Madison Cunningham

About this show

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. Ace had to simmer. It follows Revealer, a darkly funny portrait of an artist that won Cunningham her Grammy. Cunningham has long been an artist’s artist, having been working as a songwriter for over a decade. “Early on, I was advised against going to college and going straight to where the music was happening,” says Cunningham, “Instead, I learned by listening and observing some of my favorite artists at work.” On Revealer, she cemented herself as not only a favorite musician of collaborators like John Mayer and Robin Pecknold, but also as a critically lauded artist with a deep fan base. Ace builds off of the success of Revealer, but it is a different record. A slow burn until it wasn’t. It follows a period of writer's block. Of not knowing how to quite put feelings into words. And the way to put feelings into words was to wait. On Revealer and her debut album Who Are You Now, Cunningham says that she was writing songs about heartbreak, but they weren’t about her heartbreak. They were sketches, observations. Cunningham wanted Ace to be emotions first. Heartbreaking and lush and bold. She wanted it to be candid but to also maintain autonomy over her story, for it to always feel like it belonged to her and no one else. It felt scary to write music like that, almost impossible. And it took months for it to click. But then it did. “I shattered and became a new shape,” she says. She moved apartments. The summer was ending. She sat down and writing suddenly felt easy again. She wrote almost every song on Ace in the month of August, 2024.