Maude Latour is an independent, pop singer-songwriter living in New York. On top of making music, Latour is a student at Columbia University, studying philosophy and political science. Her first and only EP, Starsick, was released in November of 2019. Starsick is a six-track collection of songs tackling the themes of love, heartbreak, friendship, and so much more. More recently over quarantine, she released a few singles including “One More Weekend” and fan-favorite “Furniture“. Furniture, which grew in popularity after Latour sang it in a TikTok video, has amassed nearly 1.5 million streams on Spotify along with 331,000 views on TikTok.

“Furniture” is an upbeat, pop tune with colorful lyrics about unexpectedly seeing your ex at a party. Latour contemplates the idea of leaving the party she’s at and as she goes to get her coat, her ex walks through the door. The lyrics “who invited you babe? ‘Cause I can’t see you anymore,” lead us into the gentle but effective chorus. In this chorus, Latour jokes that someone turned the temperature up, as it feels like she’s “melting through the furniture” and “slipping through the cracks in the floorboards”, which is an accurate representation of how seeing your ex too soon after the breakup feels. “Furniture” makes you want to dance and jump from bed to bed in a hotel room, which seems so specific but I feel like it’s a universal feeling.

“One More Weekend”, a single released this past July, has a similar bedroom pop sound to it as “Furniture”. The lyrics in this song are what really drew me to it, they have a way of hitting harder than you expected them to for such an upbeat song. Lines like “I got a crush on the shape of your name on my phone” and “here’s a toast to getting older, now we’re young and soon we’ll die” are given so easily like they’re not some of the heaviest lyrics in the track. “One More Weekend” gives you the urge to drive through a city at night with all your windows down, it makes you feel like you’re in a scene from a coming of age movie. The steady beat and perfectly harmonizing vocals carry you through the emotional lyric. This one might be my favorite from Latour yet, it has this strange ability to make me feel alive. 

Latour’s career in music is only just beginning and as an independent artist, pushing her songs out is much more difficult. Despite the setbacks that come with making music independently, she continues to put out high-quality songs that make her listeners feel something. That, to me, is the most important thing a musician can do.