Wikiake

About

Maddie Jay Lough is a freelance bassist, guitarist, and songwriter based in Los Angeles, California.

Early Life

Maddie Jay grew up in a musical family in an isolated wilderness town in northern British Columbia. From a young age, she took violin lessons and learned traditional Canadian fiddle music. When she was just five years old she was a member of a 100-person fiddle orchestra.

In 2012, Jay attended Berklee Five-Week Music Performance Intensive on scholarship for violin, but on a whim, decided to teach herself bass guitar through YouTube videos, when her ensemble’s bassist didn’t show up.

The following year, Jay auditioned for the undergrad program at Berklee on bass and was admitted on a scholarship.

In 2018, Jay moved to Los Angeles to further pursue her music career.

Career

Group Work

At school, Jay composed and played in the group, Maddie Jay and the pH collective. In 2016, Meanwhile…, the group’s debut album, was released.

Jay is a former member of the group, Winnetka Bowling League. She played on their track, “CVS”, which is accompanied by a music video featuring Hilary Duff playing a pharmacist.

Supportive Touring

Maddie Jay has toured with NPR Tiny Desk Contest Winner Naia Izumi, Skylar Grey, Emily Warren, Summer Walker, Drake Bell, and AlunaGeorge.

In LA, Jay met Remi Wolf through mutual friends and was invited to play bass with her on tour.

In 2022, she played bass and sang background vocals for Lorde during her Glastonbury set.

Independent Art

In 2018, Jay began releasing music under her own name.

When it comes to her own art, Jay is known for her DIY independent lens, doing the majority of the visual and audio work on her own; including producing, composing, playing, writing, collaging, dyeing, screen-printing, animating, building, and other aspects of the creative process.

Maddie Jay started demonstrating her solo talent in “beat videos,” where she’d play every part for the camera, then splice it to show her process, which earned her a spot on Mixmag’s “Best Producers on Instagram” list in 2019.

When talking about her process for creating the “Little Love” music video, Jay stated, “I filmed the video in my garage and I had to cut out 120 stars by hand from glitter paper and glue them to fishing line.”

In 2020, after bingeing Friends and wishing to write a theme song, Jay put out a song called “Shakes” about struggling with her essential tremor. About the disorder she has said, “It gets worse when I am anxious, and it also makes me anxious when it gets worse.”

That year, she also wrote, recorded, and produced “Undertow” in her East LA apartment before hiring Grammy-winning engineer, Emily Lazar Lodge, to master it. Jay spent around 60 hours creating her own stop-motion video to accompany the track with only $50 of arts and crafts materials and a home scanner.