Maddie Regent is crafting emotional blueprints for a generation, holding it together on her debut album, "On the phone with my mom." The standout here is "Any day now," a deceptively jaunty song that nails what it's like to be simultaneously laughing, full of tears, and panicking in your 20s. "Any day now" makes you believe it's a breezy bop. The sort of track makes you want to roll your windows down and scream the chorus into the wind. But if you listen to the words, the song hides its unfettered candor in a cage of glitter.
"This is a song about the anxiety of adulthood," Maddie says, "the feeling that if things are going right, then they're also bound to go wrong at some point." And that gut-punching relatability is why this song feels like a hit today. It's a soundtrack for the internal monologue we all try to suppress the uncertainty that sneaks in when life is just too damn all right. The tension between form and content makes "Any day now" particularly magnetic. This is an upbeat, pulsating production with Cade all over it, his fingerprints everywhere, but the lyrics don't pull any punches. Its brilliance is in how it takes you from emotional whiplash, dancing to something played so nakedly. As Maddie describes, her friends' initial reaction was, "wow, I feel extremely called out and sensitive right now, but I'm gonna keep dancing anyway!" It's funny and harrowing.
The track uses the same chord progression as the album's title song, "On the phone with my mom," but it is in a distinctly different universe with a change of time signature and instrumentation. This subtle interrelation, musical callbacks, production motifs, and even lyrical echoes prove how deliberate this project is. On "Any day now," Maddie Regent asserts that she's constructing a universe for anyone who's ever smiled through an existential crisis. And it's the therapy session we didn't even know we needed.
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