‘Annabeth’ closes Maddie Grace’s debut EP, Showing Signs of Strong Emotion. It was also the song which set the project in motion. Maddie wrote it after her first experience of believing a partner had cheated, and it made her think about how much of herself she had been holding back.
“The emotions that came with that inspired me to really pay attention to how I was, and always have been, such a deep feeler, and I realised that I didn’t want to suppress that part of myself anymore,” she says. “A song came from that which was titled Annabeth, and that kickstarted the EP to happen.”
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By the end of 2025, Maddie felt ready to put out a collection. “I really knew in my gut, after a really busy and beautiful year in 2025, that it was time to make the jump and release a body of work. I had a title pop into my head in November 2025, and I just immediately understood it to be a title for these 5 songs.”
In my review of Showing Signs of Strong Emotion, I loved how much space the catchy guitars on ‘Let Me Fall’ left for her voice. Maddie hears a thread running from the opener to two of the EP’s more painful songs. “Some songs are connected: Let Me Fall, Annabeth and Didn’t Do It are all my emotional journey from cheating, to dreaming it was different, to falling again and letting myself fall.”
The stories behind ‘Didn’t Do It’ and ‘Amelie’
“Didn’t Do It was written about the aftermath of Annabeth,” Maddie says. She recalls an email alleging her partner had cheated on Halloween night, with details of what supposedly happened. “It all turned into a crime that I felt I had to solve. The story just wasn’t adding up to me.”
Maddie remembers sitting at her piano one night and feeling “that something wasn’t right”. She says she looked into the account with her family’s help and concluded the allegation was untrue. By then, she had already written the song. “Before I found out the truth, I wrote Didn’t Do It about hoping things had ended differently.”
Rapunzel, Cinderella and The Little Mermaid give those hopes a fairy-tale setting. In the interview, Maddie takes a more direct lesson from the experience: “you always just have to trust yourself”.
For ‘Amelie’, Maddie went back to college and the feeling of watching someone else move through it with the ease she wanted. “When I was 17 and going through my teens, I really was feeling it all,” she says. “Amelie represents the mean, seemingly perfect, popular girl we know from education, mine, particularly about my college years, and a girl I knew.”
“I remember back then feeling very isolated and being aware of feeling of envy and desperately wanting to be seen and understood. Writing Amelie later in my early 20s really allowed me to have that perspective of the nuance.”
Meeting her again helped Maddie find some of the empathy I hear in the song’s bridge. “It helped me reach the understanding, as I bumped into my Amelie in my early 20s and she was seemingly just the same girl and nothing had changed, but I felt some potential in her to have grown out of that.”
Vocal harmonies and the Bubble Army’s vote
Maddie had been singing long before she started writing her own songs. When I asked how she decides when to hold back and when to give the vocals more room, she pointed to instinct and two parts of a song she always looks forward to.
“I’ve only been writing songs for the last 4 years, despite singing and being, quite honestly, obsessed with music,” she says. “So I guess if there’s anything I’ve learnt from that, it’s trusting your intuition and what feels right for the song, but I understand that the chorus and bridge I always want to emphasise in my songs.”
“I’ve loved vocal harmonies for a long time, from listening to Imogen Heap’s music, or Michael Jackson’s ‘Man in the Mirror’, or Ariana Grande, and I really enjoy singing a wide range from low to high.”
Once Maddie had her five songs, she invited the Bubble Army to hear them. “They inspire me a lot. I had such an amazing year in 2025 with my music, and the army grew and grew and it was really a dream come true.”
“I held 2 Zoom parties at the end of 2025 where I showed all the 5 tracks I picked for the EP and shared the title to the Bubbles on the Zoom. I asked them to bring notebooks so that they could vote for their favourite song. I knew I wanted to make music videos out of the favourite tracks from the EP, and they all chose their favourites.”
The votes helped with the videos. Maddie was also eager to hear what her fans thought of the name she had chosen for the record. “I enjoy letting them choose what they want to see, and I love it so much, hearing their feedback on the title of the EP. They all loved it just as much as me and it felt really good to have that.”
Find Showing Signs of Strong Emotion through Maddie’s official website and follow her on Instagram.
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