“I always felt rootless,” explains LA songwriter Malena Cadiz, “not quite belonging to either place.” She might be speaking of a childhood spent between suburban Michigan and urban Singapore, but could just as easily be describing the relationship between the physical and ethereal contained within her distinctive blend of folk and chamber pop. As though, having growing up untethered to any one place, Cadiz’s experience of the world is equally unshackled, and thereby her music too. A style where home exists as a mirage on the horizon, charged by a sense of longing for this solid ground even while displaying the beauty to be found in the strange spaces in between.
With new album Hellbent and Moonbound set for release later this year, Malena Cadiz has unveiled ‘My Kind of Thief’, a new single which further explores such themes. A song centring on a narrator caught between an uncertain past and opaque future, occupying the tenuous present as a kind of haven between the two. “The girl at the bar / says she’ll read my cards if I buy her a drink,” Cadiz sings, “‘Hanged man, two of swords / See you’ve been here before but you’re still on the brink’.” But from within this situation, the narrator wishes for an even lighter existence, pining to live as her lover does, unburdened from what has happened and what might yet, as though consequences are merely something to be outrun.
You’re my kind of thief
You never look back
You get what you need and that’s what you have
And you travel light, light as the breeze
You’re out in the wild
You’re my kind of thief
‘My Kind of Thief’ is out now and available from the Malena Cadiz Bandcamp page.