Website: http://www.maddyhay.com

Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/madelinamusica

Maddy Hay was, from the very beginning, always destined to make music: as a baby, she could hum before she could speak. Raised on a steady diet of opera and classic jazz, Maddy took up violin at the tender age of five, followed a few years later by the piano.

For as long as she can remember, Maddy says she’s been ‘searching for cool and unusual sounds’. Armed with a vivid imagination, and a head most at home in high altitudes, Maddy says she doesn’t confine her sonic inspirations to just music –– she hears strange and beautiful sounds ‘in the hustle and bustle of city streets, building sites, cafes, and playgrounds.’

In high school, Maddy took up music study more seriously, undertaking a jazz syllabus under a particularly exacting teacher who, Maddy says, frightened her into practising. At sixteen, while still at boarding school, Maddy began stealing away in every spare moment to the music room, where she eventually wrote Smoke In The City, a song that would go on to take her to the final three in the 2008 John Lennon Songwriting Contest (Jazz), and which would become the title track for her debut lp. 

At eighteen, Hay ‘ran away’ to China. There, in a small village just outside Shanghai, she learnt to communicate primarily through her music, singing and playing piano in a hotel. Once back in Australia, Hay immersed herself in the local music scene, and found herself overwhelmed by a torrent of new ideas.

For Hay, writing songs means stepping into a dream –– something she’s unusually adept at. ‘It's very magical,’ she says. ‘I just sit at my piano, gaze out my window and dream. It's almost as if the melodies and stories flow in with the breeze.' Maddy says it's as if ‘they have been traveling endlessly all over the world, and I simply had to be in the right place at the right time ready to receive them as they floated by.’ Perhaps because of this, Hay leaves her narratives open, allowing for the listener to ‘paint their own pictures’ to the sounds and words.

In 2008, Maddy met producer Jonathon Zion, who she said understood her music and way of working instantly.

‘He saw depth and vulnerability in my songs and enabled them to swell into something magnificent, adding sounds that I had only ever dreamed of,’ she says. Together, the two laid down the tracks that would become Smoke In The City , Hay’s inspired debut lp.

Belying Hay’s tender years, Smoke In The City is an album of great depth and heart, Hay’s delicate songs and beautifully breathy voice nimbly backed by her ensemble and fleshed out with Zion’s rich but subtle production. It is the sound of an artist destined for big things.