From the opening playful piano notes of “Daffodil Floors,” there’s a lightness that will take you over. As Mandi Mapes greets us with “Hey it’s me/I almost lost my fire/turns out that I’m a fighter” her voice dances effortlessly through a pleasing melody while feeling purely conversational in cadence. She manages to set up a song that feels personalized for the audience even as it grows to a full band instrumentation with a fully orchestrated string section and a surprisingly appropriate plucked harp at its pinnacle. With this latest single, Nashville resident Mandi Mapes really shows us what keeping your music both personal and relatable can look like.
“Over the years, I’ve started noticing that in most areas of life, whether it be in the classroom, the office, the church, the mom’s group or on the gram, there can become a subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) pressure to measure up to a certain standard. Sometimes standards can be useful. I mean, I like knowing that my Uber driver has a good rating, but sometimes standards can be hurtful (like in a room of moms boasting about their unmedicated birth while a friend sits quietly because she had a c-section.) It can create a culture of judging others when they “fall short” or “fail” and it can cause deep feelings of shame when we ourselves cannot measure up to a lofty standard. In my early 20’s I mostly felt like I was “winning” in some of these arenas. Until one-day real life knocked me in the teeth and suddenly I went from feeling like some kind of superhero in my own movie to suddenly becoming (gasp) a mere mortal,” says Mapes.
“I was striving so hard to be the person I thought (and was told) I should be that I abandoned myself along the way. I was burnt out and depressed. This song is about healing from that hurt. It’s about taking off those heavy burdens, ignoring those voices of shame and running free like a child, knowing that we are loved, that we matter and that we belong not because of what we do, but because of who we are.”
