outside, but that was only when I was forced to take a break from Barbies and play with my sister or brother.

“stand tall and gay, swing with all your anger, and smash the patriarchy.”

ANGIE: Alongside music, you also are a co-host on a podcast called Love is a Softball field. The art for your EP Touch Hands, Touch Bodies includes a girl in a softball uniform with instructions to stand tall and gay, swing with all your anger, and smash the patriarchy. This is by far my favorite merch design in the past few years and I was curious if it was inspired by the podcast?

MADDIE: It actually wasn’t related to Love Is a Softball Field, although I love the cohesion that it created! Wolfy worked at a movie theater, and one of their frequent customers was a retired, terminally ill college professor who was slowly giving away his library of books. He developed a great relationship with Wolfy, who is an obsessive reader, and he would bring her stacks of books every time he came in. He gave her books about capitalism, anarchy, politics, current events, history, and art. One book he gave her was a design book that contained a collection of old show posters, flyers and advertisements found in New York City in the 90s. We keep it on our coffee table, and whenever we’re working on artwork we’ll flip through it and mark pages with fonts, designs and artwork that we like. I marked an image of a soldier waving his arms (with a dotted line to show movement), with instructions below it to “wave your hands in the air like you just don’t care”. I gave it to Wolfy as a reference for the artwork. She had separately been wanting to make an old Rockford Peaches style baseball logo, because A League of Their Own is one of my favorite movies that I talk about constantly. I guess the two ideas inspired her, and she created the softball players and wrote out the steps to stand tall and gay, swing with all your anger, and smash the patriarchy.

ANGIE: That’s extremely cool that Wolfy also did your EP art! Is there anything she can’t do? Going back to the podcast, how did you and your co-host develop this podcast? And congrats on already completing three seasons!

MADDIE: Thank you! Love Is A Softball Field has been one of the most fulfilling things in my life over the past few years. Annie is one of my best friends from high school. We both started dating women at the same time while in college, and when we were home for the summer, we came out to each other. Annie is one of the funniest people I know, and she has a razor-sharp intelligence and understanding of culture. When we would talk, I often had the feeling that we should be recording it so that people could hear the funny, insightful things she says. We eventually committed to the idea of doing a podcast together, and it was a massive part of my transition from being out to being out and proud. On the podcast we have discussed our coming out experiences, our high school years and youth, the Trump election, pursuing art, facing rejection, the positive gay experiences we’ve had, and the negative ones. It’s been a blast, and we’re going to jump back in once I’m home from tour and she’s made progress on her debut book. Yes, book!  

ANGIE: I’m so glad you thought of the idea to catalogue you and your close friend’s conversations. There’s many times I wish I could go back and listen to some academic debate conversations I’ve had with friends and peers. And tell Annie congrats on her future book! What a major accomplishment. I hope to hear more about it soon. So, did you play softball yourself? I did for a few years. I was right fielder and I’m proud to announce my team was city champions only ever losing one game!

MADDIE: I just watched A League of Their Own repeatedly for years. I played soccer my entire life, and it was a huge part of my identity. I still dream constantly that I’m playing soccer, or am at a game or late to a game/practice.

Finally, I have to ask my partner, Gary’s, signature question. Describe your perfect bagel!

MADDIE: BAGELS!!! We go way back. My entire adolescence is marked by eating Costco cheese bagels in the car on my way to school. I love onion, everything, or asiago cheese bagels, toasted with LOTS of cream cheese. I find a thin layer of cream cheese to be deeply insulting.

Buy Never Have I Ever here.