Maude Latour: Stardom on TikTok

TikTok has quickly become a rising musician’s go-to in regards to gaining exposure. From overnight successes like Olivia Rodrigo (whose Drivers License went viral after Charlie D’Amelio played it in a clip) to smaller artists like Ant Saunders and Ashnikko, it’s no secret that the platform can easily make an artist’s work go from zero streams to half a million in just a few hours. One artist that demonstrates this is Maude Latour, a 21-year-old singer-songwriter from New York City. She has 83.3 thousand followers and 3.1 million likes on TikTok, as well as a listener base of over 750,000 monthly streams on Spotify. One of her more recent singles, “One More Weekend,” which came out last July, has reached over seven million streams in just under a year. Her latest single, “Walk Backwards,” has hit over a million streams in the span of a little over three months. I was lucky enough to chat with Latour back in March.

The first thing I notice about Latour is her magnetic energy. As soon as we can see each other on the Zoom screen, she lights up with a wide smile and exclaims a hello. She asks me about my day and my time at Kenyon before I can say anything, even mentioning how badly she wants to play The Horn Gallery, our college’s concert venue. Immediately, it feels like I’m talking to an old friend. Her palpable passion for music and performing overwhelms her as she says,  “My songs are overly lyrical details, little takes on living in this somewhat-magical-beautiful-romantic-sometimes-difficult world!” She lights up as she searches for the words to describe her sound.

Now a senior at Columbia University, Latour’s passion for music began early in her childhood. While her parents are journalists, they harbored a fondness for western classical music and had Latour take up violin lessons as a child. This introduction to the arts resulted in Maude listening to and playing a variety of music. “I wanted to join a choir super badly and then I actually lip-synced for the first year of choir, I never made a sound.” She soon worked up the courage to play school talent shows and joined an acapella group, in which her passion for performing emerged. “In the acapella group you just make medleys or sing on the sidewalk and on subways and I’d make everyone perform wherever we were. I just love performing and embarrassing ourselves and doing things like that,” Latour said. 

By the time she was in the tenth grade, she started writing and singing more seriously: “Maybe I had a heartbreak or something and I wrote about it, and, I guess once I started I started seeing the patterns in it and that it was a craft. I could hear the difference between an okay melody and a great melody, and then a great melody and an amazing melody. It was like a drug, I wanted to make the best melody I could and just pumped out song after song and would reorder them on my phone and then text them to my friends.”

Interestingly, one of Latour’s first singles, “Shoot and Run,” was actually a project for school. She wrote and recorded it for the final project of her senior year in high school, then uploaded it to Spotify on a whim. “That was the beginning,” Latour said. “‘Shoot and Run’ was the product of 200 songs before it, but it was the first one that really started my music career. I played it for my grade and in front of the principal and then uploaded it through Tunecore to Spotify, just for fun.”

Latour’s unique lyricism makes her music different from a lot of other artists on TikTok. One of my favorite lyrics from her comes from her single “Furniture,” where she sings, “When the music is loud and I’m in front of a crowd, it’s like I’m talking to God, and I can tell that you’re proud.” Latour says she derives her lyrics from this way of thinking. “It’s often this very specific feeling that feels the same every time...Maybe it’s a little bit of God or whatever higher power or whatever thing that connects all people undeniably; our humanness, the little magic of being in a room together and just feeling.” Latour gasps as she’s reflecting on performing: “Wow, it’s like looking around the room and you’re like, it’s this beautiful thing...Anything that reminds you why you’re alive. I’m constantly on the search for those moments and every time I feel it, it turns into a song.” 

Latour’s latest single, “Walk Backwards,” replicates this process exactly. “I was in L.A. like two summers ago, and I was so drained and sick of doing sessions because it was my first big writing trip out there. I was crying outside this producer’s house calling my sister, saying I didn’t want to go in because I was too tired, and she was like just go in and then cancel the rest of them, so I did. I made “Walk Backwards” out of feeling so sad, this bright bouncy song.” She used snippets of the song in her TikToks a month or two before it came out, reigniting her fame on the app. Using the momentum those clips got her, she then released the song as soon as she could. “It’s been a crazy month of everything growing so much,” she said.

When it comes to TikTok, Latour says it’s been a huge factor in her rapid growth as an artist for sure. “You have a shot at a video going to five people or 6 million people. I’ve always had faith in the music, that it speaks to people, and so having an app like that to bring you to so many people at once has had an incredible impact on my success.” 

Aside from music, Latour is studying philosophy at Columbia. She prefers to keep music and school separate. “I use them to inspire each other but I don’t think I would be as inspired if I was doing music 24/7,” she said. 

Latour is only just beginning her music career, and her incredible success so far has only propelled her to work harder and continue growing as an artist. “I think I’ve only just started changing and I’m excited to change so much more. I wonder where it’s gonna go, I don’t know fully yet.” As for the future, the singer is hoping to tour, put out a full album, and immerse herself in songwriting and performing as much as she can. “I guess I’m trying to build everything so that I can earn an audience and give them something that feels really secret, like a little present.” Perhaps more than that, Latour is in love with the connections she shares with her die-hard listeners and is craving more of that feeling. “They understand me so well. I’ve attracted these people who are so vulnerable and exploring themselves so deeply, and I feel so close with them. There’s so many beautiful moments like that!” Latour mentioned how people have started dating or just became friends because of her music. At the heart of Maude Latour’s artistry is vulnerability and a passion for the human condition.

You can find Maude Latour on all music streaming platforms, as well as at her website, https://www.maudelatour.com/. 

-Mikayla Connolly