Maude Latour Explores Death and Tolstoy — While Serving ‘Main-Character’ Pop Anthems
Maude Latour’s fans have described her music as being for people who “had glow-in-the-dark stars on their ceilings” as kids. These days, Latour sees her music as “main-character” pop anthems for dramatic people with intense emotions, like herself.
“It’s for any girly who needs to put their headphones on, and that’s where they go to understand everything,” the 24-year-old dream-pop singer says. “It’s for people who journal. For people who love to feel every feeling and have a strong spectrum of emotions, and aren’t afraid to feel anything extremely.”
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On her debut album, Sugar Water, she does exactly that. Across 12 songs, Latour grapples with the intense, unavoidable, almost crippling feeling that everything ends: friendships change, love, life. But it captures her as she comes to the understanding that to live life fully, she needs to enjoy it as much as she can.
The title came from a Leo Tolstoy fable she learned about while studying philosophy at Columbia University. Latour’s version tells the story of a man hanging on the edge of a tree branch over a dragon ready to devour him, while mice eat the branch away. His death is inevitable and imminent. But suddenly he tastes a drop of sweetness on his tongue, and for that moment, even as his death looms, things feel just a bit better.
“There’s a sweetness to loss and tragedy and all the dark things in the world. Can you taste the sweetness while knowing that things end? That darkness exists?” asks Latour. “That’s what stuck in my mind and explained so much of my heart and my music: It’s trying to [be] as alive as fucking possible, even though life ends.”
Overall, the album is a huge sonic leap from the bedroom pop she introduced on her first four EPs. Most fans got to know Latour in 2020, when she blew up with “One More Weekend” on TikTok. Like beabadoobee with “Death Bed” and Benee with “Supaloney,” “One More Weekend” was one of the first TikTok songs to launch an artist’s career. She even signed to Warner Records over Zoom from her Columbia dorm room. “We were deep in the pandemic. It’s just crazy to look back, because we were all online,” Latour says. “No one even knew what TikTok was.”
Before ever uploading her music online, Latour started writing songs at age 15. She drew inspiration from her globe-trotting lifestyle: She was born in Sweden and lived in London and Hong Kong as a kid while her parents traveled the world for their journalism careers. (Her dad was once The Wall Street Journal’s executive editor, and is now the CEO of Dow Jones, while her mom covers credit markets for Reuters and other outlets.) Through her experiences and travels, Latour has found “all of this love for the world and curiosity for other people’s lives,” she says. “I want to believe that strangers have more in common than we think, and any two people can have the same soul and spirit.”
Her early music carries the lyrical specificity of Taylor Swift and Lorde-reminiscent vocals, with a hint of untouchable optimism. Now, her life’s philosophies have evolved, and she says she’s lucky to have grown so much. “It was me and my roommates. It was my teenage dreams,” she says. “I could see this dream so clearly, and it was this colorful explosion of my whole self.”
That philosophy is all over Sugar Water. The album’s standout is “Cursed Romantics,” a pop song about the beginning of a love story — “Every time we touch, I turn to poetry” — before her fears take over in the end: “I hope we never break up,” she repeats. Later on the album, there’s “Whirlpool,” which feels like the LP’s thesis. “The difference between loss and love is only letters and the drugs you take, but I’m hoping I don’t smoke it all away, because pain illuminates,” she sings. It’s a reminder, Latour explains, to allow herself to feel everything and not drown out those emotions.
Latour started writing the album on the seventh anniversary of her grandmother’s death. While none of the album’s lyrics are directly about her, she considers her grandmother her “North Star” in life and for the project. “Her favorite number was seven, and I just knew that seven years after her death, I was supposed to write this,” she says. “The 365 days of that year were going to teach me something new.”
Across the album and its existential lyricism, Latour channels psychedelic rock, pure pop, and even Dido. “Too Slow” is a “Lordey-hyper-pop-ish” song, and “Summer of Love” has more of an electro-pop energy reminiscent of her past EPs. “Genres are fucking fake, and all different sounds can fit under the kaleidoscope of your spirit,” she says.
Now, Latour sees her past projects as “the foundation of my cinematic universe.” With Sugar Water, Latour built a new world. It has one guiding principle: “How can I just enjoy the sweetness of life before it ends?”
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