FEATURE: Spotlight: Madison Cunningham

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Madison Cunningham

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ONE cannot call…

Madison Cunningham a new artist, as she released her debut album, Authenticity, in 2014. I wanted to spotlight her, because she is someone a lot of people might not know about. Her new album, Revealer, came out earlier this month. The Californian artist and guitarist takes West Coast Folk and injects Jazz, Classical, electric guitars and Alt-Rock to create something new and interesting. I think she is an artist that more people should know about. Revealer is a fantastic artist. I want to come to a couple of interviews that revolve around her new album. Before that, here is some information and background to an incredible new work from an amazing artist:

“As its title suggests, Revealer—the new album by Madison Cunningham—is full of confessions, intimations, and hard truths the Los Angeles singer-songwriter-guitarist might rather have kept to herself. It’s a warts-and-all self-portrait of a young artist who is full of doubt and uncertainty, yet bursting with exciting ideas about music and life, who has numerous Grammy nominations but still feels like she has far to go, who turns those misgivings into songs that are confident in their idiosyncrasies. It’s also a rumination on music as a vehicle for such revelations, what’s gained and what’s lost when you put words to your innermost feelings. “There’s a sense of conflict about revealing anything about yourself—not just what to reveal, but whether you should reveal anything at all,” she says. “When you have to vouch for yourself and present a true picture of who you are, that can get confusing very quickly. This record is a product of me trying to find myself and my interests again. I felt like somewhere along the way I had lost the big picture of my own life.”

Reassembling that picture resulted in songs full of odd turns of phrase, skewed imagery, and witty asides; Cunningham writes to figure things out, and she doesn’t settle for easy answers or pat platitudes. Instead, more often than not she pulls the rug out from under herself, playing both straight man and comic relief. “I’m not immune to a piece of bad news, I just do what I must to move on,” she sings on the percolating opener “All I’ve Ever Known.” If it sounds like a cry of determination and fortitude, Cunningham immediately undercuts herself: “Give me truth but put me under so I don’t feel a thing.”

These are dark, funny songs for dark, not-so-funny times. “I wanted this work to reflect how I was taking in the world at that moment, and I promised myself I wouldn’t withhold the good or the bad from this self-portrait. I couldn’t have planned for the startling range of emotions a pandemic would bring on — sorrow, depression, anger, anxiety, fear, apathy. Much less writing during one. While I could take some comfort in knowing other people were experiencing those very things, I had yet to understand how many conflicting emotions a person could carry at once.” The confusion she shared with the rest of the world, however, was compounded and complicated when her grandmother died unexpectedly. Suddenly, the pain became unbearably personal. Revealer became a way for her to work through all of those overwhelming emotions. With rich strings eddying around her measured guitar strums, “Life According to Raechel” is a catalog of missed opportunities and lost time, all the visits she never made to her beloved grandmother, all the important details that make up a life. “There’s always something left unsaid,” Cunningham sings. “Were your eyes green? Were they blue? What was it that I forgot to ask you?”

She offers no resolution, no closure, no comfort at all—which is exactly what makes the song so honest about grief. “You’ve got this wound that’s never really going to heal,” she says, “because you’re going to feel the absence of that person for the rest of your life. It’s never going to be resolved. When I realized that, I turned a corner I knew I wouldn’t come back from. When I was able to finally be honest about what it felt like to grieve her, I was able to properly grieve the state of the world and the other things I had lost. Like earning your first gray hair. You could pluck it, but it would just keep growing back.”

The rest of Revealer didn’t come easily, but the songs did come. “Songwriting wasn’t this romantic outlet. It was not fun. It was a constant reflection of how poorly I was doing as a human being. I didn’t want it to be true, because it’s such a humbling thing to admit to needing help.” To capture the rawness of those emotions and the urgency of these new songs, Cunningham recorded as she wrote, finishing a song and then taking it to the studio within a matter of days. She worked once again with Tyler Chester, her longtime producer and collaborator, who manned her debut, 2019’s Who Are You Now and her 2020 covers EP Wednesday, and she also brought in producers Mike Elizondo (Fiona Apple, Regina Spektor, Mastodon) and Tucker Martine (Neko Case, Sufjan Stevens).

Cunningham has already proved herself to be a deft and imaginative guitar player, but Revealer foregrounds her spry staccato playing so that it becomes a musical signature. “I’ve always been interested in different ways of approaching the guitar that challenges the way I think I should play it. I tried to explore that more fully and intentionally on this record. I pulled some inspiration from non-Western styles, like Afropop and South American music. I wanted to make the guitar sound more integral to the song structure and less like, ‘now here comes Mr. Electric Guitar.’”

While experimenting in the studio, Cunningham found ways to make familiar instruments sound unusual and unsettling. On the hard-driving “Your Hate Could Power a Train”—which directs its most withering observations inward rather than outward—she transforms a simple ukulele into something dark and menacing, drawing out the song’s darker undercurrents. “I plugged it in and detuned it an octave with a pedal, so it has this wild, undefinable sound. I used that as the main instrument on that song because I wanted it to feel out of control, frantic, and angry. There were so many moments like that, when I felt liberated to stop and take a deep dive and explore sounds. I used to think there’s no use in messing around. But actually there’s only use in messing around. You have to explore, because the best ideas come from childlike curiosity.”

Eventually she emerged with a set of songs prickly with emotions and revelations, an album full of contradictions that somehow speak to a unified truth. Revealer reckons with her recent past, but also defines her future. Hoping that she would be singing these songs for many years to come, she planted secret messages to her future self: promises and reminders that she believes might continue to reinforce the lessons she learned during the writing process. “No one’s holding you back now!” she exclaims on “In From Japan,” which she recorded with Martine. “That statement wasn’t true when I wrote it or when I sang it, but I chose to keep that line. That’s a very beautiful part of the songwriting process: Sometimes you write things for your future self to grab onto. You write some idea or sentiment that you hope you can eventually find meaning in.”

As Cunningham learned while making this album, the songwriting process is just as open-ended as the grieving process. That idea is at the heart of Revealer, which is more than simply a document of a dark time in her life. It’s a survival guide, a chronicle of growth and change written by the artist who finds joy in the process and beauty in the mistakes. “Doesn’t it feel strange when you say it out loud?” she asks on “Who Are You Now.” “Time to act your age, no one’s gonna show you how”.

The first interview, from Tidal highlighted a remarkable songwriter, singer and guitarist. Madison Cunningham discussed her Christian faith and wrestling with depression. It is clear that Revealer is a very honest album. One that everyone needs to listen to:

“Cunningham did hew to one sturdy rock ’n’ roll tradition: She grew up singing in church, in her case an evangelical congregation in her hometown of Costa Mesa, Calif. A prodigy on multiple fronts, she was playing guitar and writing songs at 7, experimenting with alternate guitar tunings at 15 (she rarely plays in standard tuning) and directing her church choir at 17 (which didn’t always sit well with choristers three times her age).

Her new album, Revealer, bristles with spiky, crunchy guitar riffs that stick in your brain. It also showcases a voice that, over time, reveals unexpected textures and shadings and runs the full emotional gamut, from tenderness to exasperation. Revealer’s predecessors, Who Are You Now (2019) and Wednesday (2020), were both Grammy-nominated, for best Americana and folk album, respectively. To the extent that genre means anything, I would reach back to a ’70s rubric attached to the likes of Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe and Todd Rundgren, and call Cunningham’s sound power pop. And for all her individuality, Cunningham is becoming an in-demand accompanist; her tasteful playing and singing have popped up on recent albums by Sara Bareilles, Andrew Bird and the Watkins Family Hour.

PHOTO CREDIT: Claire Marie Vogel

You worked on Revealer with some high-profile producers: Chester, Mike Elizondo, Tucker Martine. How has Chester’s influence changed your craft?

Tyler pushed me to record live, singing and playing at the same time. On Who Are You Now, we recorded everything live, the whole band, and put in some overdubs later. I’d say 80 percent of that album is live. Maybe 90. That’s how I record. It makes you a better performer, too, obviously.

Does Revealer have a central set of concerns?

It does. To me, the word “revealer” is neither positive nor negative; it means unveiling truth. It was really hard making this record. There was a deadline, but there were also things happening in me that I was having trouble expressing. It needed to reach a fever pitch. These songs are me going, “Alright, fuck it. I’m not going to hide the truth, no matter how ugly.”

A lot of it deals with depression and anxiety. I do struggle with depression. The more I talk to people, I see that it’s not a novel thing, that everyone struggles with it to different degrees. And the more I talk about it, the more liberated from it I feel.

What impact has your Christianity had on your music?

There’s so much that I’m still sorting through. I think the impact is that, singing in front of a congregation, there’s this sense of singing through something higher than yourself. I’ve carried that into my own music. You’re putting yourself and your instrument in the service of something bigger than your ego. For me today, that’s the song, or playing to the moment or to the audience: something that takes you outside of yourself. I really try to stay grounded in that mindset, because I think it’s the breeding ground for beautiful music. You’re the conduit, just letting it pass through you”.

I am going to round off with a great interview from Guitar.com. One of the most obvious and remarkable aspects and assets of Madison Cunningham’s music is his guitar work. An amazing player, this comes through on Revealer:

“The buzz surrounding Madison Cunningham is getting increasingly harder to avoid. Hot off the heels from a European tour, a debut appearance on NPR’s critically acclaimed Tiny Desk, and a punchy performance on The Late Show with Steven Colbert, comes her new sophomore album, Revealer – showcasing her rapid and startling development as both musician and songwriter.

We last spoke to Cunningham at the very start of the pandemic, when it felt like the momentum generated from her first Grammy nod in 2020 (for debut album Who Are You Now) might be lost amid a year of cancelled tours and industry uncertainty, but the 25-year-old has shown no signs of slowing down.

Earlier this year she received a second Grammy nod, for her EP Wednesday – a record derived from the weekly covers she uploaded to her YouTube page during lockdown. It’s a record that displays not only her impeccable taste in music, with renditions of Radiohead’s No Surprises and The Beatles’ In My Life, to name a few, but also a steely drive to keep going.

And all the while, in the background, a her second LP was percolating, waiting for the right moment to arrive into the world.

“I worked on this new record for two years and there is this part of me that feels relief in thinking about it being out into the world,” Cunningham explains as she sits in her Michigan hotel room in early August, “but there’s another part of me that tenses up and gets nervous about people hearing new music”.

“It’s such a weird sensation when you only listen to the music you and your immediate team, and then its just available for the world. I think I’m a little bit split, and have nerves around it a little bit, like I always do.

“I’m not going to start to say to people, ‘Hey guys, check out my shit, it’s cool’. I do still and hopefully always will think that there’s a necessary piece to staying humble.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Noah Torralba

Taking grief by the horns

Cool, that shit undoubtedly is, however – Revealer showcases a confidence that betrays not a hint of the dreaded second album syndrome. In reality though, she admits that the experience of making album number two was “daunting”, while the well-trodden superstitions surrounding a sophomore record resulted in a lot of pressure from the people around her, and especially herself – not an ideal situation to mix with the stress and pressure of a global pandemic and the world shutting down.

“I just felt paralysed for a long time under those circumstances,” she confesses. “There wasn’t anything true or anything I wanted to talk about, and I just felt stuck in the state of the world and our city at the time. The last thing I wanted to do was write a song. I truly felt that way”.

The passing of her grandmother in mid-2020 was what allowed Cunningham to find the clarity she needed to fuel her writing. “It’s not the case that when something hard is happening I’m not usually able to internalise it and process it and write a song about it at the same time, and this time for whatever reason, it made a way for it to happen,” Cunningham reveals. “That’s when I started to get back into the writing cycle again, after her passing. It felt like there was a lot of perspective that I had to write with.

“Grief, I think is the impetus. I think grief is shining this light on everything else that’s living underneath. In this modern age we can all create this perfect distorted image of ourselves, and we have the tools to actually make people fall for that believe that and hitch their wagon to that. I wanted to challenge myself to give the honest portrait of myself, no matter how ugly it was going to be. Writing the record was hard for that reason because it was me grappling with those things about myself in real time, and it wasn’t fun.”

Colouring outside the lines

Cunningham has always been a guitarist first and foremost, with a dextrous and angular style that sets her apart from the singer-songwriter set, but taking on some of the production duties on Revealer pushed her into thinking more outside of just the guitar in a way she found hugely rewarding.

“It was so fun to be able to put on the producer hat and be in that position,” she explains. “It just felt liberating to know that I didn’t have to think about just guitar on every single song and I can actually colour outside of the lines a little bit. It’s good to take risks on your second record as it sets a precedent of what you’re trying to do and where you’re trying to go. I don’t want to just be the guitar player that writes guitar player songs, I want to be the songwriter that involves the instruments that it calls for.”

Extending her guitar capabilities is still at the front of Cunningham’s mind, however. The percussive fingerpicking that made guitarists take notice on her statement single, Pin It Down is still present and correct on Revealer, but there’s new textures and moods, such as the swirling guitar journey undertaken on newest single In From Japan.

“It’s exciting to flip it on its head, and to know It’s not rooted in any tradition, it just sounds cool,” the guitarist gleefully states. “There were a lot of records I was listening to at the time that was very experimental and that was my favourite thing to do and to just use whatever walks across my path and feels great. I will use it and run with it and not think, ‘Am I using my Jazzmaster, is this me?’ I want to expand what is possible for the guitar, I don’t want it to just sound like a guitar all the time”.

A truly amazing artist that is growing in popularity, go and follow Madison Cunningham. I am looking forward to seeing what comes next and where she heads. Having released the sensational Revealer, there is a big future ahead for her. If you do not know about Madison Cunningham, then I would urge you to check out…