Cunningham Comes Alive

I didn't think my admiration for singer/songwriter/guitarist Madison Cunningham could grow any stronger, but I should have known that seeing her live would do the trick. I've watched a number of videos of her playing, in studio and live and from her bedroom (even one taking apart one of her songs), but seeing her onstage for the first time with a crackerjack band in the intimate confines of Le Poisson Rouge, as I did on October 28, I couldn't help but be infected by the same giddy enthusiasm that made her blurt out, after a particularly lively jam (I think it was a rollicking new tune called "Hospital"), "I just love playing music!" It shows, and it translates. A friend I'd brought who'd heard and liked her music on record was, I think it's safe to say, blown away by her guitar playing, not least the way she plays her knotty, sinuous (but not gratuitously showy) guitar lines while singing similarly ambitious melodies. The way she leans into both the musicianship and the meaning, both the starker angles and the languorous reveries, of her world-class songs—I was already sold, but now I'm a signed, sealed, delivered Madi Cunningham stan.

The euphoric high of that night sent me back to binging her music, which comprises her stunningly mature major-label debut Who Are You Now, two exquisite prior EPs (For the Sake of the Rhyme and Love, Lose, Remember), and Authenticity, a lovely debut effort she made when she had just graduated high school (and has since quietly taken off the market, disavowing not so much its openly Christian themes but what she thinks of as its clunky lyrics). Oh, but there's more: She has made and posted a series of amazing and wide-ranging covers, both alone and with others, some of which she captured on the recent EP Wednesday. A deeper dive into that catalogue led me to this extraordinary obscurity by T-Bone Burnett, which I promptly learned and played with my little church band. (A little background on the song's provenance can be found here.)

I was also knocked out by this song from a livestream concert she did last March, which she busted out in a full-band version at LPR. As it gives her current tour its name, I imagine it will have a prominent place on her next record. It's already among my favorites of hers:

At LPR she opened with the mysterious, haunting "Last Boat to Freedom," which she also happened to release in a piano version that brings out its lush, Joni-esque harmonies (with attendant shades of Radiohead).

I've been drinking deeply from its glories. To wit:

The verse melody spells out a smudgy, lovely E-flat major 9th chord, though it can also be read as a sort of polychord: a B-flat triad over (and/or a G-minor 7th) an E-flat. The polychord vibe is even stronger on the next bit:

That's technically a G-flat major 11th, but it's just as plausibly an A-flat triad over a G-flat. It's an impossibly lush, very Joni sound world. The form then runs through a tentative, rubato pre-chorus over three descending chords and a shifting time signature—it all has a very "Pyramid Song" feel—before repeating the above shapes and another pre-chorus in which her vocal climbs ever higher, then snags on an unexpected harmony that tumbles into a yearning chorus:

All very nice, but look/hear what happens next:

The song backs away from that cloudburst of chromaticism to resolve back to the E-flat minor/A-flat progression. Then, after a very melismatic, Jeff Buckley-ish section over alternating B-flat and A-flat chords, the chorus slips back in, and after a slight fakeout—instead of going to the D major 7th, its second line goes a very tense F 7th chord—it blows back wide open into that D major 7th. As a sign that the song—whose lyrics are an evocative meditation on what could be death or immigration, but definitely marks some kind of major rite of passage—has finally broken through to some new state, it stays locked on that D major 7th (and/or 9th) and ends there, as if hanging in space.

It's a journey, to be sure. The other two Madison songs I've been especially digging, apart from all of them: In "Song in My Head," a clear tribute to her father, a praise music band leader, as she simultaneously realizes she is outgrowing him and that she owes him for her musical calling, she pulls a simple but beguiling trick. The verse is in A-flat and the chorus is in B-flat, a subtle gear shift you don't really hear—but then you definitely hear it when it clicks back to the A-flat at the end of each chorus (except the final one), in a change that magically feels like a lift rather than a descent (probably because the last chord of the chorus is an F, and that minor third leap up to an A-flat is a lift). I haven't charted it all out but you can hear what I'm talking about at 1:12 below:

I also love the way her rocking single "Coming Back" runs through a series of very un-obvious chords with such winning confidence you (almost) don't notice: The verse is in B and B-flat (what?), and the chorus is...F, C, and D (double what?). Somehow it works like gangbusters, like "Come Together" in a funhouse mirror:

To be clear, I don't only cherish Madi when she gets weird; she can do deceptively simple as well as any songwriter alive (though if you're paying attention, she does like to voice her chords differently all the time). But that she can play the game on this level does make me love her all the more. If God is in the details, this is the best kind of praise music.