In an industry where a sea of superficiality floods your Instagram feed and your New Music Friday playlists, 21-year-old [Maude Latour](https://www.instagram.com/maudelstatus/) shines as a glimmering lighthouse of authenticity, guiding her very committed and rapidly-growing fanbase towards safety. Maude’s sincere depth of feeling comes through her music with honest, nuanced recollections of love, delivered through lyrics ranging from “I fell in love with how you emphasize your sentences” to the sharp cut of “Isn't it alarming, it was October, January, almost July—here's a toast to getting older, now we're young, and soon we'll die.” With each release, Latour paints a painstakingly raw picture of the highs and lows of authentic young love, and her most recent single, “Walk Backwards”, is no exception.
Sitting perched on her longboard on the corner of West 81st Street and Central Park West in Manhattan, Maude giggles with her signature bright smile. You would never guess that this young woman, blending in with the bustling city intersection, has been climbing the charts and racking up millions of streams on her entirely independent releases. Out of the crowd, a passerby recognizes the local star, which sets off a chain reaction—within a matter of seconds, Maude Latour is recognized by three separate parties, with sentiments like “I love your music!” being yelled out across the busy street corner. Maude, as down-to-earth as the subway system, does her best to thank each of them individually, but expresses afterwards how she wishes she’d had more time to talk to them before they scattered into the city streets.
That’s exactly how Maude’s fanbase (or close friends, as she describes them) has grown in a uniquely strong way. The level of equality with which Maude regards those who love her music is unparalleled for others at her level of stardom. She and her fans express their love for each other in an equal exchange, where the shared experience of her genuine, diary-esque music connects them both, and subsequently her fans scatter to invite their friends to join Maude’s collective musical universe.
_Flaunt_ caught up with Maude in a socially-distant picnic in the midst of Central Park (belovedly mentioned in her track “Ride My Bike”). Read our interview below for Maude’s insight on falling in love with your friends, her unique songwriting process, and the making of the music video for her latest release “Walk Backwards”_,_ linked below.
**The music video for your new release “Walk Backwards’”came out recently. Can you tell us a little bit about the music video, and the process of creating it?**
This is definitely the hardest we've worked on a video. I've made all my music videos with my friends—I live with my great roommate Fergus, who's an amazing filmmaker. He's made the “Furniture” music video, “Lovesick”, but this one is the epitome of our collaboration. We were planning it for weeks, and we filmed it over four days, and my other two roommates, my best friends, are in it as well. The song is obviously about friendship and fluidity of love, and these are people I've had such complex, challenging, beautiful relationships with... The video is just so sacred to us. He made a movie about our world we've built together, and it just feels like such a keepsake. When he first showed it to us, we all just screamed! We couldn't believe it, it was so incredible to make art with our friends all about ourselves, because it captures our own worlds the way that we know it. I'm so happy with it.
**You’ve mentioned how the song is about the thin line between relationships and friendships. How does the concept connect to the phrasing of “Walk Backwards”, and how did you come up with it?**
I always write songs from titles, and Walk Backwards was a title that I thought of when I was watching the sunset once. I was in California, solo-trip-find-myself vibes, like four years ago over my gap year. I was watching the sunset and I needed to get home, but I couldn't turn away so I just walked backwards the whole way home! And in that moment I said oh, “Walk Backwards”, that's gonna be a song, great. Noted. And so I feel like it's about that feeling of just turning around one more time, like at the end of the music video, I turn around and it's just taking things in for one more second. They were kind of separate parts, but the person that I experienced all of that with—the sunsets, the summer, getting home and then realizing it's just 8:45 and you have the whole rest of the night—is my best, best, best, friend who I've written other songs about. “Starsick” is about her, and in it I say “Happy Birthday”, because it was for her birthday present!
I had a different version of \[“Walk Backwards”\], it had different words as the verses, and only about two months ago, I re-recorded them, and changed them. I was like: What is this song actually about? I realized it’s about the fact that I keep writing songs about my close friends! At the time, I was also in a confusing relationship. Queer people know how it's just so blurry, these lines, and straight people deserve to know about this too, because it's true! Because it's just such an honor to be experiencing life as a queer person, you just get to know so many emotions and dimensions of feelings that are so beautifully accessible.
But the fluidity of love with these friendships—like what happens when you feel like you could spend the rest of your life with your best friend? I've been in relationships while having these best friendships that feel more sacred than the relationship! There's such rigidity on how we talk about love, and love songs. But like, Damn, what about friendships! They're so sacred, and they're literally there for you every day—like, it's so much deeper. It's so much deeper.
**You're quite vocal about being queer and having a queer identity, and “Walk Backwards” touches on fluid sexuality. How do you think your queer identity goes into your songwriting?**
I'm still living life, falling in love with different people. I'm sure it's going to grow even more as I keep living life, but... I've always just been a fan of not labeling things. I think about the blurry line between love and friendship and just the fact that this line ever existed to begin with, it's just our attempt to categorize, to define, and to limit. That's this patriarchal, old Western philosophy binary that we're trapped in, but it is melting away. It literally is—our generation is proving that, and our generation's understanding of gender is proving that, and we're just on this journey to such an understanding of the fluidity of love, gender, and sexuality, and truly being free. And I feel like, after this pandemic, the type of love we're going to feel for each other when we can hold each other again, I think it might have these moments align so much with this freedom-revolution of identity, and freedom, and expression. Our generation is proving that this binary is gonna fall. We're on the way to destroy capitalism, and gender, and it's happening, and our generation is gonna fucking do it!
You asked how it relates to the songwriting, and I do think my songs are supposed to be about that revolution in whatever way—like holy shit, I'm so sick of small talk, let's talk about what we actually mean. Let's say what we mean! We're afraid to die! Backpack through the universe, like, just being free in this transcendental freedom, and it's all related. But I'm also discovering it in myself as I'm making it, and I'm curious to see what happens next. But damn, beautiful question.
**You have a very unique style of songwriting, very stream-of-consciousness, very diary-esque. You've mentioned how you start from a song title, what is the rest of your songwriting process like?**
Well, I have a promise to myself that I will only write songs that need to exist. That's the only way that I stay in love with this. I never want to write a song because I have to, I want to write it because it's coming out of me and I need to put it somewhere! I just counted that I've been writing songs all the time for six years, and I know my process so well. I know what I need to get a song done and I know that I can be patient with myself and wait for these moments of inspiration. I feel like my primary job is to just be ready for that moment to come, and to practice for the moment when you do get your best idea. So that means getting bad ideas out, and that means jotting things down, knowing where you're going to write things down, and knowing how to store it. It's a lot of collecting, and a lot of five second voice memos.
I sit at the piano every time I go through anything—that's how I figure out what I'm feeling. It's weird, I had an emotional moment months ago realizing that every time I'm coming home from a moment, or a party, or an experience, I'm immediately singing melodies or putting it into lyrics. I don't even let the moment just exist without song—I put it into song immediately, and it scared me in that moment. I was like, Oh my god, I give more to the songs than I let just be for myself. It immediately is in song-form. It scared me, like holy shit! What is mine, then? It's definitely so near to my diary, like you said. Just me getting through things, and being able to put it in a few seconds or a few minutes of a moment and say, “Okay, that's exactly what happened. That looks exactly how it felt. Now I can watch it, now I know how I feel, and I can breathe.”
**You've released all of your music completely independently, and through that process you have built up your fanbase. Now we're seeing, based on that moment on the street corner, that you have a very special relationship with your fans. What has your ground-up approach been like, and how do you think it has created this relationship you have with your fanbase?**
It's been a minute doing this. I started by scheduling little shows downtown, at Bitter End, those types of venues. And a random, terrible pub wanted to have live music once, and I just invited everyone I knew. It was probably 30 people, my family, friends, and I would just look forward to them so much, and I’d play whatever I'd been working on. That's always my tip to people with getting started, just book a show and play whatever you're working on, have it in the distance and work up to it. But even before I was conscious that I was doing music, I would use instagram in weird ways just to make people be like, huh? Like, I would try to make the upperclassmen in my high school be like, What is she doing? Posting eight pictures of her socks in a row? What does she think she's doing? Being a troll low-key, and I feel like it's still the same essence of it now, feeling like I can be really honest, really comfortable in this position. I feel very close to these people. I've always taken the philosophy of responding to every comment, every DM, and I didn't know why I was doing it. But now I understand why, because it has built literally one person at a time, and it's taken years! It's been three years of me working just as hard at it. And only this past month have I seen it all come together and it feels so crazy. It feels like it paid off a bit with the life of this body of people who I feel are literally my best friends. I come to them when I need them as well. Like when I'm feeling lonely, I text a groupchat. This is a place that really truly accepted me and understands me, and I'm so lucky that they really see me! It's so nice, and if I know someone who likes the music, I just already know their soul and I feel so connected to them. It's just so beautiful, and I finally feel like I'm not striving to blow up, I feel so in sync with where I am, and I’m just wanting to enjoy it.
**Do you feel like TikTok has changed things?**
Oh my gosh, it's done so much! My first TikTok, I posted in the pandemic in early March. I always believed that if you heard the music for the first time, you would like it, but how do you get people to hear it for the first time? TikTok is exactly that platform that I was waiting for! If you like it, it'll get boosted. I wanted to go on tour about a year ago, and I thought that's what I was going to do, and honestly from my bedroom, TikTok has grown so much more than any of that would have made a difference. It's a crazy platform, and I'm so glad that it's worked this way.
**I'd love to know a little bit about your musical influences. You've been compared to some artists, but I want to know: who are you listening to that we might not hear in your music?**
My lineage has gone somewhere like Cyndi Lauper, then some Prince, using music as catharsis, coming out of your fingers, and you feel it everywhere. Gwen Stefani was huge, No Doubt was my first band I was in love with, and ABBA was the first CD I had. Sometimes I hear ABBA and I'm like, "this shaped everything in my music, the harmonies, the way the songs make you feel!" It's banger after banger. Also people who build worlds, like Lorde, like Lana, like SZA. When you build a world so truly that when you're in the album, the entire world is this album, and there's not a single break or any crack in it. That is one of my major goals as I keep going. I've never had an album, and I want to, that's my dream. I want to build these albums. I think that's what I'm supposed to do.
I do think when I'm listening to music, it's mostly alt rock vibes. It's a lot of The Kooks, The Strokes is probably my favorite all-time dream collab for sure. They totally influenced me so much, but maybe you wouldn't hear that right away. They're such a huge influence on me. The Beach Boys, maybe you can hear that a little more. Queen is a big one, and also where I want to go—just this musical theater, opera-like craziness. I also love classical music a lot, I grew up playing violin. I love opera.
**New York City is a very apparent and present backdrop in your music. How is a sense of place important in your songwriting?**
I feel like my first love was New York for sure. I think that's part of why I keep writing songs about best friends and not always love centric songs, because my first love was having my headphones in, and being 15, and being able to go wherever I wanted—oh my god, I'm literally crying. Being able to go wherever I wanted and having a world in my head and being in the city. It's just me and the city! It's the feeling of windows down, driving down the FDR, starsick forever. Like, it's that romance with this life and this city… It shows you everything about being a person. I never tried to use New York City references intentionally, I'm actually trying to use them as little as possible, and this is the minimum I can do. Unfortunately, I think my next thing is gonna be heavily New York City based, but it's literally about Central Park. So much has happened in this park, I know this park so fucking well! I guess it is important, because it's a diary, and because it's a map I'm collecting in my head, my record of being alive. And so, gosh, you better know that we're on the west side, and then we go to this corner, and it's part of it all!
Watch Maude Latour’s latest music video, Walk Backwards, here:
Written by [Devin Kasparian](https://www.instagram.com/devin.pdf/?hl=en)
Photography by [Devin Kasparian](https://www.instagram.com/devin.pdf/?hl=en)
Assisting by [Cameron Coughlin](https://www.instagram.com/camcog_/?hl=en)
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