photo courtesy of claire marie vogel
No one is holding Madison Cunningham back. The 26-year-old singer, songwriter, guitarist and poet is quickly gaining acclaim. Her listeners are adamant that she is set to become one of the musical greats, joining the ranks of her inspirations Joni Mitchell, John Lennon, Bob Dylan and Jeff Buckley. She combines folk, rock and pop-derived sounds to create a genre all her own.
On Sept. 9, Cunningham released her sophomore album “Revealer.” The 11-song album does just what it claims: it reveals life in its truest form, combining lyrics detailing faith, loss and longing with fascinating instrumentation, turning a simple guitar into a sonic landscape.
This album follows an exciting year for the two-time Grammy-nominated artist, who opened for Harry Styles at his sold-out Madison Square Garden run and performed on “The Late Late Show with James Corden,” “The Late Night Show with Stephen Colbert” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” She wrote an original song for the NPR “Morning Edition” podcast and performed a Tiny Desk concert on Aug. 3.
As a huge fan of her work, it was so exciting to hear her speak about “Revealer” at a Sept. 14 press conference by °1824 of Universal Music Group. grain of salt mag was one of fifteen press outlets at the virtual conference.
Many of the questions asked about the process of writing the album, as lyricism is one of Cunningham’s strongest suits. A reporter from Luna Collective noted that so many lyrics are marked by a strong, yet resolved, contradiction.
“The whole process was me trying to give back to the love of the music,” Cunningham said. “And, making music and then trying to sell it is sort of a thing that is always at odds with each other. I tried to ditch the fear of ‘what happens if it doesn’t sell?’ and just write from a pure place. Those contradictions were there. I think the record is constantly showing what it’s trying to hide, and I think that’s sort of an ironic thing that I like in music. It immediately takes the edge off of its seriousness.”
Blue House Magazine wondered about the inspiration for the lyrics.
“I felt like I kept having to write outside of my experiences, but in a way that was emanating from my own experiences,” Cunningham said. “That’s the most honest way, for me at least, to write. The urgency has to come from somewhere. If I had written exactly what my life looked like at the time, I think the record would have been very boring. There was a lot of me having to think about myself in broader terms, and having to write in a way that left room for other people’s experiences to fit into the narrative. It’s experience based, but it’s also drawing on other metaphors and themes that inspire me.”
In one particular song, “Life According to Raechel,” listener experience seems to be incorporated into the narrative in an impressive way. The song is about Cunningham’s grandmother’s passing, and poses the question of what it means to love and lose. It has become one of the best performing songs from the album, with over 400,000 streams on Spotify alone.
“In the making of that song, I had so many issues with my vocal takes,” Cunningham said to Portray TS Magazine. “I was like ‘Oh, it’s not perfect,’ and that was my own perfectionist mentality which can be really dangerous, especially in a song like that. If I had gone in there and tried to autotune anything, it would have taken away from the imperfect feeling that grief is. It would have been completely unbelievable.
“I let that song go, to be a bigger thing than me and my ‘abilities.’ This isn’t about me, it’s about [my grandmother], and I want to pay tribute to her in the most respectful way. To tamper with that song would have taken the pain out of it, and the imperfection of losing someone. I think I had to reconcile that the song is never going to feel done, because this feeling will never be resolved. That’s kind of like how grief is. It’s this feeling of ‘I’m okay now,’ and then suddenly you’re met with this wave of overwhelming sadness. Grief is never done and neither is art. It should be this living, breathing thing like we are. We’re never going to be perfect or satisfied. We have to keep moving and growing.
“I’ve learned so much about grief from the song,” she said. “I have my own feeling, and it’s very particular. But then getting to see and hear everybody else’s experiences and how they attach them to the song has helped me more than I thought was possible. That’s definitely the most special part of that. I’m glad I didn’t tamper with it.”
At this point in the press conference, the moderator, Camila Romero, began to get emotional. “These human emotions you write about are something that people deal with everyday,” she said. “They have to wake up and say I’m going to keep going.”
Romero is not alone in feeling the power of Cunningham’s work. The album is emotional labor. Each song resonates and discusses larger issues concerning the meaning of existence. Luna Collective asked Cunningham how it felt to give so much of herself to listeners, especially as Cunningham was about to leave on a four-month tour.
“It feels kind of funny, I suppose, to let those things about yourself hang out for everyone to see,” she said. “What’s been cool about it, and surprising in the best way, is how much people have been able to relate to those sorts of conversations. That way it doesn’t feel lonely. A lot of people have met me there and been like ‘yeah, I feel the same way about these things.’ I suppose it’s always a gamble when you put out things that are true for you. You wait to see if it’s true for everybody else. So far that’s been the overwhelming reaction to it, which is very cool to see.”
Content like this in Cunningham’s work is not new. I simply had to take this opportunity to ask about my favorite song of hers, “Broken Harvest.” The song, which beautifully examines what it means to live in a capitalistic society, was written two years ago as part of the NPR “Morning Edition” Podcast Challenge. She was given the prompt of “dreams deferred.”
“I immediately started thinking about this one episode of this show I used to watch. There’s this community of farmers who spend the summer, fall and winter making their crops, which would eventually become the wheat for their bread. All of these things were relying on them to survive, and one hail storm knocked it all out. I thought that was such a beautiful image and timely metaphor for the country, and the human race.”
Writing this song during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, these themes ran true for Cunningham’s own experience. “Everyone was experiencing the burning down of our industries in the way we were used to them running,” she said. “You couldn’t rely on anything. I think that was the sort of dark turn that I attached to dreams deferred, because I wanted to make it about everybody, not just my own career being on hold. I did make it a lot about from the artist’s perspective, because that’s what I knew, but more about the farmers. In our own way, we’re all trying to build things, and I think the COVID era really challenged a lot of that.”
Cunningham is currently on a four month tour, just ending the North American run in Chicago on Oct. 24. The tour resumes in Europe for a stint in November and December, when she’ll visit ten cities. Much of how she conducts a tour comes from her experience opening for Harry Styles.
“Playing for Harry Styles’ crowd showed me what the songs could be,” she said to Blue House Magazine. “They could survive in a room like that, and play to that energy. It was learning how to not just think about yourself in the performance, but learning how to know the songs enough that you can pay attention to the audience, and how to make them feel like the performance is about them. The audience can sense that. No audience is stupid.”
“I think opening for Harry Styles at Madison Square Garden was one of the most rewarding moments of my life,” she said to The Reclusive Blogger. “I stood onstage with my band and we all looked at each other and tried to breathe and smile. His audience was so sweet to us. We were expecting that they were just wanting to hear Harry, which who wouldn’t? But they were so sweet, caring, and did their homework apparently; they came knowing the songs. That is one of the best moments of my life musically. It was this beautiful moment of care.”
Care is what I find Cunningham puts into all of her work. From the instrumentation and songwriting, to the vocals and stage presence, care is a clear central element. To end the press conference, I wanted to know what her goal was with “Revealer.”
“I hope that Revealer makes people excited about the possibility of music making. I hope it sheds a different light on what can be done sonically,” she said. “I hope that people on a personal level find it relatable, and I hope it’s a conversation starter.”
“Revealer” can be streamed on all music platforms, tour tickets can be purchased at http://www.madisoncunningham.com/tour, and Madison can be followed @madicunningham on Instagram.