“When I was a teenager,” Madi Diaz recalls, “my dad and I would hang out in the living room and learn songs by bands like the Eagles and Alice in Chains. We’d pick parts to harmonize and sing our way through them, over and over. My dad would get so excited when he figured out something by Yes or the Mamas and Papas, then he’d let me pick my favorite Silverchair song or whatever I was obsessing over at the moment and we’d learn it together, too. It was the best.”

Diaz’s full-length, Plastic Moon reflects a lifelong attraction to song craft as well her deep-rooted affinity for contrasting types of music. One part pop music and one part organic Americana, the album is a hooky, confident collection of songs that is as heartbreaking in places as it is catchy in others, sometimes within the span of a single song.

The 25-year-old, Nashville-based musician is herself a bit of a contrast, growing up in Lancaster, PA, surrounded by Amish farms, where she was home schooled by her Peruvian mother, Nancy, a proponent of early childhood development and the visual arts, and her Danish father, Eric, a woodworker and musician. Madi began piano lessons at age five at the behest of her father, himself a keyboard player in the Frank Zappa tribute band, Project Object. The family’s home stereo fed her a steady diet of Metallica, Sheryl Crow, The Beatles and Whitney Houston.

In her early teens, Diaz switched from piano to guitar and when she sought advanced instruction, she landed at School of Rock in Philadelphia. Her family eventually moved to the city and both Eric and Madi’s brother, Max, went on to become part of the faculty.

“The school was a big part of my life,” she acknowledges. “It showed me how to be in a band, and taught me about dynamics and orchestration, taking apart sections and basically leading and directing other musicians. I’m definitely opinionated and I was always the one to come into a room where everyone’s doing what they want and try to get them organized.”

Diaz was a standout among the pupils and became a focal point of director Don Argott’s 2005 documentary about the program, Rock School. Nearly a decade later, she holds a fondness for the fierce teenage Madi captured on screen, but doesn’t plan to see the movie again any time soon. “It’s embarrassing enough to have pictures of you when you’re 15 or 16 years old; I have an entire doc.”

After high school, Diaz was accepted to Berklee College of Music in Boston and began spending every waking moment making music: writing, singing and recording. She credits the period with helping her get serious about pursuing music as a career.

“It was one of the smarter things I’ve done,” she says. “It made me focus on finding what I wanted to do. It helped me realize I didn’t want to work in production; that’s not my brain. Do I want to work in film scoring? No, not that either. I came to recognize that I liked songwriting the most.”

A fellow student’s production assignment provided the first opportunity to work with Kyle Ryan. The Lincoln, Nebraska-raised guitarist would turn into her future songwriting collaborator and right-hand man. Diaz was in awe of his guitar playing, and Ryan had similar admiration for Diaz’s abilities, yet the two cagily circled each other for a time. Diaz was convinced Ryan was just being nice when he gave her his number and asked her to write together, while Ryan was sure Diaz hated his guitar playing, which was why she wasn’t calling.

“We were kind of awkward to each other around campus for a while,” she says. “Turns out we were both just completely intimidated.”

The ice was broken when that fellow student, a producer looking for a project, offered Diaz the chance to record an album in Hawaii—all expenses paid, no strings attached. It was a no-brainer for Madi and she worked up the courage to ask her favorite guitar player on campus to come along as part of the band. The self-released, alt.country-leaning Skin And Bones was the result, and a songwriting and performing partnership between Diaz and Ryan was struck for good, as well as a friendship.

“I was going through a lot of weird stuff personally at the time,” she reflects. “My parents had recently divorced. I was going out with shitty boyfriends. My brother was still living at home and having a hard time. But Kyle was really great. He’d come over to my apartment and we’d write and talk for hours. It was super helpful and I’m still grateful for it.”

Not long after that, Diaz tired of Berklee and subsequently left the program. She and Ryan kept writing though, and, armed with a strong batch of new material, the pair began heading down to New York City regularly for gigs. One otherwise inauspicious night at Greenwich Village landmark The Bitter End led to a chance meeting with a manager who had come to see another artist and stayed when she heard Diaz’s voice. The manager left her card, and soon thereafter she began representing Madi. Their first order of business turned out to be sending Diaz and Ryan for a month-long visit to Nashville to do some co-writing.

The trip went so swimmingly that Diaz and Ryan relocated to Music City in mid-2010. “When we moved to Nashville it was like clouds lifted off our heads,” she says. The pair was quickly thrust into the center of the city’s nascent indie-pop scene, eventually landing Madi on the Ten Out Of Tenn tour showcasing the best of Nashville’s emerging artists.

With the release of the EP, Ten Gun Salute, Diaz began receiving some encouraging exposure, touring with The Civil Wars and Landon Pigg, garnering favorable press in Paste (who dubbed her one of the “Top Ten Buzziest Acts” at SXSW 2009) AOL’s Spinner and on NPR, as well as and having her songs licensed for ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars and Lifetime’s Drop Dead Diva and Army Wives.

Plastic Moon initially began as a self-produced project. Diaz and Ryan gathered up “60 or 70” songs in progress and started paring them down, looking for a collection that held together as a singular work. At the same time, producer John Alagia (Dave Matthews Band, John Mayer, Liz Phair) was seeking his next project and connected with the pair, who then decamped for Dave Matthews’ palatial studio near Charlottesville, Virginia. The result departs from Diaz’s early rootsier side, though the record is no less heartfelt and arguably even more so with its poignant melodies and inventive arrangements.

“It’s funny,” says Diaz, “we moved to Nashville and moved out of the alt-country box.”

After years of perfecting her craft, it’s no surprise that the album boasts uniformly strong songwriting, ranging from the power-pop bounce of “Nothing At All” and the unshakably inviting “Let’s Go,” to the soaring, introspective majesty of “Heavy Heart.” Diaz’s pure, effortless voice and unerring sense of song craft shine throughout. Thanks to Alagia’s meticulous and sympathetic production, the music keeps Diaz’s indie spirit intact while bringing forth a more sophisticated soundscape, with everything from Fender Rhodes to marimba popping up in the mix.

“Hopefully the next few years are going to be terrifyingly busy,” Diaz says, her voice excitedly rising. “I don’t want to rest on my laurels. I have had people say to both of us, ‘You’ve done so much; aren’t you ever going to be happy?’ I think that’s such a silly thing to say. Of course we’re never going to stop.”

Philadelphia, 11:47 AM: The members of Harper Blynn find themselves in an unusual situation. Standing on the sidewalk outside the Philadelphia Academy of Music, they watch as a cadre of beefy union guys unload the band’s equipment out of the Dodge Sprinter van they call home for most of the year. As their gear rolls into the venue without them, the members sip coffee, provide a running commentary on lunchtime passersby while taking in the grandeur of the building in which they will be performing that night.

After logging over 150 shows since the release of an eponymously titled EP in 2010, Harper Blynn welcome the break. Buzzing from the news of being handpicked by indie queen Ingrid Michaelson to open up a healthy chunk of dates on her spring tour, the band has spent the previous two weeks doing a run of shows up and down the East Coast while approving the latest mixes of their new full-length, Busy Hands. The Michaelson tour is the latest in a series of accolades that would seem to indicate that Harper Blynn, a unit accustomed to the rigors of managing, booking, financing and transporting themselves, might finally be on the verge of graduating from the DIY lifestyle.

Busy Hands is a worthy chronicle of the transition. Co-produced with Irish wunderkind John O’Mahony (Metric, Coldplay), the album effectively captures the sensation of hurtling towards a precipice of sorts, that fantastic moment when feet leave the ground and wings take over for the first time. Songwriters J.Blynn (vocals/ guitar) and Pete Harper (vocals/keyboards) accurately portray the limitations of long- distance relationships (“In Another Life”), infatuation and lust (“Falling In Love”), betrayal (“Knife”) and bleary-eyed existential crisis (“High End Melody”). That said, Harper and Blynn never wallow in their sorrows; these songs are about finding a way out. Unlike most 21st century songwriter fare, they have an eye on the sky, a belief that transcendence is possible.

As good as the two front men’s contributions are, the heartbeat of the band is its rhythm section. Bassist Whynot Jansveld and drummer Sarab Singh inject these songs with an immediacy that grounds their songwriters’ soaring melodies and stylistic eccentricities. Jansveld and Singh have also played a major part in providing the band with a time-tested outlet for exposure: backing up other artists. Like The Band before them, Harper Blynn has toured as a back-up outfit for an eclectic roster of independent artists such as David Mead, Elizabeth and the Catapult, The Damnwells, Cary Brothers and Greg Laswell. The band’s off-the-charts vocal abilities and instrumental prowess have made them into a unit capable of propelling these artists’ shows to dizzying heights.

The band happily agrees that this experience has had a major effect on the dynamic of their own performances. It is not surprising to find out that the most often asked question after a Harper Blynn gig is, “How do you guys make all of that noise?” In an era in which bands can often be heard playing along to pre-recorded tracks, Harper Blynn manages to create a jaw-dropping wall of sound onstage with no artificial assistance whatsoever. Singh’s polyrhythmic style often achieves the effect of three drummers playing at once, while Jansveld manages to generate multiple octaves from his instrument, sometimes tricking the audience into thinking an extra player must be hidden offstage. The interplay between Harper’s keyboard melodies and Blynn’s guitar soundscapes is reminiscent of Death Cab For Cutie, and the pristine wash of three-part harmonies that floats through much of the music recalls Grizzly Bear at its best, or perhaps a disembodied choir hovering in the ether above a very large performance hall.

The sky above the Academy of Music is darkening as the first drops of an oncoming storm splatter onto the sidewalks of Philadelphia. The union stiffs have made short work of the band’s equipment, but offer no help with one major component of gigging in a major city: parking. Having enjoyed their brief flirtation with the high life, the band piles back into the Sprinter. Harper Blynn pulls out of the loading zone and is quickly sucked into a swirl of metropolitan traffic, just another band getting it done the hard way, if only for a little while longer.