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MIDWIFE is the musical moniker of Madeline Johnston who describes her sublime music as Heaven Metal and one listen to the gloriously atmospheric soundscapes that Johnston creates, you can’t help but feel that this sums up the music of MIDWIFE perfectly. With her last album, 2021’s Luminol, gaining a whole host of deserved plaudits and the anticipation for the follow up record gaining even more traction with the release of her latest track Sickworld, the music of MIDWIFE is very much on the ascendancy.
Closing this year, Johnston took to the road. The tour, one that takes in a whole host of cities across the UK and Europe in the middle of October, is the first time that MIDWIFE has played live overseas, she tells us she is suitably excited to be heading over to these shores to show how the music of MIDWIFE translates in a live setting. “I am! So far I’ve only played once in the Netherlands, and I’m really looking forward to experiencing a lot of new places. This is my first European and UK tour.”
When it came to the subject of if playing live is akin to a therapeutic experience at all, Madeline explains thoroughly. “Playing live is definitely challenging most of the time, but that’s what makes it rewarding. I have always had severe stage fright and anxiety when it comes to playing in front of people. Over this past year, I’ve began to work through that. It sounds counter-intuitive, but the thing that helped snap me out of it was actually playing in front of 1500 people (the biggest show I’ve ever played). The calm and confidence that I felt in that moment was so therapeutic. This is the feeling I’m always chasing. I think the pursuit of zen in itself is therapeutic, too. My best shows are not measured by outside factors like who I’m playing with, where it is, and so forth, but instead measured by this feeling of inner peace.”
With all the talk of live shows and tours, the next obvious course of conversation was the status is of the follow-up to the last MIDWIFE album Luminol and Johnston explains exactly how it is shaping up.“I’m writing a lot right now! Most of the writing I have done has been on the road, in the van. Naturally the writing is about that experience in some way too. This past year I did three tours, and I’m about to go on my fourth. The experience has shaped what I’m thinking about and what inspires me. Without giving too much away, the new work is about rock n roll, fantasy, memory, dreams, and transience.”
Other recent new music from MIDWIFE has been a cover of Send The Pain Below by CHEVELLE. Johnston told us about what led to the cover the track and how it has been received. “I covered this song because my label, The Flenser, was doing a compilation of nu-metal covers. I’d always liked it and had been hearing it on the radio a lot recently. I was struck by the emotional place that the chorus brings you into, the feeling of release. I wanted to try to capture something like that in my song. It’s always a good challenge to cover a song that is completely different from your own music, and make it your own in a way rather than the goal of duplicating it. Minnesota-based filmmaker Alana Wool created a beautiful music video for the track that captures some of the same emotional resonance that the song inspires. The imagery used is also the perfect reference to the nu-metal era.”
As the music of MIDWIFE is brilliantly self-described as Heaven Metal, Madeline told us in depth to what led to her calling her music this and about the dynamic of beauty and a more harsh side in the music as well. “I think it makes the tragic stuff more digestible. Pairing something beautiful with something devastating is what heaven metal is about to me. Most of the time the heaviness is in the content more than the music itself. My music is about grief. Heaven Metal is about Grief. The more you grieve, the more you praise. I have carved out a little corner of my own in the heavy music scene, although my music is not always super heavy, I think this naming of my genre makes it all make more sense. I find beauty in the ways we relate to each other when we’re experiencing trauma, and what we do with that energy. I did always want to have some element of heaviness, or weirdness/experimentation, inspired by the DIY world I grew up in as a creative, surrounded and amazed by freaks and outsider artists. I think what I really wanted was to do something unique.”
The highlights of MIDWIFE thus far have been plentiful but Madeline shares with us the more personal side of what makes her experience through music even more special. “The moments I cherish are the moments when someone shares a personal story with me about their life, their struggles, their joy, and how the music reached them and helped to see it through. The man who plays MDWIFE for his baby girl everyday at nap time, the person who now understands what their wife is going through with PTSD and mental disability, the man who listened to MIDWIFE at rehab, the people that write a song of their own, people at their first concert, people experiencing grief. These insightful moments tell me I’m doing something right and I should keep doing it. I want to help people in a therapeutic, reflective, and comforting way, as the creation of the music has helped me in a therapeutic way, too. Music, to me, is about healing and understanding.”
Johnston finished up our informative chat as she told us what she would still like to achieve with MIDWIFE in the future. “I feel really open minded about the future. I definitely want to shift to more engineering and producing work for other artists, continue touring, continue making records. The rest falls into place. I hope to get the full MIDWIFE band together in 2023 and do a tour with them.”
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