Interview: ‘Sugar Water,’ Explained in Maude Latour Pop Terms

Pop star Maude Latour gets philosophical about the temporary nature of life and love, themes in no short supply on her highly anticipated debut album, ‘Sugar Water.’

Stream: “Sugar Water” – Maude Latour

Maude Latour has constantly demonstrated star power since her debut in 2018.

It’s been three EPs, a Kim Wildes cover for Netflix, and a stage presence that commanded audiences at Bowery Ballroom, Austin City Limits Music Festival, and soon, Radio City Music Hall. She’s managed to do it all over the course of the previous six years.

Her astounding musical footprint is made up of bedroom pop tracks chock full of chaotic one-liners detailing intense relationships. Look no further than tracks like “Block Your Number” from 2021’s Strangers Forever, which clever anecdotes like “Modern love is so damn romantic, the irony of poor connection as we talk over FaceTime, what a metaphor.”

Latour has been dropping EPs and singles for what seems like a decade now, but finally, her debut album is due later this month. She has crafted tracks for her Sugar Water (out August 16th via Warner Records) that seem like they fall into place on a sort of Venn diagram, one circle representing tracks that are “just weird,” and the other labelled, “for the greater cause of pop music.” The album has currently four singles: “Too Slow,” “Cursed Romantics,” “Comedown,” and “Whirlpool,” and truly, they sound like nothing else – blending grunge, pop, and disaster. Her confessional lyricism on the album is her most mature, but fun moment in her still fledging career.

In conversation with Atwood Magazine, Latour gets philosophical about the temporary nature of life and love, themes in no short supply on her album, out August 23.

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:: stream/purchase Sugar Water here ::

:: connect with Maude Latour here ::

Stream: ‘Sugar Water’ – Maude Latour

A CONVERSATION WITH MAUDE LATOUR

Maude Latour: Every day, it’s new feelings. I freak out most of the time for sure, but then I have these amazing moments of calm and excitement. So, it goes back and forth between those two extremes.

Latour: That felt so good. Since then, I’m feeling amazing, because I think I was just really anticipating people knowing it, and now they do.

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Latour: Yeah, there’s a lot of different things. I was a rebellious philosophy major, so my whole vibe is taking my own creative spin on all of it, but Sugar Water to me is supposed to be representing this sweet, temporariness of life and love and everything in the world.

There’s this Derrida piece, in the thought process of post modernism, post structuralism, which is supposed to be the most recent era of philosophy. It comes from this thought of, in one example, the story of Adam and Eve, then Eve, bites the freaking apple. (laughs) And then we end up in this fallen world where we have nakedness and death and non-paradise. Darkness exists, it’s not paradise, it’s this fallen world.

But post modernism is trying to suggest, what if there’s this world that can’t be defined by its fallenness, and we actually still have access to wholeness, and wholeness is not the opposite of the fallenness. But they can both exist; it’s taking these two contradicting things, technically, and being like, no, it’s both of these things. Loss and love, death and living, are the same thing, two sides of the same coin. And that’s what the album is about – it’s people that I’ve lost and loved.

But in that process of loss, can that actually be part of the bigger process of love? And can that be part of complete wholeness? It’s so this guy (Derrida), very dark, being like, “If you have loss, the absence of something implies the thing itself as well.” So, the absence of a person, that someone is gone. But that implies there being so much, and when we have breakups, because I loved them so much, this feeling of grief is also this feeling of love. In missing college, missing your youth, it implies that this youth is known by you, and it’s in you.

That is the framework, that is the hypothesis of the album. In “Bloom” (the album closer), that’s the song where I’m like, “These people are dead and yet like, I can see you in everything.”

Latour: Exactly. It’s such an applicable and powerful concept, because in this theory of post modernism, and all these types of post structuralist thought that we’re talking about, they are so key we need to make the world the place we want it to be. And it’s stuck in this theoretical realm. So I hope I can help to bring it to the mainstream. You can’t ignore the loss and the darkness of things. It’s about looking at things as complicated as they actually are, and not trying to make them one thing or the other – it’s actually both. It’s about taking away the binary and that’s where we are, that’s what we are experiencing right now.

Latour: Wow. I’m so glad it feels like it’s all from the same planet!

Latour: I definitely wrote the weirder ones first – “Sugar Water” (the title track) and “Bloom” are the first ones and those are definitely the weirdest ones, and then “Whirlpool,” “Cosmic Superstar” were the next ones that I wrote.

But I think my whole pop mission is always to prove that every genre can be pop, it’s just the mask you put on it. The sound is the final thing that it comes down to, but in its spirit, it’s just a poem. There are some rocky moments and there’s everything I love. That’s the through line of my sound: just me and my vibes. Everything that’s new here comes from believing that I can pull from anything in the world. I’ve made the sound is just me saying, “Yeah, I’ve been to the rave since my last couple of EPs.” (laughs) Like, “I’m dreaming, I love my rock life,” like, “Ooh, ’70s.”

I wanted it to be this trippy thing, pop disguised as pop music, but also, I love just pure pop that’s clean, cutting, and direct. And so yeah, it’s all those things.

Latour: It’s been a journey. I love the cover. So much. I didn’t know what it was going to be until it happened. And I realized I learned a lot about making stuff within the project and making it from like, yourself.

You decide you try to control so much, but then it ends up being this thing that if you leave this little percentage for just chance and like, like letting the universe be a participant in the making stuff as well, it turns into what it’s actually meant to be.

I’m finishing the visuals this next 10 days as well. And they’re about to be awesome. I’m really excited. They’re gonna be freaky, and cool and scary and emotional and everything. And so I’m still in the middle of finishing it. But um, but yeah, I wanted it to be. I love the cover. What? The visuals weren’t good. Sometimes I panic about that.

Latour: Well, with that one… (laughs)

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Latour: I did know. (laughs) I think it works best when I’m following like, a random childhood vision. It works best when you’re just doing the thing you actually want. It is really realizing like, wait, no, the thing that I want it to be and the thing that I feel I can’t do but should, that is what it should be. And so, all of this is totally practice, learning that I feel like when I was a little younger with Starsick and Strangers Forever era especially, I was like, “Oh my god, I knew exactly what I wanted.” I didn’t know about the vibes within the music industry. I didn’t know about other opinions. I was so good at not listening to shit and I’ve gone through the adult-ification of suddenly so many voices. I signed to a label and so many new voices were involved. It’s been a process of learning to tune out and to trust my voice again. And that’s growing up, but you know what? It thinks it’s gonna be okay. It’s gonna be good. I’m learning it now. Yeah, so sorry. Too honest of an answer.

Latour: I definitely feel the presence of being in love in that album for sure. I think that’s different than past vibes. Sometimes a love allows you to be safe enough and secure enough to go deeper in yourself to think about what it is you are grieving, and deep down what it is you are missing; What are you lacking? Has this just brought me closer to other forms of love? And so, I feel that in the album.

Everything that I write has to be about something that actually happened, and the first few lyrics of “Officially Mine” is ‘Taking you in on the corner in the rain / Bag on your shoulder wearing my sweatshirt.” It was because I was literally looking at my girlfriend and… she was in standing on the corner in the rain, bag on her shoulder! (laughs)

Or like, in “Summer of Love,” I’m like, “You’re the only thing I think about / Summer ending on your ex-boyfriend’s rooftop / I met you when the sun was out and we almost kissed / But I said ‘You can’t kiss me when you’re drinking’ / In the morning you came crying to me / That was the beginning.” Like, just you actually have to just say what happened! (laughs) This is my way of remembering stuff! Like, writing music is my way of remembering it and journaling.

Latour: Literally, yes! Exactly!

Latour: I actually really think I went with the current for this album. I think in the past, I do bring some choices first, but it was so important to me that I let just the writing do its thing. I wanted the headphones vibes, let the music lead the way, and let it come out. I didn’t know what the album was supposed to be about. I needed the God of music to show me, to teach me something. This album was what she taught me, so this album was so an exercise in following moments. You have to open the valve, you know, you have to open the portal and let so much run through that.

Latour: “Cursed Romantics,” oh my God, that’s a pop song for sure. Um, the song started when I was singing at the beginning that little sound, the doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo. I made a lot of the weird songs first, but then there’s a few pop bangers, and I think if left fully to my own devices, this project could have taken a way weirder direction, but I kind of remembered pop music halfway through it, and I remember that there’s such a craft and muscle and sport of pop music. It’s our religion, and so I definitely came back to that art during this album. There was definitely this moment in the room where it was me and producer Zhone, and Alex Chapman, songwriter / human / friend, and there was a feeling when suddenly, like the finished the song was for the greater cause of pop music!

Latour: I attribute that it was important for this album, like I said, to like tribute all these little parts of my pop soul that make me, and this song is so the homage to 2014 perfect pop songs that made me believe in something bigger. I’m like, “You’re my new religion sometimes,” I’m like, so singing about pop music. So that’s how I came to be.

The beginning is a reverse piano. I was talking about how it started as me singing like, opera songs, improvising opera over these like, very classical piano sounds, and just zoomed in, reversed it, took a very tiny part of that, and that became the chords. And then, “We were in a tunnel going Superman.”

Latour: I’ve mentioned tunnels a lot. I think it’s because this was one of those first moments I had kissing this person was when it started suddenly raining and we ran for shelter under a tunnel, and it was just like the first moment we were like, “Oh, f*k, we are gonna get so f*ed by this love. This is epic.” We were soaking wet, and we were glittery, and like, so many things.

Latour: I love Alexa Gates. She’s on the rise in New York. She’s a rapper girly. She’s awesome. She’s a New Yorker. I just made friends with this band called The Army, the Navy and they make guitar-ish music and they have these crazy harmonies and they’re so cool.

This song I’m going to show you has been my favorite song of the past year and I can’t stop listening to it. It’s called “I Saw You” by Swank Mami. It’s my favorite I’ve ever heard. It’s amazing. I love the new Ice Spice song, “Did It First.” It’s great. I love the Ariana Grande (eternal sunshine). There’s someone named Horse Girl. She makes crazy like, clubby rave music.

Latour: This is the most fun I’ve had, I have to do it again!

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:: stream/purchase Sugar Water here ::

:: connect with Maude Latour here ::

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Sugar Water

an album by Maude Latour