2021 is about to be Maggie Lindemann’s year. The pop-punk rocker just starred in Machine Gun Kelly’s movie musical, Downfalls High and now Lindemann’s debut EP PARANOIA has just arrived.
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Upon the arrival of PARANOIA, Maggie caught up with RADIO.COM’s Kevan Kenney to tell us all about what it was like to be Downfalls High’s leading lady, plus opens up about the release of her new music and all the inspirations behind her debut EP.
Lindemann says that her involvement with Downfalls High all came together quickly. Maggie was called and asked to be in the YouTube streaming film and then just days later filming for the movie began.
Downfalls High, which is a visual adaptation that depicts the storyline from MGK’s most recent album, Tickets to My Downfall premiered on January 18 and garnered over 16 million streaming views during its debut.
When asked if she could turn any album into a movie adaptation Maggie shares that she can’t exactly pinpoint the album but explains, “I think I would make it super dream world-y, like super scary dream world…kind of like 'Edward Scissorhands' honestly… you know it like looks fake but it’s like real.” However, Lindemann does add that if she could live in any universe that a song depicts she would choose “Decode” by Paramore because “it reminds me of 'Twilight' and I would love to live in the 'Twilight' world.”
Maggie goes on to tell us who has influenced her music and which artists have inspired her to develop her own sound.
Avril Lavigne, Paramore, Evanescence, No Doubt, Sleeping with Sirens, and Bring Me The Horizon are just a few of the major inspirations that the “Knife Under My Pillow” singer rattles off.
Lindemann started with a more typical pop sound when she first began releasing music and has been able to evolve over the years to arrive at the more punk-influenced sound that she’s always identified with. When first starting out Maggie explains, “I felt like a lot of the times it was like me as a person and then my artist…I was sixteen when I first started making music…I had just moved to LA like I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I wasn’t done growing, I mean like I’m still not done growing. I was just so young in a world that I just didn’t know.”
Now, the 22-year-old knows that while she’s “down” to try things she’s not going to do just anything. Maggie has a sound and style she is working to curate and PARANOIA is an outcome of the artist’s true sense of self.
Lindemann, a Texas native, grew up listening to pop-punk music. She has taken her love for the genre and spun it into a more mature and fully realized identity since moving from Dallas to Los Angeles. The singer says she’s so drawn to rock and alternative music because of “the drums and the heavy guitars, and just the energy. I just feel like there’s just this energy that’s so insane with rock music and alternative music that sometimes pop music doesn’t really have. I love how alternative music is about everything.”
When making PARANOIA, Maggie tells us she knew exactly which direction she wanted to take the EP. “I knew what I was going for, it was just how I was going to get there,” explains Lindemann. She continues, “But ‘Different’ was the first song I made on this EP and I think you can kind of tell because it does sound a little bit different than the rest… but after we got ‘Different’ and ‘Scissorhands’ I felt we just kind of got into the hang of it a little bit more.”
“Love Songs,” the track that most resembles a ballad on the new EP, was conceived right after Maggie had finished a recording session. She explains, “I was like, I really really wanna write like a love song.” One of her collaborators, Cody, encouraged her to just sit down and write it even though they had just completed a recording session. “It immediately just happened, like literally five minutes,” shares Maggie. She adds, “and then I went home and I wrote the rest of the song, I wrote the second verse and the chorus. That song like just really happened so naturally…I was like so in that like honeymoon like love phase of my relationship and so it just came to me naturally.”
Maggie Lindemann’s PARANOIA is available everywhere today.
Watch Maggie's full interview above.
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