Maddie Zahm / Corook

For 24-year-old Maddie Zahm, there’s nothing more powerful than writing songs that scare her. On her debut EP, You Might Not Like Her, the Boise-bred singer-songwriter intimately documents the massive upheaval she’s experienced over the last year: a life-changing journey that includes leaving the stifling church community where she long served as a worship leader, moving to Los Angeles and coming out as queer, and losing a substantial amount of weight. With equal parts raw vulnerability and undeniable strength—a delicate alchemy first glimpsed on her viral hit single “Fat Funny Friend”—Zahm opens up about her personal trauma, her sexuality, and her relationship with her body, embracing the kind of unapologetic yet compassionate truth-telling that is transformative for both artist and audience alike.

“This project is me believing in myself for the first time, and owning up to the things I was afraid to acknowledge for so long,” says Zahm. “I wrote these songs privately, as an outlet to process all the changes I’ve been going through, and they helped me to find a freedom that I never would’ve thought was possible. They’re songs I wish I’d heard when I was younger and hiding so much of myself from the world, so hopefully they’ll help other people to find that freedom too.”

Her first release with AWAL Recordings, You Might Not Like Her, takes its title from a boldly autobiographical track that marked a major creative breakthrough for Zahm. “Before ‘You Might Not Like Her,’ I’d written a lot of heartbreak songs that were very much humor-based and focused on hypothetical relationships, which I now realize was a way to avoid dealing with what was really going on in my life,” she says. Sparked from its gut-punching opening lyric, the song quickly catalyzed the emotional transparency that now defines her music. “That whole song came out in maybe 45 minutes,” recalls Zahm, who co-wrote the tune with her friends and songwriters Carlee Chappell and Rabbit. “It was the most honest thing I’d ever written.”

Corook, aka Corinne Savage (yes, that’s her real last name), is a singer, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist. She can solve a Rubik’s cube in under a minute (depending on how she’s feeling that day.) This freckled, chubby babe was born and raised just outside of downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she grew up listening to Drake, Gwen Stefani, and Mac Miller.

Savage went to a performing arts high school (yes, just like Victorious) where she came out as QUEERAF her senior year. She then attended Berklee (“wow”—Owen Wilson voice) and graduated with two degrees (barely). Savage currently resides in Nashville, Tennessee (howdy). She spends most of her time writing and producing music for her artist project Corook (boop!), locked away in her room, alone. (She blames it on coronavirus, but she’s actually just anti-social.) She has co-written hit songs like “This Whole Bio Is a Joke” and is an award-winning Person of Doing Things.