MIAZ, the musical project of 24-year-old singer-songwriter Maggie Rose Connelly, is the product of releasing everything she’s felt. Her writing always comes from a need to get something out, she says. “It’s very impulsive.”
It was only five months ago that she released her debut album, I’m Dramatic, I Know, and she already feels like she made it. “This is everything that I really wanted to be able to do.”
I’m Dramatic, I Know, released in January of this year, is a powerful chronicle of her own heartbreaks and healing. In a fusion of alt-rock and pop, MIAZ laid her heart out on this record detailing the rollercoaster of falling in love and breaking up with ferocity and honesty.
Before releasing the album, MIAZ would sing her songs in her basement and post covers on her Instagram, idolizing the likes of Lana Del Rey and Remi Wolf. She also has released a few other tracks with some fellow local musicians under the name “MERCI” and would post regular videos of her playing on her Instagram, but eventually took a break from music. At that time, music was only a half-dream, and she wasn’t writing as much and found herself stuck on whether to dive back in, she said.
“Honestly, I was really happy, and I know that sounds funny, but it’s hard for me to really sit down and write things and like everything’s going well,” MIAZ says.
She also began to get caught up in the likes and views on her Instagram posts of her music, overthinking small details of her videos and finding herself losing the spark of it all. “When I came back from that, I was like, ‘That was so stupid.’ It doesn’t hurt to post videos and sing. It’s just a fun thing,” she says. “It became more of a burden and me worrying about if is this gonna go anywhere than enjoying it.”
She found inspiration again in her own life, heartbreaks, and with friend/label-owner Salazar Gomez from Stupid Monday Records, who signed her in 2021. “He brought me back down to earth,” she says. “He’s like, ‘If your dreams are easy to reach, they’re not big enough dreams.'”
Reigntied, MIAZ jumped back in and put together her debut album. In June of last year, she flew from her hometown of Chicago to Los Angeles to record her first full-length record—a leap into a new world as a musician.
“The whole time, I was like, no matter what happens with this, there’s nothing that beats just going away on a trip alone for the first time and like being able to just do everything I could possibly have dreamed about. It was pretty eye-opening,” she says. “It also just made me realize that anything is possible. In the music world, everything sounds so impossible… and then you’re like, ‘No, it’s right in front of me,’ you just kind of have to search for it a little.”
The album was recorded over about a week at the Pale Moon Ranch in L.A. with producer Alex Estrada, known for fronting Silver Snakes and working on albums for Touché Amoré and Joyce Manor. For MIAZ, she saw it as the first mark of becoming a serious musician.
“I never was immersed in the music world so much. I’ll sing these songs in my basement, and my mom and my sisters are like ‘Oh, that’s so good!’ But, you never really take it seriously,” she says. “And then there’s, like, these real, other musicians and… You just see everyone sitting there working so hard on a project that’s for you… It’s just really cool.”
The record was written with a nod to the era of Avril Lavigne and girl rock, channeling the angsty pop sounds she heard as a teenager with her own sonic twist—a sound she said she’s still developing. “Honestly, to this day, I don’t think I have found my sound yet,” MIAZ says. “But, I think that I’m on the right path.”
As for discovering the sound for the album, MIAZ credits that process to collaboration and experimentation. “I just knew that I wanted a little bit of pop-y guitar in it, that was the one thing I went in knowing,” she says. “It was a lot of just trying things out.”
MIAZ initially had a different vision for the album, a culmination of breakup songs detailing the stages of a breakup entitled Breakup Ballad. She wanted to narrate a whole timeline of a relationship, from meeting to falling in love to parting ways to rekindling the romance.
To write so vulnerably and then to release such a tell-all record took a lot of courage from the artist, she says, but she never let that stop her from getting out what she needed.
“Sometimes I’m like, ‘Wow, if everyone listens to this, this is exactly how I feel like on the line,’ like everybody knows. But then also, I’m like, this is like the way that I could tell people how I feel without having to say it,” she says. “When it’s in a song, it just seems a little bit lighter, like it doesn’t make it as real, but you’re still getting it out and expressing it in a way.”
This album brought a lot of firsts for MIAZ. She also took to the stage for the first time while in L.A., playing an acoustic set on the stage at Blackrose LA—her first time playing her own songs live, too. “It was absolutely incredible,” she says. “I was like, ‘that was the best feeling and I feel like I’m meant to do this.'”
Since jumping into the studio, MIAZ sees herself as a real artist, feeling motivated too. “I think I just feel more like a musician now and I feel like I take my music more seriously,” she says. “I think higher of myself now that I did it.”
With her first album out into the world, MIAZ now wants to play around with different styles of music, exploring how each one fits her in different singles. “Not that I have to stick to one, but I don’t want to have to make anything sound the same,” she says. “I want to be free about it.”
She’s now going by the motto of “just have fun with it” for her writing and is no longer worried about “being good,” she says. “I think that’s the most fun way to do it is when there’s no restrictions, and that’s what it’s supposed to be about, like just having fun with it.”
