photo by emily moses
I can still remember the first time I heard “The Red Means I Love You,” the haunting, catchy tune by Madds Buckley which went viral on TikTok in 2021 and now has over 100 million streams on Spotify. A lot of songs pass you by when you’re scrolling, scrolling, infinitely scrolling and so many of them are so good, but you will never hear or perhaps even remember them again. This is not one of those songs. You hear the chorus once and it enters your conscience so fully that you feel like you would be able to perfectly repeat it without another listen. If Billy Eichner accosted me on Billy on the Street and asked me to sing the first melody that came to mind, there’s a good chance it might be this song.
This catchiness is a product of Buckley’s time at Berklee College of Music, an experience she mentioned early in our interview in order to cite how profoundly it influenced her songwriting and the trajectory of her career as a musician. The 24-year-old credits her decision to pursue music in college and beyond with her upbringing, which consistently featured music as a communal and unifying act. “Music was always in my life. My mother is from a huge family, she’s one of 12 children, and I am the youngest girl out of the mainline cousins. A lot of my cousins are like 20 years older than me and have kids of their own. So when I was very little, I didn’t have people my age to connect with in my family. So my first way of connecting with my cousins was at family reunions we would just sit around a keyboard or an upright piano and just sing songs all night. And I latched on to that, so music has been the one constant in my life since I can remember.”
Then, in high school, Buckley had a music teacher who ran an “amateur musicians club” for students not in the music department, or who wanted to learn more about music production. He also ran a project which invited students to record original music to be compiled into one album and released online, and he asked Buckley to submit, which turned into her devoting her free time in her final two years of high school to songwriting. Buckley, who had previously considered careers like attorney and teacher at the suggestion of her parents, suddenly began to seriously think about music as a career. “It took a bit for my parents to be like, ‘Why is this girl who is a straight-A student wanting to do something that is very far from left field and might not make any money?'” But once they came around, Buckley says, it was her dad who suggested she apply to Berklee, the prestigious school for young musicians in Boston. Armed with passion and encouragement, Buckley applied and was accepted. It was there that she feels she learned how to write songs properly, surrounded by inspiring peers and teachers and steeped in a diverse assortment of influences: Paramour, the internal rhyming of Sondheim, Theo Katzman, Sara Bareilles, The 1975. Here, Buckley met friends who would become her roommates, producers and cowriters, and who would form her support system and network of creative inspiration.
Buckley’s attention to her craft that Berklee had nurtured led inadvertently to a (still active) frustration with English covers of songs from anime. Buckley is a huge fan of anime, having been introduced to it by a love of manga sparked memorably at a Scholastic Book Fair in elementary school. But, she said she can’t enjoy a lot of those English anime covers because of their lack of attention to authenticity and detail. “They’re hard to do, but at the same time, because I went to school for this and took so many classes learning about songwriting, I will sit there and be like, ‘You missed the rhyme there. That line doesn’t make sense. You said that word wrong.’ Like, I’m annoying as hell about it.” Buckley noted that Japanese lyrics, by nature of linguistic differences, are much less information dense than English, so the process of translation (while retaining meaning and emotion) is not just a matter of literal conversion, but of rearranging concepts without adding in things that aren’t there. “At some point, you might have to throw in filler words, which I despise. I’m so stubborn about not having filler words.”
Freshly graduated from Berklee, where it was drilled into her head to work on a song’s lyrics until they sound natural and convey the right meaning, Buckley decided to put her skills to the test. “I thought, ‘You know what, I’ll put my money where my mouth is. I’ll do it myself.’ And then I did, for a few songs, but I took it so seriously that I couldn’t keep up anymore. I would find every single translation I could possibly find available, then check if they were like a reliable resource. So one song was taking a month to translate and reconstruct to sound right in English, so that the heart of the song was there.” Buckley decided instead to do original short ditty songs about anime characters, a decision which resulted in the 2022 album Sunset on Somerville, on which each track was based on a character from the anime series My Hero Academia, including “The Red Means I Love You.” When she began posting on TikTok, Buckley added anime character tags to her videos, rather than using the oversaturated #singersongwriter tag. This tactic proved successful, as “The Red Means I Love You” quickly exited an audience of anime fans and found an enormous audience. “I thought, I’ll have fun with that, this will be fine. And it was, surprisingly. And I come out of that on the other side really wanting to write my own music.”
Buckley is indeed a writer at heart, and readily admitted she doesn’t always feel confident playing instruments on recorded tracks. To this end, Buckley counts herself lucky to have musicians she trusts to shape her music (one of whom was Kari Estes, of Sorry Mom. It’s a small world, after all). “I work with people who are far better at playing instruments than me. So once I’ve written the basic chord structure, I just hand them the reins and go, ‘This is yours now. I trust you.'”
Buckley’s new album, “My Love is Sick,” blends the storytelling that Buckley is known for with more autobiographical, confessional elements. “I’m excited that this album has a way more cohesive sound. It was to be an album, not just a collection of songs.” While the songs are still not direct retellings of personal experience, Buckley wanted this album to explore themes that she has been wrestling with, such as identity, self-acceptance and living away from one’s family for the first time. “To my core, I don’t write songs about myself, because I like to tell stories first and foremost,” she said. “But I will take things from my own experience and see how I can make a better story from them.”
In comparison to Buckley’s previous work, this album is more percussion-heavy and more complex in terms of layers, giving it a more mature, considered feel. To this end, it also features lots of stacked vocals, a songwriting habit which Buckley traces back to an adolescent obsession with Marianas Trench. “Sometimes, my producer will be like, ‘No, you can’t have 11 stacked vocals. We can’t mix it.” The endearing habit is present in the title track, which, along with “I Wanna Be in Love Again,” delivers a slow build to a soaring, gratifying chorus about grappling with one’s perception of their facility for love. Although I am often unfairly put off by traditional love songs because of a lifelong trepidation towards slower, acoustic music (it makes me uneasy, the combination of sincerity and being able to hear my own thoughts), these songs, alongside “Anything, Anything, Anything,” made me reconsider that stance completely.
My favorite track from “My Love is Sick” is “Wine and Wheat,” a feisty song about Buckley’s complicated experience growing up Roman Catholic, the release of which Buckley described as scaring her: “There’s always that risk of while I’m promoting it, it reaches the wrong side of the internet.” The song, which showcases her belting abilities against a tapestry of grungy guitar and urgent drums, is the album’s best example of the bite of which Buckley is capable. “Wine and Wheat” is a natural progression from “The Red Means I Love You,” which successfully builds on its energy rather than trying to recreate a hit and which bodes well for her longevity as an artist.
This album is also the first in which Buckley dives into her queer identity, which she says she only recently began to meaningfully discover. “An inciting incident known as ‘having a crush on someone’ happened and all these feelings got dragged up from my gut, and I felt horrible, and I didn’t know why. I unpackaged it and it was this terrible feeling of feeling bad about being in love with someone.” That feeling was so strong that Buckley was ready to give up on the crush for her own sake, but was able to use the writing of My Love is Sick to investigate and process those feelings further in a fictionalized setting. “DogBird” in particular details the central conflict of the two characters created within the world of My Love is Sick, in which the “dog” is dealing with this internalized homophobia and fear-based anger, and the “bird” bears the brunt of feeling pushed away. The song makes use of the second person, which Buckley loves to use because listeners can easily slot themselves into the vague “me and you” storytelling. Buckley’s capacity for sharp and tactical musical storytelling can be traced back to those early, impressive translations of anime narratives into music which is accessible to and enjoyable for everyone, even those unfamiliar with the source material.
Following its course of virality, “The Red Means I Love You” now has a near-permanent spot on the Spotify playlist “Villain Mode,” and other user-generated playlists with similar visions of playful wickedness. While those curated “mood” playlists are certainly useful in terms of providing exposure for smaller artists and helping listeners find new music, just like snippets of songs that become trends on TikTok, but these methods of delivery can flatten the cultural history and contextualization of music — genre description and creation, the sequence of influence from one generation to the next and technical innovations are sometimes overlooked in favor of highlighting the trend alongside which a song became popular. Mashing everything into “vibes” and “eras” rather than presenting artists by their own complete and complex bodies of work can also be hard on the musicians, who are facing the twin pressures of getting their work seen in a sea of posts and maintaining that attention once they have it. Buckley also noted that her exploratory meetings with record labels amidst this virality were also marked by this fervent need to put artists into boxes and sell them as hyper-specific vibes, recalling that record label representatives told her she would figure out what genre she was as soon as she signed (despite her stated desire to remain fluid).
Buckley, who is clearly intentional about giving her work the time and attention it deserves, also lamented the fact that when a song goes viral online, it often does so to the demands of fans clamoring for a “FULL VERSION WHEN??” Social media users who have good intentions but who may not understand how music production works demand immediate results from musicians, putting extraordinary pressure on artists who already feel constrained by the breakneed speed of promotional cycles and windows of brief virality that constitute the building of a career online. The nature of video-based platforms like Instagram and TikTok can also drive artists to make content they don’t view as ideal in order to establish an audience: “The things that made me go viral were silly little skits and stuff that were not indicative of my overall music,” she said. However, Buckley has remained steadfast in her patient and meticulous songwriting process in the face of this pressure, and she maintains an excitable, appreciative outlook where many people might have easily become jaded. “It brings me so much joy to scroll through playlists that my music has been added to, and the playlist title is someone’s name with art of an original character. Like, we did it, boys! We did it! It’s better than winning a Grammy.” Her commitment to her unique creative inspirations and her diligent personal process has been rewarded in a catalog that sounds thoughtful and well-rounded, and I eagerly await what comes next.