Idol Chatter & Voice Views

American Idol fans will remember Maddie Walker as the charismatic teen who made the Top 10 on Season 14.

After the show, she returned to Iowa where she says she played music at a few “little places” and “was just living life as a teenager.”

At the same time Maddie was performing on Idol, Nicolette Mare was appearing on The Voice, landing a spot on Team Adam Levine and advancing to the battle round before being eliminated.

After the show, Nicolette says she returned to Staten Island, N.Y., hoping to record a debut EP and launch a solo career.

These days, both young ladies spend lots of their time in Nashville, teaming up with Brit Willson and Ray Taaffe in hopes of breaking out as a new country girl group called South Haven.

Oh, and please put an asterisk beside the word country. Make no mistake, this sweet-voiced quartet isn’t selling your parents’ brand of country music.

This is pop-country with a few unexpected twists, a touch of pretty and a broad dash of sass. The result is addictive. Music sure to get stuck in your head. Or have you singing along. Both very good things when you’re vying for listeners in the crowded Nashville music scene.

HOW IT STARTED: Brit jokingly calls the group’s manager, Todd Cassetty “the mastermind behind the chaos.” Cassetty says the girl group idea sprang from another project his entertainment company launched, Song Suffragettes, a weekly showcase at the Listening Room in Nashville designed to draw attention to female songwriters fighting to be heard on male-dominated country radio.

Each Monday night for the past two years, the Song Suffragettes show has featured five female artists performing original music — “songs without a home” in Cassetty’s words because most of the singers have neither a recording contract nor publishing deal.

Brit and Ray played Song Suffragettes shows and loved the girl group idea. After all, with the exception of the Miranda Lambert-led Pistol Annies, more than a decade has passed since a girl group made a splash on the country music charts.

But completing the group wasn’t easy, even though about 130 female artists have performed as song suffragettes. When two previous incarnations of what would become South Haven didn’t work out, Cassetty reached out to Maddie via Instagram and Nicolette via a Skype audition looking for voices that would work well with the two already in the fold.

The current lineup met for the first time in November.

“I never really thought about being in a girl group,” Maddie says. “I never even had it in the back of my head. When Todd contacted me about it, I thought it was cool because it’s something that hasn’t been done in a long time. When I met the girls, it really felt right. We all turned into best friends immediately.

“And the second (Nicolette) got in the group, we really knew it fit,” she adds. “We would walk around, and people would be like, ‘Are you guys a group? Cause you guys look like a group. You look like you belong together.'”

THE SOUND: Next came the music. Cassetty says the theory was to take the group in a One Direction direction, with four equal singers trading off lines and less stress on the lush harmonies that become the focal point for so many girl groups and “often times sounds dated sonically.”

Since all of the young ladies have different musical influences — none are Nashville natives — and there’s hardly a current successful girl group model to follow, Britt says the South Haven sound wound up incorporating pop, rock, even elements of EDM.

“We like to say we’re two clicks off center,” explains Nicolette.

Maddie says the music “keeps that country heart, with lots of other really cool influences.”

South Haven’s debut single, “Firestarters,” as an example. The group members trade off lines on a rapped bridge in the second half of the song.

South Haven released the music video for “Firestarters” about a week ago. The single hit iTunes Wednesday.

It’s one of those songs without a home, co-written by two song suffragettes, though the incredibly catchy chorus sounds like it could have been written just for South Haven as the girls sing “we’re the modern dreamers / making our move / rule breakers / with nothing to prove / non-believers / we’re coming for you / we’re the firestarters.”

South Haven has posted audio for five other songs on the group’s YouTube channel. Four are other songs without a home; Brit’s “Girl Like Me’ is the only one with a South Haven writing credit.

But that’s something that will change, the ladies promise. They’ve been busy writing original music and say those songs will be the next batch they record, with hopes of releasing more music in a couple of months.

Nicolette says they feel that’s important to the group’s “authenticity.” Besides, Maddie adds, “those are our own thoughts and it’s easier for us to relate to the songs we’ve written.”

THE DIFFICULT PART: As for the group’s name — well, if the friendships preceded the music, both preceded the group’s name. Choosing a name became quite the process, Maddie recalls. Several suggestions were made. And rapidly rejected.

“So it took forever,” she says. “We were like ‘Okay, guys, here’s a deadline. We need a name by now.’ And then we waited until two weeks after that and still didn’t have a name.

“I think we were all sitting at the studio and, we were like, ‘Okay, south. Let’s start with south. South works.’ We were just trying to figure out things that go with south. Ray threw out haven. It was really cool, because she was like, ‘Our music makes me feel safe, kind of like a haven.’ So South Haven kind of came out of nowhere after us thinking for months and months about a name.

“It seems like it should that easy all along and it wasn’t,” she adds with a laugh.

Equipped with a name, a fresh sound and an impressive batch of songs, South Haven plans to play for CMT on Monday morning. In the evening, they’ll perform “Firestarters” at the Song Suffragettes show. And Cassetty says he’s in the process of booking the group for the immensely popular CMA Music Festival in early June.

“It’s so hard for girls to make it now in country (music),” Nicolette says. “To be in a girl group with four amazing girls with amazing voices, I feel like we can take country by storm.”