NEED TO KNOW
It’s one day after Madeline Edwards performed a set at the famed Grand Ole Opry, and the singer-songwriter is sneaking away for some peace and quiet from the extended family she’s hosting at her home in Tennessee.
Her younger brother Micah joined her on stage last night, and right now, his kids are filling Edwards’ home with laughter—and noise.
“You’ll hear babies screaming,” she warns as she slips away.
But for Edwards, 32, the sounds of a happy home are certainly welcome. It’s been nearly two years since the sudden death of her younger brother Jonah, a devastating blow that kicked off a painful season of life that also included her getting dropped from her label just three months later.
Having had time to process all she’s gone through over the last few years, Edwards has channeled her grief into the new album (out now), which sees the musician navigating her pain while trying to find beauty in her sorrow.
Braylen Dion
“One thing that came out of grief was experiencing this level of joy that I’ve never seen before, ever in my life. It’s very deep grief and very deep joy, and you can hold both at the same time,” she says. “The album’s called Fruit because, look at all the fruit in your life. Despite seeing a terrible marriage with your parents, you’re able to have a really good partnership with your partner. I was in a place not too long ago where I didn’t have a relationship with my brother Micah, and now he and his wife and his kids are just running amok in my house and I love it. Look at all this fruit in your life despite loss.”
The, well, fruit of Edwards’ labor is a record she wrote for herself, and one she’s fought tooth and nail to release on her own terms. Its content is dark — Jonah, who was just 24, had schizophrenia and died by suicide in November 2023. The songs that emerged in the wake of his death confront his mental illness head-on, in a way rarely seen in pop music.
The album begins with a voice memo from Jonah praising his sister’s 2022 debut album Crashlanded, and includes the song “American Psycho,” with lyrics like, “An American psycho is a broke down car on the side of the road… While his sister’s out crying and his brother’s out punching holes through the wall/’Cause the beautiful boy just won’t come back home.”
“The really complex thing about losing someone to mental illness is toward the end of their life, they start becoming someone that you don’t even recognize,” she says. “So you have to find those little key pieces through voice memos or our texts to remember the pieces of him that were totally normal, and the pieces of him before his mind started deteriorating. My brother was a schizophrenic and he committed suicide. But that’s not what I want people to remember my brother as. I want them to remember him as what I heard on that voice memo.”
Edwards remembers her brother as an “incredibly goofy” person who was the “most gorgeous dancer.” He once worked as a cast member at Disneyland, which is where he took his own life.
“[Like] a lot of people with mental illness, he was the joy in the room, even though he was the one hurting the most in the room. I miss him so much. I talk about him every day,” she says. “I’m constantly inspired by him, it’s crazy. He was just wildly creative with no limits. There’s not enough people like that in this world. And so anytime I’m even a little bit scared of like, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to brand Fruit, I think this is too weird, I don’t think people are going to get it,’ there’s always a piece of him in my brain that’s like, ‘Just f—— go for it. No one else is going to do it, so go do it.’”
Edwards, the oldest of five siblings, was born in California, and moved with her family to Houston when she was 9 years old. She describes her childhood as a “whole cocktail of chaos” (While close with her mother and siblings, Edwards says she’s “forgiven” her dad, but does not have a relationship with him; she sings about breaking the cycles of her traumatic past on the Fruit track “New Leaf”).
But amid familial turmoil, there was always music — Bee Gees, Shania Twain. The Carpenters and Ella Fitzgerald. Edwards, whose sultry voice evokes a comfort similar to that of Norah Jones, started playing piano at 4 years old, and picked up the drums in college at the University of Houston, where she studied advertising. In 2021, she moved to Nashville with her husband Jim, and the year after that, she signed her first record deal.
Braylen Dion
Her debut album Crashlanded came out in November 2022, and though her music blurs the lines between country, jazz, soul and rock, she was quickly embraced by the country scene. She’s performed at the CMT Music Awards and the CMAs, and toured with everyone from Chris Stapleton to Brothers Osborne and the War and Treaty (She’ll hit the road with Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan and more on the Outlaw Music Festival starting this September).
Edwards says she doesn’t categorize herself as a country artist, but is grateful for the support she’s found in Nashville, noting that trying to figure out a sound and being funneled into a genre is “just as confusing for the artist as it is for everybody else.”
What she does know is that regardless of genre, she’s made an album she’s proud of — even if it meant parting ways with not only her label, but her manager and business management, whose exits all came in quick succession as she stood her ground.
“I knew it was going to be a grief record, and obviously a grief record is not fun or sexy at all. It was this kind of push and pull of, ‘I can prove to y’all that this can be commercial, because look at Billie Eilish and Noah Kahan.’ Then all of a sudden you’re comparing yourself to other people to sell yourself to the label,” she explains. “I think it was for the best. It really was. It gave me more confidence in myself. I get to make my own s— now. This record was for me and this is for my family.”
Braylen Dion
Still, fans will be listening — and for anyone who has ever lost a loved one, Edwards knows she’s made a body of work that will connect on a deep level.
“This very deeply personal journey is way more universal than I ever expected,” she says. “I think there’s a lot of people out there that have been like, ‘Thank f—— God that someone said something.’ Because there’s a lot of people that need to be seen and heard, especially when it comes to the complexities of mental illness. So now I get this really beautiful gift of getting to see people also be healed through something that was meant to heal me.”
Fruit is out now.
If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health challenges, emotional distress, substance use problems, or just needs to talk, call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org 24/7.
