Today we’d like to introduce you to Maddie Kemp.
Hi Maddie, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
My name is Maddie Kemp, singer/songwriter and Travel ER Nurse out of Ann Arbor, Michigan. I have been singing ever since I was a little girl. I never really knew what I wanted to do with my voice, I just knew how much I loved to use it. Whenever I sang, I saw the joy it brought to others around me. I joined a show choir my last year of high school and sang in front of my entire hometown with the solo ‘This is Me’ from the Greatest Showman. That performance and the fun I had with my whole team while training for it had me feeling the most alive I had felt in a while. The experience is what made me truly fall in love with performing. I decided I wanted to go to nursing school at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and for the first 2 years of college I was too overwhelmed with schoolwork to think much about music. I was still singing, but I didn’t know what role I wanted music to play in my life. One day playing volleyball with a friend, someone walking by smiled and joined us and later started to tell me about the music he makes. I told him I sang, and next thing you know I was singing for him. After hearing me, he asked me to be his backup singer in his R&B band and to come perform with him in his upcoming show at the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor. Needing to scratch the itch of singing again, I agreed. We had a few practices before and I really honed in on memorizing his songs. We had our performance in 2023, and the turnout was so beautiful. So many people I had sent our flyer to showed up and supported. I felt what it was like again to really do this. After all of this, Truth, my new friend in music, took me to a studio. I had never made my own music before and almost subconsciously convinced myself I couldn’t. He didn’t believe me. I am so grateful I had someone to push me into uncomfortable spaces that simply made me uncomfortable due to fear of failure. He put me in the booth, and that day I made the catchiest chorus I have probably made to this day, layered and everything. Hearing myself on a track was the most mesmerizing and rewarding experience, and with the way it made me feel I knew I could never stop. Since that day, I have consistently been in studios, and I’ve been to a lot of different ones now. I found an engineer that I really enjoy working with and I feel he has really helped me expand my sound, shoutout @11Eleven at Northside Audio & Xenon my travel producer and engineer. I still have work to do, but I have all the faith I’ll never stop learning because I really love what I do. I am really versatile and love to experiment in different genres. I have always really loved R&B music, alternative, emotional and catchy pop, hints of EDM and indie. It is my dream to be on stages performing live for bigger crowds. I am meant to do this, I am meant to bring so much light into this world through not only a positive spirit, but true creation and expression of art.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It hasn’t always been a smooth road. I really didn’t grow up around anyone who made music, so I originally started doing this with zero knowledge. Throughout the process, I have met people in music who slowly but surely integrated themselves into my community. But along the way, not everything has been picture perfect. I had to start taking an anxiety pill specifically for performance anxiety because being in front of crowds put me in a state where it felt like I was gasping for air. But I have grown stronger, older and more confident. I have learned to enjoy myself more, and remember why I started.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
What sets me apart from others is the fact that I live a double life. I am a singer, but I am also a full-time travel ER nurse. I have to make time for both, as well as emotionally balance both. It gets tough at times, but traveling and being away from home and everything I am used to has taught me strength and resilience I have only started to scratch the surface. Every 3 months, I start over in a new location with a new group of people. Parts of me stay with people in all of these locations now, but I take parts of them with me too. When I have the opportunity and the time to, I use music and my voice to heal. I have a tattoo on my right hand that reads ‘one more song?’ This tattoo is something so special to me because it has a story and a purpose. It serves as a reminder that whenever I reach the point of exhaustion, baby what about just one more song? Don’t give up, just one more song. The story comes from when I was a baby fresh new nurse, still not having seen anything super traumatic, or real yet. I was on a medical-surgical floor as a technician at first while I was in school, so I never got to see trauma or codes. In my last year of nursing school, my internship was in the Trauma Burn ICU at University of Michigan. So, I knew my world was about to get very intense. One of my very first patients was an 18-year-old boy. I was 21 at the time, and this boy pulled at all of my heart strings because I couldn’t stop thinking about my little brother since we was the same age. My patient had been in a near fatal car accident, ended up intubated and went straight to internal radiology from the ER for emergency surgery to cauterize his spleen to stop internal hemorrhage. What this means in non-medical terms is that he was rushed to surgery as soon as he was stabilized by the ER, because the impact of the crash broke his pelvis and caused an internal bleed. Because he had a tube down his throat and a machine breathing for him, he was insanely frightened. He was very much awake when he arrived to us in the ICU. Usually these types of patients stay sedated, but some need more sedation than others. I decided I would become his voice to remember while he was there, I began talking to him and telling him squeeze my hand once for no, and two times for yes. After we got him comfortable, his family arrived. After calming them down and updating everyone on his status, they began to tell me stories about him while he rested. They said he was a theatre kid and loved anything to do with music. I remembered this later on, as I was packing up about to give report to the next nurse. I went back into the room and woke him up. I asked him again while holding his hand, if he wanted me to sing him a song before I left that day. Two squeezes and a nod. I sang to him the song, She Will Be Loved by Maroon 5. He squeezed my hand to the beat of the song the entire time and at the end I watched a tear roll down his cheek. He kept holding his finger up, and I thought he was trying to point at something. I asked if he could write it down if I gave him a notebook, in broken writing he wrote ‘one more song?’ There we sat, tears rolling down faces, together in that room while I used music to heal.
What do you like and dislike about the city?
I grew up in Michigan living on a dirt road, and I can honestly say until experiencing other places I didn’t appreciate the nature as much as I should have. I am around so much water, so much green. I can be close to a city but also feel like I live in the middle of nowhere. I ended up leaving Michigan for my first travel nursing contract in Chicago. After living there, I know now why people call it the greatest city in the world. Living in a rural part of Michigan with a lot of land and water surrounding me, I had never felt the energy of a true city. I love the stimulation, I love the busy-ness, I love the drive of the people around me. I love being around people my age with personality and creativity and uniqueness. Traveling to different cities with travel nursing I feel is what is going to help me decide where I want to settle later in life, figure out deeper parts of myself and connect with people I am meant to meet along the way.
Pricing:
- Collaborations: $250
Contact Info:
- Website: https://linkin.bio/maddiekempmusic/?fbclid=PAdGRleATnO8NwZG9mAmZkaWQWUMMdl1z5nX2SrD37Zokw4NIpED9yH2V4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDzEyNDAyNDU3NDI4NzQxNAABp_pLV6A3o8JUB-SAVldi0DhRGm9Fp0lhegllvn6tmRZO9td-K_nPipLCph2M_aem_zEBy7oy9VzZnnPYz7p1uEw&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&utm_source=ig
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maddiekempmusic?igsh=c2tiYnV3OGlhdjFy&utm_source=qr
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/19bfUussVF/?mibextid=wwXIfr
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@maddiekempmusic?si=fn4ElAD6NeWAKR47
- Soundcloud: https://on.soundcloud.com/Sp2wq6371GX00tuavr
- Other: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/maddie-kemp/1743796345
