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With a Spotify caption “I don’t know what I'm doing but I'm doing,” it's hard not to get pulled in by the beautiful ambition of Maddie Regent's, On the phone with my Mom. The debut album feels like a wondrous discovery. For such a new artist to tackle this caliber of depth and weight with such melodic fluidity – the dynamism of femininity being the primary subject matter – is stunning, and it compiles into a truly immersive work. Not wanting to filter anything from this gorgeous tome of nuanced pop, we asked the artist herself to break it down:  

“On the phone with my mom”

This started out as the intro to the second track, “Any day now,” but we (Cade Hoppe, my producer and co-writer, and I) decided to break it off and have it introduce the whole album instead. So much of this album sonically was about the marriage of lush orchestral arrangements with more modern electronic elements—so it felt fitting to introduce this new chapter of music with this ultra-organic orchestral intro, especially given my last project was heavily synth and electronic alt-pop stuff. Plus, I think intro tracks are sick. 

“Any day now”

This is a song about the anxiety of adulthood—the feeling that if things are going right then they’re also bound to go wrong at some point. My favorite part of playing this song to my friends for the first time was how immediately they were convinced it was a bop. But, when they actually listened to the lyrics, the response was like “wow, I feel extremely called out and sensitive right now, but I’m gonna keep dancing anyway!” I love songs that do that. It’s also an interesting study on what controls the feel of a song because “On the phone with my mom” is the same chord progression at the same tempo (but in 6/8 instead of 4/4) and it feels completely different because of instrumentation, melody, etc. Cade and I had a lot of fun throughout the album bringing back chord progressions, little melodies/motifs, production sounds, and even using lyrical callbacks—it was one of the best parts of making a full project like this, knowing we were building a world of songs that could each interact with one another. 

“Sleeptalking”

This was the first song we released for this project, and the first song we made for it that felt like a single. As a production, it became the proof of concept for the album we went on to make, as it was this unique blend of the more electronic pop that Cade and I had made together up to this point with this new “bedroom orchestra” vibe we were starting to hone in on. This was one of the first songs we made since moving in together and turning our second bedroom into a studio space. As a musician, Cade is a pianist first, so what easily could have been a synth-based song took a new piano-based direction mainly because he had just bought an upright piano for the studio. This song also became the touchstone for the project as a whole because it deals with expectations (from others and myself) versus true desire, which became a theme that we explored throughout the album.  

“Turtleneck”

Cade came up with the idea of “swimming in a turtleneck” while he was on a run on the Williamsburg bridge, and we thought the double meaning was funny. To me, figuratively swimming (because the sweater is so big) or literally swimming (like in a pool) pretty much both summed up what dating felt like. On one hand, it can feel cozy and warm, and on the other, it can feel like you’re being weighed down and drowning. This served as a jumping off point for writing about feeling lonely and touch-starved in the aftermath of a breakup. This is probably my personal favorite pre-chorus on the whole album—it’s so catchy and clever to me with the Etch A Sketch line (“I got an Etch A Sketch / I'm working on an outline of your face”) and we even squeezed a dirty joke in there because who doesn’t love a dirty joke? Production-wise we really wanted to lean into the country-feel of the song by letting this be very guitar heavy, along with making the decision to have our mixing engineer, Harper James, play some live drums and electric bass on it. It’s actually the only song on the album that has live drums and electric bass. 

“Cutie”

I love this song! I wanted to write a love song that didn’t feel idealistic. It was loosely inspired by the “orange peel” trend on TikTok, haha, where people were asking their partners to peel an orange for them as a way to demonstrate a gentle kind of love. This song is about accepting your partner for all that they are. To me, that is the most romantic thing in the world.

“Miss Virgo”

This is a song I wanted to write for a very long time, but I could never quite find my way in. When I was seventeen, I was struggling with an eating disorder and ended up in a residential treatment center. At first, all I wanted was to go home, but I couldn’t. So for a while, my entire world became that little cabin in the woods, and my family became this group of fiercely strong girls from every walk of life. We bonded over our mutual distrust of the nurses, our collective crush on the one male specialist, crocheting, and watching Pretty Little Liars. Even though every day I was there I didn’t want to be there, I really do have fond memories of that place—mostly because of the people I met.

This song took the longest by far to finish, but the actual writing process was pretty quick once we got going. Cade and I had just rewatched Shutter Island the night before, which brought back the memory of the first time I saw it—also when I was seventeen. I remember really identifying with Leo’s character, which inspired the lyric: 'Miss Virgo’s watching Leo / La, la, losing his mind.' We wrote the song from that headspace, returning to it over and over again because I wanted to get it just right and I wanted to capture that haunting, surreal feeling. One time I went out of town for a couple days and came back to find Cade had added a full orchestra to the bridge. Iconic!

“Other girls”

This is one of the more pop-centric songs on the album. We were inspired by the phrase “not like other girls,” and how that might be internalized by a young girl who just wants to fit in with her friends. The song explores the loss of innocence experienced by both girls and boys, and by the end, it feels like we’re hearing from an older version of that same girl—now angry at the lies she was fed. The truth is, society thrives on pitting women against each other. We changed the lyrics in the final chorus and I shouted them into some heavy autotune, which felt incredibly freeing. Leave it to me to turn one of my saddest songs into a cathartic dance bop! 

“The other shoe”

While a lot of songs on the album reflect on past experiences, this one dives into a frustration I’m still very much dealing with. The day before we wrote it, I got a text from someone who was basically trying to play the victim after doing something hurtful. I was angry, and writing this song became a way to process that anger. I tend to use a lot of imagery in my lyrics, and I loved the idea of this feeling like a fable or piece of folklore about girls literally living in the other shoe, from the phrase “waiting for the shoe to drop.” It’s how I feel sometimes in regards to this personal relationship that inspired the song – it makes me feel very unsettled. 

This song was one of those rare cases where we basically had the full chorus production and most of the lyrics done before we even touched the verses. Everything centered around the piano part, the big drums, those ambient electric guitars, and the acoustic textures. It felt super anthemic right away, so we wanted the verses to feel grounded, hence the fingerpicked acoustic part that starts it all off. One of our favorite things about the verses is the way I ended up singing them with a little country twang. It actually started as a joke, but Cade was like, “No, do even more twang!” It was hilarious, but somehow, it totally works.

“Fountain of youth / man is a knife”

We wrote this one about the pressures of being a young woman wanting to chase her dreams, but feeling like she’s racing against the clock. This is one of the songs that we sat on for a long time because we were struggling with where to take it after the second chorus. We returned to it after a couple months, and Cade had just gotten an AKAI MPC2000 and had the idea to sample “ruining” (which is a song from my last EP), specifically the lyric “I’m getting too old.” He created this whole loop out of it that he kept building as the song went on, which ended up creating this long outro that we kinda had to find a way to transition into which led to this super weird middle section. The song is pretty long, but I love every bit of it. I like the idea that I’m following up a lot of pretty real and unsettling truths about being a woman with a dance banger! Like, we may as well go out dancing after we’ve had that quick cry! 

“The wolf”

The chorus for this one came first. We had a fun pop production idea that Cade started fleshing out, and I remember listening to it and randomly singing, “I don’t wanna be afraid of you” over and over again. At the time, I was dealing with a lot of anxiety—constantly looking over my shoulder, worried I might run into someone from my past that I wasn’t ready to face. That’s when the “wolf in sheep’s clothing” metaphor came to mind. “You’re wearing sheep’s clothes, but you’re still cold” was one of those oh sh*t moments of inspiration—it cracked the song wide open, and suddenly we knew exactly where this was all going. We just wanted it to feel like a big, overwhelming bop, and I think we nailed it.

“Girl inside her head”

A lot of my favorite albums include interludes, so I really wanted to have an interlude track on this record too. This project felt like a great candidate deserving of an interlude because we were really trying to weave in thematic throughlines and there was a lot of introspection that came with that. It felt like a cool way to kind of come back to myself in this project—almost like a check in. My whole life I’ve been an overthinker and a ruminator. It’s one of the reasons I love songwriting because I can just rehash the same anxiety over and over again in new ways and from new angles. On a more technical note, when thinking about the flow of the album as a whole and in writing this interlude Cade thought it was important to have a fairly seamless transition between “The wolf” coming before this and “You could break my heart” coming after. So we started in the same tempo and key as “The wolf” and then modulated into the same key as “You could break my heart” as well as slowing it down a few BPM to match the tempo. The most obvious part of that was introducing the piano part at the end. I really love the role that this song plays on the album.

“You could break my heart”

This one will always have a special place in my heart—it was the first song we made for the album, in our new home studio setup with new gear and instruments to experiment with. I also love how vulnerable and empowering it is. The idea that loving someone so deeply can feel like handing them your heart—just for them to either cherish or crush it—and not caring which, as long as they just hold it once… it’s insane. But honestly, that’s exactly how it feels sometimes. 

The most important elements of this song, sonically, were the piano, saxophone, and violin. Cade had just gotten a new upright piano, and he ended up writing this beautiful part that really became the DNA of the whole track—he actually says it’s one of his favorite piano parts he’s ever written. Even more impressive, though, is the fact that he bought a violin just to experiment with—despite never having touched one before—and decided he was going to play it on this song. I’ll admit, I wasn’t totally sure how it was going to sound while he was recording it, but I was so impressed with how it turned out. The super orchestral arrangement and production on this track really shaped the direction of the whole album. It gave us the confidence to lean into these less pop-leaning songs, which felt like such a departure from what we’d been doing up to that point.

This song is also, of course, where the album title On the Phone With My Mom comes from—it’s pulled straight from the pre-chorus: “On the phone with my mom (On the phone with my mom) / For like, two hours or so.” And since this was the first song we wrote, we pretty much knew from the beginning that it would be the title.

“Black sheep”

I wanted to make a song that felt so melancholic and devastating that I’d probably cry every time I performed it—and I think we pulled it off with this one. It’s about growing up and feeling different, told through the lens of a younger me spending summers by the lake. It captures the shift from being carefree to feeling stuck in my own head and body, unsure of where I fit in, even with the people closest to me. The bridge is actually one of my favorite production moments on the whole record.

“Goodnight”

This is the most recent song we made for the album. I liked the idea of stepping away from the project for a while and then returning with something that felt like a proper conclusion. After sitting with all the tracks as a body of work, we had considered ending the album with “Black Sheep,” but ultimately felt like we needed a song that gave the album a bit more punctuation. Since the album already had an intro and an interlude, along with sonic and lyrical callbacks throughout, it felt fitting to end with a track that was a little more self-aware of itself and knew that it was the finale. That also made it one of the more precarious songs to write because there were so many ways it could have ended up feeling too cheesy or on the nose. Honestly, it still blows our minds that we managed to land on something that felt so right to close out an album we spent a year and a half making. The writing and production process happened quickly—it’s honestly hard to even remember the order of things, but I know it started with Cade noodling around on the piano until he stumbled into the main part. From there, I knew I wanted it to feel soft and self-reflective, so we decided to keep the production pretty stripped back and centered around the vocal performance. Every choice we made was about serving the vocal and adding subtle texture around it. One of my favorite moments on the entire album is how we brought it back to crying on the phone with my mom—but this time, it’s only for a minute or so, “because my eyes cried out.” I think we’ve all been there.

Listen to On the phone with my Mom now: