When I sit down to chat with Madison Cunningham she’s well into her tour. The Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter smiles when I ask her about her first impressions of Dublin, where she had performed the previous night.
“The people here are really friendly”, she says, “but they don’t mess around. I was walking in the city at 10am this morning and there were already people with a pint, smoking a cigarette”. She pauses while I sit there worrying about dishonestly stating that I too prefer Kombucha to Guiness.
“It’s incredible”, she laughs, “I want to do that too!” With this, all my LA stereotyping is thrown out the window. “There’s such a good balance of work and play here”, she continues, “there’s not as much urgency about everything compared to what you can feel in LA”.
This refreshing realness is a step away from the self-important LA musician who dominates a lot of mainstream media. This is potentially due to Cunningham’s more humble early musical influences, namely, her dad and the Church community she grew up in.
“The biggest lesson I learnt from playing with my dad and siblings is teamwork. If you’re on a solo mission as a player, you can tend to work against the band and the purpose of the song. So that’s really informed the way I write music and work with other musicians,” she explains, again displaying an intriguing absence of ego.
“Growing up inside the Church there’s this ethos of playing to a higher power, and I’ve definitely taken that concept and method into the shows that I’ve played”, she states, potentially explaining what sets her apart. “I always just try to play to a border purpose, not for the sake of perfection or for my own egotistical reasons.”
This early education took place in Orange County, an area of California. My only experience of the place comes from the early 2000’s TV show The OC, so I ask her what the music scene was like growing up. “It was pretty much non-existent”, she explains, “it’s changed a lot now though, there are a couple of people I know of that have taken the time to really spearhead a movement there.”
She goes on to describe something I imagine is relatively normal for more suburban America, places with one larger venue (“The Observatory, where Kendrick Lemar played his earlier shows”, she tells me proudly), but otherwise gig venues being largely made up of coffee shops. “I would email this one place maybe once a week to let me play, and they would totally ghost me,” she says, illustrating that even the smaller venues didn’t offer much opportunity for an up and coming artist.
We chat about how this absence of early support affects how she feels about the area now. “I do have a bit of a self-righteous feeling when I go back, like ‘you turned your back on me and now I’m going to turn my back on you,” she says. “But ultimately, you can’t blame a place for being what it is”.
This feeling may change the day she eventually plays The Observatory, however, which she tells me: “I’ve yet to claim”.
Although, connotations with Orange County are not limited to slightly angst-fuelled ones. “There was this one record store that I would always rummage through and they just put my records in the store, I guess I’ve made it!”, she exclaims laughing.
Cunningham has had a few ‘I’ve made it moments’ recently, not the least of which is the accompaniment of verified icon Harry Styles on tour, (she describes stepping out onto the Madison Square Garden stage with him as a fairytale) but also the release of her latest album: Revealer.
One of my favourite things that Cunningham says about this new venture is that she wanted to fully incorporate her guitar playing into her music, rather than, as she says, it being like: ‘hey Mr Electric guitar, there you are!”
“When playing electric guitar, there are so many ways you can assume to play it, as it’s been over-used and over-done,” she explains. “I wanted to remove myself from the burden of holding the electric guitar and move away from what people expect when they hear the instrument.”
This less flashy, more foundational, approach to guitar playing also allowed Cunningham to explore new sounds on the album. “The guitar I have is a Lethbridge guitar which naturally has some more Latin tones. There’s so much soul and rhythm in Latin music and I wanted to make my own interpretation of that with this album.”
Apart from exploring new styles, Revealer has pushed Cunningham to tackle the new subject matter. As an album about her journey to truly uncover herself, I asked her why she felt compelled to put it out at this moment in time.
“Well there was a deadline, I was obligated contractually”, she laughs. “But on a serious level, making music has always been a helpful tool for me. In the last two years, I went through the darkest depths of depression I’d ever felt. So, I wanted to make an album that embodied the feeling of losing your mind and soul a little bit, and also explored how to navigate and talk about loss”.
For Cunningham, it was the physical act of writing the album itself which helped ease her tumultuous feelings. “With some of these songs I didn’t believe myself when I was writing them”, she explains. “But I needed to place some breadcrumbs, to be able to look back and see that’s where I came from, to know I would get out of there.”
She continues: “Sometimes you have to create circumstances for your future self to one day embody, write something you can aspire to. There’s this one song, ‘In From Japan, and there’s this lyric: ‘no one’s holding you back now, and it means go be free, actually enjoy your life. I wrote those words and I hated them because I didn’t feel them. I tried replacing them, but nothing else fit. Eventually, I felt like I needed to keep them there because at some point, it needed to start feeling true to me and not like some corny line.”
With her aversion to having anything fake in her music Cunningham once again impresses me with her down-to-earth attitude. As we finish the call it crops up again as, despite the glamour of touring, she tells me she’s homesick, missing both her husband and her dog. I wish them a swift reunion.
