Visiting Madds Buckley’s Inspired LP “My Love Is Sick”
For the past couple of years, Madds Buckley, a 23-year-old singer-songwriter based in Nashville, has been combining her love of music, anime, and video games through emotional songwriting. By leaning into her niche interests, Buckley has curated a widespread yet unique audience of listeners, bringing together anime and manga fans, video gamers, and theater kids alike with a refreshing blend of cinematic Alternative folk-rock. In 2022, Buckley released her debut album, Sunset on Summerville, a collection of songs inspired by characters in the popular anime series My Hero Academia, which received hundreds to thousands of streams and amassed many followers for the young artist.
This week, Madds Buckley releases her latest album, My Love Is Sick. This album draws inspiration from Buckley’s experiences with coming out as a queer person and learning to love herself despite her upbringing. This project includes her latest single “DogBird”, a musical narration of a failed relationship between a dog and a bird. The main character, Dog, carries a load of hurt and struggles to accept the love her selfless partner, Bird, provides. Through the lens of these two characters and their relationships, Madds Buckley explores themes of queerness, love, and acceptance.
Madds Buckley kicks off the album with an upbeat rock-influenced opener titled, “Love After You”. In this song, she cleverly captures the emotional difficulties of trying to find love after experiencing heartbreak. “Nobody warned me that it’d hurt so bad” she sings over a pumping wave of drums and guitar. To Buckley and the main character, Dog, learning how to love again is “a kick in the chest from the inside…a weight that I can’t stay away from”. Feeling out of sorts and weighed down in the shadow of her heartbreak, she questions whether this is even real love while pushing away all potential possibilities for it.
Throughout the early half of the album, she continues to struggle with her feelings of wanting, yet being too afraid to accept the love she deserves. Buckley leans into her knack for theatrical lyricism to emote this. In “Paper And Ink”, a mellow tune on the album, Buckley compares her character to ink - “a twisted thing” - easily bleeding and infecting everything in its path. This is in contrast to her lover, a pretty sheet of paper; paper thin and prone to permanent destruction if they stick around her for too long.
In “My Love Is Sick”, Madds also reflects on her past relationships that led to her distrust and apprehension towards love. In track 3, titled “You Stabbed Me in My Sleep”, she recounts a dreadful betrayal by her past lover over a steady cello and haunting orchestral arrangement. “You held me like you loved me”, she ponders. And yet, there was still love in the betrayal, Buckley says, as they “gripped the knife with passionate care”. In another song titled “Everything Changes in Time”, she sings over a bittersweet guitar about a relationship once close but has now grown distant, and wishes for things to change back to how they were before life got in the way.
Buckley juxtaposed this with messages such as the song “St. Valentines”; where Buckley grows to reflect on the mistakes she’s made in her last relationships; and the parts she played in their ruin. Over a lush piano and steady guitar, she wistfully recalls trying to reconnect with this lover, only to realize that she was too late. “My mistake, I loved you a year too late”, she sings to herself quietly. There’s nothing like regret and loving someone too late to make someone tear up.
Madds’ feelings of guilt, shame, and fear hit an all-time climax in her Wine and Wheat. Digging into experiences of her religious trauma, Buckley takes listeners on a tense journey of accepting her sexuality in the wake of leaving a religion that cast her as a sinner for her queerness. Everything about this piece is heavy and cinematic. From the echo of rhythmic guitar riffs feeding in the pockets of a growing drumbeat to the full band breakdown with her voice soaring above it all. Invoking phrases of the Catholic mass - “Dona nobis pacem/miserere nobis/God have mercy on them/have mercy on me…” - she excavates and purges out the worst of this trauma, hashing it out, fighting to accept all of her in spite of her upbringing. The song ends with an abrupt pause to the breakdown, her ominously considering words thrown at her in religious settings. “All I know/is you love me so”, she starts. “But that still leaves/something sick in me”, she finishes.
If “Wine and Wheat” is a storm of a song, “I Lose to You” is the calm aftermath of it all. Following the previously rock-heavy climactic track, this seventh track is a soft tune filled with warm bluegrass, country, and folk influences. Much more subdued, Buckley chooses here to follow her heart in spite of others. “Hands up, I surrender”, she admits. “Nothing could be better than the mark of me when you leave me for dead”, she completes sweetly. Buckley’s character grows a bit here, and it’s beautiful to witness.
In the wake of choosing herself, Buckley switches things up in the eighth track, with the cheery song, “Anything, Anything, Anything”. Inspired by the playable Pyro character, Diluc, from the video game Genshin Impact, this song revels in the highs of love and everything that comes with it. Throughout this song, she asserts that the highs of love she receives is worth the trouble of doing things she wouldn’t normally do - drinking wine, traveling, waking up early. After all the turmoil Madds’ character experiences in the early half of the album, this blissful experience of love feels light and well-deserved, even if in excess.
The feeling of excess is short-lived as the album shifts to “DogBird”, the lead single of this LP. In “DogBird”, Buckley’s character continues to grapple with her feelings of unworthiness in her relationship. She starts off the song with apologies, feeling as though she is too messed up for her partner, Bird. At points, she wonders why the Bird still puts up with her; singing “Don’t you fear me!?” to Bird, begging her to fly away, despite really wanting her to stay. Those who resonate with the insecurity know how this feels too well; cynically pushing people away and expecting them to stay while hoping they say the exact opposite.
Whereas “Anything, Anything, Anything” is a song about love in excess, “Staring At the Sun” proposes a more subdued love song that is just as sweet. A lullaby filled with lush guitar riffs and reprises from her other songs, she contrasts her early budding love in the previous tracks with a more mellow vibe. “I make dandelions bloom whenever I am near you / You make midnights afternoons whenever I can hear you”, she sings charmingly. Instead of showing love through extreme sacrifice, there is a settled balance of give and take that feels like a more matured love that has been able to withstand the past turmoils.
Buckley is a gifted storyteller, and proves this again as she closes this album with the track “I Wanna Be In Love Again”. With the opening track circling around the uncertainty of falling in love, this last track brings things full circle as she asserts the desire to be in love again. Unlike the turbulent start of the album, where Madds’ was scared of love and potential heartbreak, here she is ready to love; to experience all the highs and lows that come with it – even if that leaves the risk of heartbreak. This desire to be in love is also rooted in more stability, as she sings how “it’s a want / Not a need”. You can tell she’s finally made her peace and is ready to live and love again. All in all, this is such a beautifully written queer album that is worth the listen.