Madison Cunningham Returns With Ace After Four Years

Madison Cunningham singing on stage.

Madison Cunningham releases her third album for Verve Forecast on 10 October, four years after the last one.

It runs to fourteen tracks and was co-produced with Robbie Lackritz.

Fourteen Tracks Is a Statement

Album lengths have been shrinking for a decade, and fourteen songs is now on the long side of normal.

Streaming economics reward shorter records, because completion rates matter and a listener who abandons a record at track nine has generated fewer plays than one who finishes a ten-track album.

Releasing fourteen anyway is a decision to treat the album as a form rather than as a delivery mechanism, which is a distinction most of the industry has quietly stopped making.

It also means a substantial share of the material will never be played live, since no set list holds fourteen new songs.

Four Years Between Records

The gap since her last album is long by any standard and normal for a working touring musician.

Albums take about a year to write, several months to record and a further stretch to schedule, and touring the previous one occupies most of what is left.

What a four-year gap usually indicates is not slowness but a live business large enough to fill the calendar on its own.

Working With One Co-Producer

Co-producing with a single collaborator rather than assembling a team of producers is the older model and increasingly the minority one.

Records made by committee sound like it, and the usual symptom is a set of songs that each work individually and do not sit together.

One production relationship across fourteen tracks produces a consistent sonic argument, which is the thing an album has that a playlist does not.

A Duet Written in a Blizzard

The single Wake was written in January during a blizzard in Nashville, which is not a routine weather event there.

Cunningham has described it as two people talking at each other while trying to reach an understanding, which is a specific structural description rather than a mood.

Duets built that way require two lines that genuinely disagree, and they are considerably harder to write than a song with a guest vocal on the chorus.

Why She Asked Pecknold

She has said she wanted him specifically because nobody else sounds like him, which is the only good reason to ask for a feature.

The alternative logic, which drives most collaborations, is audience overlap, and it produces records where the guest is interchangeable.

A voice chosen for its timbre is doing compositional work, and the song has to be written to accommodate it rather than around it.

What a Real Duet Requires

The form has largely collapsed into the featured verse, where one artist sings sixteen bars and leaves.

An actual duet needs both voices present through the song, responding to each other, which means the arrangement has to leave room in both registers.

It also requires the two singers to be in the same room, or at least to record with the other performance already in place, which is now the exception rather than the rule.

A Guitarist First

Her reputation among other musicians rests as much on the guitar playing as on the writing.

She works in altered tunings, which changes what chord shapes are physically available and pushes a writer toward voicings they would never find in standard tuning.

That is the mechanism behind a great deal of distinctive guitar-based songwriting, and it is why so many players who sound original turn out to be tuning their instruments differently.

Opening in San Francisco in January

The North American tour opens on 6 January in San Francisco and runs through to 11 April in Minneapolis.

A January start is unusual, since most artists avoid the first weeks of the year on the assumption that nobody has money after Christmas.

The compensation is an empty calendar. A January tour competes with almost nothing, which is worth more than it costs for an artist at theatre scale.

Three Two-Night Stands

The routing includes consecutive nights in Austin, Nashville and Knoxville.

Two nights in one venue is a demand signal, and it is also a set list opportunity, since the second night can differ from the first for an audience that attends both.

Nashville and Knoxville back to back is a Tennessee cluster that most national tours would reduce to a single date.

West Coast Before Everything Else

The early portion covers Portland, Vancouver, Seattle, Boise and Salt Lake City.

Boise and Salt Lake City are frequently skipped entirely, and including them adds days to a routing that could otherwise run straight down the coast.

Cities that rarely receive touring acts tend to reward the ones that come, which is the reasoning behind most inconvenient routing decisions.

Nearly Four Months on the Road

January to April is a long first leg, and it front-loads the album’s touring into the months before festival season begins.

That sequencing is deliberate: an artist who has toured through spring arrives at the summer festival circuit with a band that is already sharp.

The cost is that the record is three months old by the time the largest audiences hear any of it.

Tickets Before the Album

Tickets went on sale in September, several weeks before the album itself arrives.

Selling a tour on the strength of one single is standard practice now, and it works because the audience buying early is the existing one.

It also creates a specific pressure, since those tickets were bought on the basis of material almost nobody has heard.

Verve Forecast and the Third Album

This is her third record for the same label, which is now an unusually stable relationship.

The third album is traditionally where a label decides whether an artist is a long-term proposition, since the first is a bet and the second is a follow-through.

Getting to a third with the same people generally means the touring numbers are working even if the streaming numbers are ordinary.

What Altered Tunings Actually Change

The technical point is worth spelling out, because it explains a great deal about how records like this get written.

In standard tuning a guitarist’s hands fall into shapes learned over years, and those shapes carry harmonic assumptions with them. The same five or six chord voicings appear on thousands of records because they are what the hand does.

Retuning the instrument breaks that. Familiar shapes produce unfamiliar chords, open strings ring against notes they would never normally meet, and the player has to find everything by ear rather than by muscle memory.

What comes out is harmony that sounds composed rather than played, which is why the technique keeps producing songwriters who do not sound like each other.

The Long Album in a Short-Form Era

There is a reasonable argument that a fourteen-track record is simply too long for how people now listen.

The counter-argument is that the audience for this kind of writing is not the audience that abandons records halfway, and that optimising for a listener you do not have costs you the one you do.

Artists who commit to the longer form generally find their audience follows, provided the sequencing earns it. The failures are records that are long because nothing was cut.

Fourteen tracks made with one producer at least suggests the length is a decision rather than an accident.

What Is Actually Being Tested

Two things. Whether a fourteen-track album holds together as one argument, which is the only justification for that length.

And whether four months of touring starting in January builds the audience that a four-year gap risks losing.

Fourteen songs, one producer, a blizzard in Tennessee, and a first night in San Francisco.

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