Los Angeles singer-songwriter Madison Cunningham is getting ready to release her new album, Revealer, on September 9. In the run-up to the album release, Cunningham has been on tour — either as the headliner or as a supporting artist — rolling out songs from the forthcoming album to audiences across the country. Cunningham’s tour included a show at the Fine Line in Minneapolis, which facilitated a visit to The Current studio to play songs from Revealer and to talk with host Mac Wilson.

Watch Madison Cunningham’s full session at The Current in the video above, and read a transcript below. The radio edit of the session is also available in the audio player above.

Interview Transcript

Edited for clarity.

Mac Wilson: Hello, friends, I'm Mac Wilson from The Current, and I have a special guest in The Current studio today, Madison Cunningham. Hello, Madison.

Madison Cunningham: Hello.

Mac Wilson: So you're in town playing at the Fine Line tonight. It's good to have you back around these parts. I was looking into our archives about the last time that you were around here. And I don't know if this is the exact date, but you opened up for Calexico and Iron & Wine.

Madison Cunningham: Yes.

Mac Wilson: A couple of years back.

Madison Cunningham: That's right. In the before times, as we like to call them.

Mac Wilson: Yeah, right. It's like, I was looking up online and it said "watch a complete set from Madison Cunningham." And it was part of that live stream.

Madison Cunningham: That's right! We were at the... is it called the Palace Theatre?

Mac Wilson: I believe it was at the Palace. Yeah.

Madison Cunningham: Yeah, I think that's where we were. We did... Yeah, we opened for them. Iron & Wine and Calexico did a joint tour. And that was serious. I don't think we understood how blissful that stretch of touring was, because weeks later, everything kind of started to burn down.

Mac Wilson: I believe it was Valentine's Day 2020. So if somebody is going back and looking at it...

Madison Cunningham: It was Valentine's Day!

Mac Wilson: Yeah, it was it was weeks before [the COVID-related shutdowns]. So Madison, there's a lot that I'd like to talk to you about, including the new record on the way. But I wanted to ask about your time here in St. Paul; in particular, when you were part of the Live From Here repertoire. Were you based out of St. Paul proper? I mean, obviously, you were all over the place playing with Live From Here. But did you consider St. Paul your home base?

Madison Cunningham: Well, for the show, it was. I mean, I'm from Los Angeles, so I live there. I just did, I was telling my band earlier that the Minneapolis airport is probably the airport I've gone to the most because I think I appeared on that show 25 times as Chris [Thile's] duet partner. And a lot of it was based in St. Paul at the Fitzgerald Theater. So yeah, I mean, this was, this is I kind of, Live From Here was how I paid rent. So I was here, like, almost every weekend it felt like.

Mac Wilson: So as part of the Live From Here, crew — as you said, his duet partner — how much planning were you involved with in the layout of any given episode?

Madison Cunningham: Not a ton; I mean, sometimes I would be asked to give input on what songs we would play. And sometimes Chris and I would have a back and forth on that. But for the most part, there was just this massive team that was making kind of the layout run smoothly. And Chris was behind a lot of that. I basically just had to cram a bunch of, a bunch of pieces that were some of the most difficult musical pieces that I had heard. Kind of, yeah, once a week, really.

Mac Wilson: Imagine that, Chris Thile coming up with something difficult and complex.

Madison Cunningham: And also just expecting that everyone could do it like he could, but which was also kind of a wonderful environment, because he really had faith in all of us, more than he probably should have. And I think that's what got it off the ground.

Mac Wilson: Chris Thile, he's one of those people where you chat with him once or twice, and you realize that this guy, he could have done absolutely anything he wanted, he could have been a brain surgeon.

Madison Cunningham: Very true.

Mac Wilson: Absolutely anything, and you're just kind of in awe being around him on any given day.

Madison Cunningham: So true. He's like, he's the opposite of jack of all trades, master of none. He's like master of all trades!

Mac Wilson: So Madison, you are doing, you're headlining the show tonight at the Fine Line, but you're also doing support for a bunch of artists over the next couple of weeks, including Lake Street Dive and Mt. Joy. And even looking at your calendar, it seems like on any given night, you'll be doing support or headlining. Mentally, how do you switch back and forth between, you know, "the stage is mine for the night" and giving support to another artist?

Madison Cunningham: It's a great question. It's a little bit jarring. They're just two different head spaces. One is you walk on a stage that you know you're going to have to prove something on. I mean, there's pressure on either stage, but you feel a little bit more at home knowing that the audience is there to see what you do in particular. But yet, I think the other side to that coin is that there's this sort of, like reckless abandon that you have when you're the opener, because you're like, "I'm not the one who has to pull tickets tonight. I can, I can just, I can just do whatever." And it's a liberating feeling.

Mac Wilson: I almost feel a similar way the on the air at The Current lately. I've been doing all sorts of shifts, like literally mornings one week, middays another week, and then afternoons the next week to the point where I have to go, "Okay, which week is it? Which day of the week? Is it?" So I can relate to that, believe it or not.

Madison Cunningham: Yeah, no, I believe you. I really do.

Mac Wilson: We are here in The Current studio with Madison Cunningham. So Madison, you've got a new record on the way called Revealer. And you've been revealing a couple of the songs in our studio, so to speak, playing "Hospital" and "Anywhere" and then "In From Japan." "Hospital" is the one that we've been diving into, and there's a lot of metaphors in that song. What is the, what was the focal point that you started as the springboard for composing that tune?

Madison Cunningham: Oooh... God, it all came in different phases. And I wrote that one, I usually take a lot of months to finish songs because they just come in these, these particular phases that take time. And this, in this particular instance, it was a writing prompt that my, one of my songwriting heroes gave me. And the the prompt was to write a song that just had like five chords. And all the focus should, should be on the melody was, was the idea. And so I just went through my notes, I wrote this one in about a week, because we had had this cycle going where he would tell, I would meet him on his porch, and I would have to have a new song every week to kind of go through with him. So I knew I had to finish it by Friday; I started on Monday. And I think, I think I just went through my notes, and I had a bunch of random metaphors and lines in my notes, and one of them was "regret is like an infant that won't let you sleep it off." And I wanted to utilize that, but I didn't quite know how. So the first verse just kind of like, stayed in this limbo state for a while. And then when I finally filled it in, dug through some more notes and kind of like filled in the blanks, I finally made my way to the chorus. And all the lyrics just kind of came after that.

Mac Wilson: Now that you mention it, that's a very evocative thing. And that's exactly what it is when you have kids, whether infants or otherwise, that no matter how exhausting the night is, you have to be up at a given time and you don't, there's no time off. It's like, the one thing that I need right now is an extra two hours of sleep. And that's the one thing that you can't get, so.

Madison Cunningham: Well, the one thing, it's the opposite of what your child who completely relies on you needs; needs like all of your attention at all times. And I'm not a mother I should preface, but I am the oldest of five daughters, and I remember a lot of sleepless nights hearing my younger sisters just screaming their heads off. So, I can relate in that sense.

Mac Wilson: Are you ready to divulge who your songwriting muse is?

Madison Cunningham: Oh, man, I mean that oh, man, that list is really long at this point for so many different reasons. But I mean, probably one of the obvious ones would be Joni [Mitchell], she was kind of one of the first people that I listened to that, that gave me permission to write in a more unveiled way. She seems to not have any rules about the way that she writes or what she speaks about. And that was maybe the first example I had of that as a young aspiring songwriter. And yeah, I mean, Rufus Wainwright's a big one. I know I'm gonna space on so many people that I love right now, because that's just what happens. And, of course, I do love Bob Dylan. He's he was another another, I think, gateway drug into just a certain way of writing. And Mike Viola actually is the guy I was talking about earlier, who's one of my, definitely one of my current songwriting muses; he just always kind of gets it right.

Mac Wilson: See, my guess was gonna be Dan Wilson, but Mike Viola, that fits, too.

Madison Cunningham: Dan, too! Dan is incredible. They both are, for different reasons. Yeah. I mean, Dan is another muse, for sure.

Mac Wilson: Dan's absolutely, like, he has the Oblique Strategies, like, that's something that he would come up with, like, "Hey, we're, you're gonna write using X number of chords, you're gonna write one song a week," like keeping you on a schedule like that. So, it's similar with Mike, then?

Madison Cunningham: I mean, they're, they're similar, in that they are the same way. They're so regimented, and so prolific, and that they just make all of these kind of limitations for themselves. And they just, they, they never let up. It's crazy. They both write so much music.

Mac Wilson: So maybe this is getting off track a little bit. But I'm curious because it's something I was thinking about earlier today, reading about Bob Dylan reading about some of the stuff that he recorded in the 1980s, that there was a prompt on Twitter a couple of years ago that said, "What is the best song that you've never heard?" And that feels, that feels like a paradox, but I'm like, "It's probably something Bob Dylan put out in, you know, in a rarities collection or the 80s or something that you just haven't gotten around to hearing yet." That, for as much as we appreciate his music, he's been so prolific over the years, there's probably stuff that we have yet to even discover.

Madison Cunningham: Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure. I mean, there's so many artists who are probably... it's the same, you know, situation. I mean, I would imagine Joni is another one of the best songs we've never heard. Or any of those artists that I named.

Mac Wilson: We are in The Current studio with Madison Cunningham. Revealer is the new album on the way. We are wishing you luck, and we are enjoying hearing the new songs from it in our studio today.

Madison Cunningham: Thank you.

Video Segments

00:00:00 “Anywhere”
00:04:02 “Hospital”
00:07:32 “In From Japan”
12:07:08 Madison Cunningham interview with host Mac Wilson

All songs from Madison Cunningham’s album Revealer, releasing Sept. 9, 2022, on Verve Forecast.

Band lineup

Madison Cunningham – vocals, guitar
Philip Krohnengold – keys
Garret Lang – bass
Kyle Crane – drums

Credits

Host – Mac Wilson
Guest – Madison Cunningham
Director – Erik Stromstad
Camera Operators – Erik Stromstad, Peter Ecklund, Thor Cramer Bornemann
Audio – Cameron Wiley
Video Editor – Evan Clark
Producers – Derrick Stevens
Digital Producer – Luke D. Taylor

External Link

Madison Cunningham - official site