Savannah Music Festival: Singer-songwriter Madison Cunningham needs to make music

Madison Cunningham is worried her life is so consumed by music that she needs some different influences, so she has taken up bike riding. She claims to be introverted, yet she radiates a sage-like wisdom while only in her mid-twenties and is entirely open about her grief, guilt and growing up a sheltered kid in a conservative Christian family that really only listened to contemporary Christian music.  That didn’t stop here from innovating.

At age 6, she started playing with a guitar and without an awareness of popular music, she experimented with open tuning and unique chord progressions that broke the rules of the key. At 16, she transitioned to popular music via the gospel influences of Aretha Franklin, which led her to Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack. By 17, she was listening to “all her favorite stuff” like Jeff Buckley, Bjork and Fiona Apple, and playing in a high school band.

Her last two albums are testament to this biography. Having been nominated for best Americana Grammy for her first album, Who Are You Now, she was nominated and won Best Folk Grammy for her newest album, Revealer.  Despite these genres, she sees herself as possibly indie-alternative, but clearly none of this matters to her. She just needs to make music.

Listening to Revealer musically, the orchestration on songs like “Sunshine Over The Counter” feel a little like Sufjan Stevens, with a tense cacophony of dreamy reed instruments, fun and slightly off in the best way. Clearly, she takes delight in crossing genres and defying categorization. On “All I’ve Ever Known” or “Anywhere” there is a hypnotic cyclical chord progression of the guitar, which is almost African, specifically Malian. Lyrically she channels the songwriting of Leonard Cohen. In “Something to Believe In” she writes Well I've spent my life looking/ For a truth I can bear/ But kingdoms are just sand/ And a throne is just a chair/ Dreams are born to grow up/ To die, and tear/ and spring again In the summer air.

For our brief chat I was in the Bull Street library and she was sitting at a Parisian café just having opened for John Mayer the night before. I told her I wasn’t a conventional music writer, rather I was an English and Creative Writing professor which helped open her up.

“That was my favorite audience of the whole tour. I would stop playing for just a couple of seconds to hear how quiet and engaged 20,000 people could be. You couldn’t hear a f-ing soul move. I can’t describe how ominous that felt. There were legions of people being respectful all together and I was so keen to not waste those moments and I will never forget that.”

My first exposure to your work was  “Life According to Racheal” on an NPR Tiny Desk concert. It was lyrical, sparse, and very intentional. Then when I heard it on the album, I felt Leonard Cohen. Maybe because it explores the mysticism of loss and the weight of stark simplicity. Were your eyes green or were they blue, /I forgot to ask you. You’ve talked a lot about the subject matter of that song, but can you talk a little about where the tools to write it came from?

"Yeah, that’s a great, great question and only an English professor could ask it like that (laughs). I think it was just  honestly that at the time my grandmother died, I was in a writing cycle, so I was very devoted and dedicated to just waking up and trying to write a song a week. So, I kind of had these methods of how to write things that were interesting but simple, trying to find the simplest truths and trying to cut away at the shrubbery of my musical interests because sometimes that part of me can get overgrown.

I love music and I love for it to go as deep as it possibly can but not at the detriment of what’s being said. With that song in particular I was working toward and trying to simplify my writing to get at a deeper truth that met me in that moment of grief. Honestly the grief did a bunch of the writing. I don’t mean to sound overly spiritual about it but that was the experience. It was a need more than a want. That was the easiest song I have ever written. It just happened. Of course, there is practice and rehearsal for when moments like that meet you."

When approaching a song, do the lyrics come first, or is it the melody, or do they work in tandem? What’s the process?

"It doesn’t really matter what starts first. Whatever comes first is where I jump off. With “Life According to Rachel” the whole thing felt cosmic because I was with friends in Montana and 3 days before my grandmother died I literally had the chorus melody in my head and thought what an interesting sequence and sang it into my phone. And then she passed, and I remember being immobile and not knowing how to process it. Later that week I went back to that melody and the words just fell into place. Usually if I start with a melody, it’s almost like a curse because it takes a lot longer to find the lyrics.  But this was mysterious because it was so easy. I guess I didn’t have to figure out the emotions because they were clearly sadness and guilt and grief and loss and that is what came across."

“Your Hate Could Power a Train” is likely where the Fiona Apple comparisons come from, but you have so much more going on there musically. The abrupt changes in tempo and your unique guitar tuning work like some amalgamation of alt-indie-prog rock. Can you walk us through that song a little?

"I found that strange twisted and curvy progression through this tuning I often play, and out of boredom I discovered this weird chromatic line that felt syncopated and angry. I felt like it led me to this well-spring of anger I had in myself about specific manipulative people that waltzed in and out of my life. The title had been bouncing around for a couple of weeks and then I found that chorus. I finished the lyrics as I was walking into the studio to record it. Anger is the best vehicle for being deliberate sometimes. It pushes you off an edge in a necessary way. I am an introverted person and take things on the chin all the time and suffer quietly. Pushed to a certain point, I have to say something."

That’s a good segue to “Our Rebellion” Have you ever thought of “Our Rebellion” as a metaphor for the relationship you have with your music and songwriting, If love is our rebellion/put me on the frontlines.

"F- yeah, that’s such a good way to put that. I was in a relationship at the time, so I thought I was writing it about that but thinking of it as being written though the lens of my music actually, maybe, makes more sense in hindsight. The musical freedom to do whatever I wish is something I will always be fighting for."

What can we expect when we see you here in Savannah?

"Well, it’s going to be fascinating because I am playing with Juana Molina, one of my biggest influences and she is going to blow everyone away. Our goal is to play music together on one another’s songs and then play separately and then do a few improvised tunes so it’s gonna be a fascinating stretch for both of us and we are excited about the creative challenge."

If You Go >>

What: Savannah Music Festival presents Madison Cunningham with Juana Molina

When: 7 p.m. and 9 p.m., April 11

Where: Trustees Theater, 216 E. Broughton St.

Tickets: $42

Info: savannahmusicfestival.org

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: singer-songwriter madison cunningham performs with juana molina at SMF