For our latest spotlight episode, host @jaydenrobinsonmedia caught up with Grammy-Award winner @MadisonCunningham about her highly anticipated third studio album Ace. Depending on the game, an Ace can be the highest or lowest card, zero or infinity. A breakup feels similar—one path crumbles, while all others remain infinitely possible. How do you write about heartbreak when you’re going through it?
Ace, Grammy award-winner Madison Cunningham’s third record for Verve Forecast, tracks every part of it: falling out of love, having your heart broken, and then falling in love again. It’s about betrayal and betraying yourself. It is a stunning record and some of Cunningham’s best songwriting to date. It showcases her at the height of her powers. Cunningham rose to fame as a songwriter and a guitarist. She’s collaborated as a guitarist and as a vocalist with countless artists: Lucy Dacus, Remi Wolf, Mumford & Sons, and Andrew Bird, among others. Her guitar is perhaps what she is best known for. On Ace, which Cunningham serves as co-producer, she wanted to ever so slightly move away from that notion. Sonically, the piano is in the foreground. And Cunningham’s piano playing here is beautiful. Look no further than opener “Shatter Into Form,” and how it unspools so gently into “Shore.”
The piano here is soft and searching. It feels like swimming in the sea in August. Like looking out the window of a train in June. “Nervous girl / In the third person / How words escape her,” sings Cunningham. It’s a line that is as playful as it is reflective. All of it swirls together, creating a stunningly intimate portrait of a woman growing and rebuilding. The record also features a collaboration from Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes, who lends his vocals to “Wake.” Pecknold sings alongside Cunningham, as she plays intricate finger picked guitar. Her bandmates are musicians she has worked with for years, and they help sharpen her vision. They follow her lead with upright bass and stomps. It is wooly and warm. “Wake,” like the rest of Ace, is an ensemble effort, produced alongside Robbie Lackritz (Feist, Rilo Kiley, Bahamas, Peach Pit). “She’s a force of nature,” says Lackritz of their collaboration, “An unreal musical talent. When we worked, we would work all day.
We would start a song and finish it that evening. We fueled off of each other’s energy. It felt like a snowball of energy and creativity.” “I wanted it to feel like a mountain peak,” says Cunningham, “I wanted Ace to feel like a mountain we built together.” “Best of Us,” Ace’s final track, might be the summit. It is some of Cunningham’s most exciting writing, her most poetic wordplay. “The kingdom has fallen,” she sings, “two bedroom apartment / holding up the broken arm.” Ace is a record that feels alive and lush in all the ways Cunningham hoped for when she started writing. It is a record of mastery and honesty. Cunningham loves every single song on it. You can tell.
