Marie Davidson Turns Flight Delay Boredom Into Poetry Collection "Traveler's Faith"

Instead of doomscrolling in the departure lounge and cursing airlines, Marie Davidson chose to write poetry. The Montreal electronic musician told The FADER she's given up doomscrolling entirely — "I write to process what's happening around me." That line pretty much sums up the ethos behind her debut poetry collection, "Traveler's Faith," a book born out of endless business travel and airport fatigue, officially dropping September 1st.

In the interview, Davidson describes herself as someone who "hates airlines," but rather than letting that make her bitter, she turned every delay and every nonsensical rule into verse. She says the unglamorous downtime of travel — strangers striking up conversation, endless waiting, doing absolutely nothing — is just as much a part of the "traveler's experience," not merely an extension of her DJ and producer identity, but a chance for her to observe, learn, and grow.

The collection continues the writing logic she established on her 2025 album "City Of Clowns." That record, built on electronic beats with lyrics skewering the absurdity of social media, ranked among The FADER's favorite albums of last year. Davidson admits she's never really drawn a line between songwriting and poetry — "Traveler's Faith" includes several tracks with lyrics identical to "City Of Clowns," including "Fun Times" and "Push Me Fuckhead," while a few others are pulled from her next in-progress project. "Anything I write down could become a poem, or it could become a song."

The collection is paired with photography by Nadine Fraczkowski, capturing Davidson amid the cold, sterile modern infrastructure of airports and departure lounges, with a distinctly bureaucratic sense of absurdity. Davidson specifically notes that if Fraczkowski's photos hadn't been so inherently poetic, the entire shape of the book would have turned out completely different — she recalls the team looking at the photos and text together and thinking "there's probably something here worth making," which is what sparked the idea to publish a book.

Writing poetry isn't an entirely new habit for Davidson. Her mother was once a poet who organized poetry readings in Montreal, and Davidson was often brought along as a kid — her earliest impression of poetry was "a bunch of adults doing weird stuff into a microphone." She truly picked the pen back up during a low point in the pandemic, first writing a batch of poems, which she then set aside to work on "City Of Clowns" — but once the album wrapped, the urge to write came back even stronger. "The pandemic ended, but the desire to write stuck around, because traveling is just so boring. 'Traveler's Faith' is basically an anti-boredom remedy."

Language choice was also a major topic in the interview. As a native French speaker, Davidson says she originally wrote mostly in French, until her label suggested she start an English-language newsletter — that's when her writing habits gradually shifted toward English. She describes English as making her feel more "playful," because the language is "direct, right in your face," and the entire poetry collection was written in English. She also revealed that her next album will draw on some of the content from "Traveler's Faith," with the new songs carrying the same tone — rhyming, a bit self-deprecating, always tinged with something melancholic.

"Traveler's Faith" was produced with help from the DEEWEE team, with graphic design by Gio Mo Moro. Davidson says writing the book started out feeling like a joke before it got serious — "the biggest challenge was convincing myself I was actually a writer," and once she got past that, everything else fell into place. She also emphasizes that while she's used to making music alone, this book was different: "this was a team effort."