By the time Madison Cunningham finished Revealer, she was somewhere between enlightenment and exhaustion — which, for an artist who once got mistaken for the help at a Grammy party, tracks perfectly. “I wore all black,” she laughs. “A bunch of people gave me their drinks because they thought I was working there.” The story lands somewhere between humiliating and holy, which is also the line Cunningham walks best.
Three Grammy nominations in and she’s still mildly allergic to the idea of “making it.” “The first time it happened, it felt like a break in the system or something,” she says. “Like an accident.” But the accidents keep happening, and Revealer — an album she describes as a hard, unfun record to make — turned into her best yet. “Writing it was never a happy place for me,” she admits. “It was a duty. To myself. To work things out. It wasn’t about chasing some idea of success.”
It’s easy to forget that “success” in Cunningham’s world means building art from chaos, grief, and absurdity — sometimes literally. When she lost her grandmother during the pandemic, it wasn’t just a private tragedy; it became a sort of scaffolding for the record. “I think it’s important not to be clear when nothing is clear,” she says. “Don’t write from an unrealistic place because you wish it was that way. Write from where you are.”
That bluntness threads through Revealer’s poetry — songs that sound like dispatches from a moving van, spiritual breakdowns written in 7/8 time. The record begins with “All I’ve Ever Known,” a restless road song in the classic second-album tradition. “I do like the feeling of a record being in transit,” she says. “You’re in the van for a while, then it crashes, and suddenly you’re just standing there, on land again, trying to figure out what the hell just happened.”
If that crash has a soundtrack, it’s “Hospital,” which opens with one of the year’s best opening lines: “You’ll never see me dying on screen or microscope.” She grins when asked about it. “I liked the idea of someone being bratty to a person trying to pry into their life,” she says. “They’re showing their cards the whole time, but they’ve got too much ego to realize it.”
Even Cunningham’s lyrical misfires have grace notes. When I tell her I’d misheard her chorus — “I’m always one man down” — as “I’m always warming down,” she doesn’t flinch. “That’s good!” she says. “I’m always warming down — I’ve never thought about that. You warm up to something, but warming down? That’s good.”
It’s that humility — or maybe that willingness to be haunted — that makes her one of the rare modern songwriters who actually earns the Jeff Buckley comparisons she keeps getting. “He really affected me,” she says quietly. “I became obsessed. He felt like a ghost that never left the room.” When she covered “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” for her Wednesday EP, it wasn’t out of nostalgia; it was compulsion. “It was desperation,” she laughs. “We wanted to print vinyl, but the EP was too short. So we added songs until it was long enough.” The result: a haunting Buckley take and a killer version of Paul Simon’s “Poses.”
Still, for all the reverence and grief that swirls through her work, Cunningham’s not a tragic figure — she’s too funny for that. When asked about working with Matt Chamberlain, the legendary drummer whose résumé reads like a playlist of every great record from the past 25 years, she’s practically giddy. “He’s a stone-cold killer,” she says. “Anywhere,” their collaboration in 7/8, came together in four takes. “He hit the target every time. It kind of blew my mind.”
Cunningham calls Revealer the moment she became “an adult in songwriting.” It’s not that she stopped feeling lost — just that she found ways to make being lost sound beautiful. “The best songs write you out of situations,” she says. “Even if you don’t know where you’re going, you start to find your way back.”
And maybe that’s what “warming down” really means — not cooling off, not fading out, but giving yourself permission to come back down to earth.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
