Maggie Lindemann Refuses To Let Paranoia Hold Her Back

By Jack Irvin


Maggie Lindemann has routinely thought herself a paranoid person. As a kid, it was the reason she’d ask her mom to reside in her room up until she fell asleep. As an adult, it’s why she started sleeping with a switchblade under her pillow.


“It just gave me bad vibes, which is weird because it was a brand new house,” the 22-year-old singer-songwriter tells MTV News about her then-home in a Los Angeles neighborhood. Combined with the copious quantity of horror films Lindemann watched at the time, nights as soon as her roommate wasn’t residence abandoned her scared, to mention the least. “Two stories is also much for me… I need to know every inch of the residence. He could be gone, and I would just freak out and require to sleep with a knife under my pillow like every night — and in all my drawers.”


Her sharp response to fear came in handy as direct inspiration for “Knife Under My Pillow,” the pop punk-inspired first single from her debut, Paranoia, out this Friday on Caroline Records. While the EP may be the singer’s first-ever project, she is by no means a newbie in the music industry. Growing up in Texas and performing with her local church choir, she habitually dreamed of singing professionally, and she moved to Los Angeles at 16 to pursue it. Like several other teenagers at the time, she began posting cover videos online — not on YouTube, although on Keek, a now-defunct video platform that launched in 2011.


After picking up a following, her fans flocked to her Tumblr and Instagram pages, turning her into a full-blown influencer before the term — which she despises — even existed. “I hate as soon as people call me an influencer, ‘cause that isn't how I make my money,” says Lindemann, who hit a million followers before releasing her first single, the downbeat “Knocking on Your Heart,” in 2015. “I habitually wanted to sing. I didn’t desire to just be a pretty girl on Instagram.”


Lindemann expressed a similar sentiment in 2016’s aptly titled “Pretty Girl,” an empowering, anthemic pop track that became an international hit and caught a persons vision of 300 Entertainment, the record label she signed to that year. Considering the track has been streamed well over a billion times to date, and its follow-up, infectious dance bop “Obsessed,” boasts nearly 100 million streams, you’d think the singer would have followed up the immense success with an album. Nevertheless in back of the scenes, she wasn’t a fan of the music she was putting out.


“I hated being this bubblegum-pop girl. I just didn't ever feel like that was me,” she says. “The lyrics were me, however the vibe wasn't, and I felt like that began to be a constant theme in my music. I loved the lyrics, nevertheless the production, I habitually just didn't like it.”


She determined to shift her sound to better mirror her own music taste, citing acts like Sleeping With Sirens and Avril Lavigne as major inspirations. “I love heavy drums, heavy electric guitars. I routinely wanted to scream. I used to practice my screams Whenever I was young,” Lindemann recalls. “I felt like my whole life was pop-punk, and then I was pop, plus it just felt so weird.” In 2018, she released the emo, melancholic “Would I” and “Friends Go,” a No Doubt-influenced track that procured a hardcore remix from Blink-182’s Travis Barker. Although just as she was finally settling into a sound she identified with, things took a dark turn.


On June 21, 2019, she was asked to leave the stage while in an efficiency in Malaysia, where she was then arrested by immigration police for not possessing the right work let visa. The incident was reportedly due to negligence on behalf of the visa agent, who was later fined over $7,000. Right following the show, Lindemann was put in jail for 24 hours before getting released to her hotel room, where she was forced to stay for five days before she may fly residence. “It’s all such a blur, although basically we had to go and be like, ‘Look, we had no idea. We don’t book these things,’” she specifics. “We were facing possibly five years in prison for being there illegally and perhaps deportation. It was just horrifying.”


At the time, she felt she was being watched in her hotel room, only worsening her preexisting paranoia. “I've habitually been paranoid, however that was a different level 'cause it felt like I had a reason to be,” she says. While recognizing how fortunate she is have the ability to move on relatively unscathed thanks to her legal team — and why several others aren’t as lucky — over each year later, she still finds herself reminded of the discomfort and uncertainty she felt while in her time in jail. “I had to go to the DMV the other day, and the tiles and stuff were the same [as the jail cell], and I was just sort of like, ‘Whoa, this is really freaking me out.’”


Although it also pushed Lindemann “want to prepare better music” and finally get an assignment out into the world, and this time she wanted to call the shots — which meant parting ways with 300 Entertainment in favor of Caroline Records, an independent distributor that permits her to do so. Within a week of returning residence from the tour, she hit the studio and made the grim, guitar-driven “Different,” the opening song written for Paranoia, and also because the opening track she’s ever co-produced.


From that point the songs kept flowing, and soon enough she had a EP’s worth of material. While new songs like the ear-shattering screamo track “Gaslight!” And metallic, cutthroat banger “Scissorhands” are a far cry from the polished pop of “Pretty Girl,” the musician feels like her sound completely aligns with her personality for the opening time. “I used to routinely visualize comments like, ‘I love her Instagram, I love her fashion, nevertheless her music doesn't match,’ also it routinely would drive me crazy 'cause I'm like, ‘Ugh, I know. I want it, also, so bad.’ And I feel like it finally does,” says Lindemann. “What you visualize is who I am, for sure.”


In fact, she’s felt so inspired in her new sound that she’s already hard at work on an album to come right after Paranoia. “I have three songs already, however I’m still just in the beginning,” she specifics. “But I do hope to have an album out not too also much longer right following the EP drops, hopefully next year.”


If it were up to Lindemann, the next step could be to head out on a headlining tour, which she was planning to do before the pandemic hit back in March. Above anything else, her aim is merely to prove herself as an artist once and for all: “I just want to reach people that I haven’t reached nevertheless, and I hope that people will take me more seriously — and not think of me as an internet person who determined to create music or something.”