Why 'Idol' Fave Maddie Zahm Calls 'Dani' a 'Gut-Wrencher': 'That Song Scares Me the Most' (Exclusive)
The singer-songwriter explains why it's so important to her to have a song that helps people "connect"
The fat funny friend isn’t fat anymore, but she’s just as beautiful.
“Oh my gosh, thank you,” Maddie Zahm gushes over the compliment during a Zoom interview with PEOPLE. “I'm genuinely happy. I'm kind of coming off a bender of figuring out who I am in every way." She laughs. "And do you know what's amazing? It's like a calm happy, you know?”
It’s a ‘calm happy’ that certainly Zahm, 25, is so very deserving of, as the rising pop star and raw truth-teller has had to put much work in over the past few years to become the person she is today, a person that happens to be so very different than the one she sung about on her 2021 breakout hit “Fat Funny Friend.”
“I was in the middle of losing a bunch of weight and was really having a hard time with realizing that the stuff that I thought that [the weight loss] was going to fix, wasn’t really going to fix everything,” explains the LA-based powerhouse that the world first met when she competed on Season 16 of American Idol. “It was very disorienting for a while.”
Around the same time, Zahm was also coming to terms with the trauma that came from a past she experienced at the virtual hands of her church. “There was just this feeling of being an empty canvas a little bit, where I had to rebuild,” Zahm reflects. “I had to figure out who I was.”
Related: Katy Perry, Luke Bryan and Lionel Richie Will Return as 'American Idol' Judges for Season 22
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Maddie ZahmAnd during that process, Zahm also realized that she was gay.
“I had started kissing my best friend,” Zahm remembers. “I remember just going into the studio and talking about it. In that moment, it hit me that I was gay. And so, I wrote her a song —‘Eightball Girl’ — because she's a songwriter and I wanted to know what she thought of me.”
And while that love story didn’t quite have a happy ending — "I went through a break-up" — Zahm says she knows that her fandom thrives on learning all they can about their own life through her life and her songs, including her new song “Dani,” which she refers to as a ‘gut-wrencher.’
“I've noticed that it's a very queer experience to look back at a friendship in high school and realize that it was gay,” Zahm explains. “Especially, in the position that I had in the church at the time, I cut off that friendship just out of what I thought was conviction, and the Lord telling me to cut off.”
And Zahm knows she’s not the only one who has been through a similar experience.
“I do think that most of the people that listen to [recent EP] ‘You Might Not Like Her’ are going to have a ‘Dani,’ and I think that they're going to figure it out at some point here soon,” says Zahm of the inspiration behind the powerful song premiering exclusively on PEOPLE.
“It's important that I allow them to have a song that lets them connect with their ‘Dani.’ That is really important to me." She pauses. "That song scares me the most though, because obviously it's a person's name and I want to protect and honor them, but I feel ready for that.”
Indeed, as she finds herself on the cusp of the October release of her highly anticipated forthcoming album Now That I’ve Been Honest, Zahm says she’s ready for all her truths to be out there for the world to see.
“I'm so proud of [the new album] and I'm so glad that it's so personal,” concludes Zahm. “If I were to have strayed from that with the community that I have, I think they would've been able to smell bulls---." She laughs.
"However, I feel like they're a year behind me with the stuff that we're deconstructing and talking through, and so I wanted there to be songs on the album that kind of honor that. When someone says they listen to my music, I always wonder, are you deconstructing your faith? Are you the fat funny friend? What part of my journey do you relate to?”
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