Grammy-winning singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Madison Cunningham returned to Atlanta for the first time since 2023 to bring her newest album “Ace” to Variety Playhouse on March 27.
Surrounded by grassy reeds and accompanied by the sounds of birdsong and flowing water, Cunningham wordlessly made her way to her piano bench at 9 p.m. sharp, sitting in profile. Somehow both unassuming and impossibly magnetic, before even making a sound, Cunningham had already enchanted the audience. Dressed in billowing blues, she resembled a mystical water spirit, inviting the audience into the river for a night of revelry. Rapt, they dove right in.
Released in October 2025, “Ace” encompasses heartbreak and loss of self after a divorce. The album itself is balletic in its sweeping precision, yet achingly raw and unreserved in a way that sets itself apart from her past work.
An ‘Artists’ Artist’
Conveying emotional sincerity was Cunningham’s goal for the record as opposed to technical finesse. Forgoing demos and rerecording, the first takes of each song are what you hear on the album. Referencing a book titled “My Name is Asher Lev,” in which a young artist gets frustrated that the water he tries to paint looks white or blue rather than clear, Cunningham said, “I think the whole mission of a songwriter is to figure out how to make the water look like actual water. I’m trying to make my words feel like clear water more and more and not like a stick figure drawing of water.”
That’s how Cunningham’s music feels: real and almost tangible, like you could run your hand through the lush instrumentation and wrap your fingers around her lyrics. Part of that is due to the tight melodic and thematic cohesion throughout the record. It opens with “Shatter into Form I” and blossoms further two-thirds of the way through with “Shatter into Form II,” two piano interludes that display the mantra she held onto throughout the writing and recording process.
“It was a promise that even though I felt like I was constantly brittle and kept breaking over and over again, I was about to meet a version of myself that I really loved or liked, even,” she said. “That’s all I care about. I just want to like myself.”
As her fourth studio album, “Ace” shows that Cunningham has clearly grown more comfortable with being intimately candid in her music.
“I feel like this is the record I always wanted to make, and I don’t know why it took me that amount of time to get there,” Cunningham said. “And also, I do know why: because it takes a lifetime to be acquainted with yourself and to know what you’re all right with leaving in the past, and what you’re all right with being a part of your ‘brand’ or not.”
Cunningham spurns the concept of “brands” and titles laden with pressure. “There are no rules about when and where and what time you choose to change or better yourself,” she said. Due to her technical musical prowess – plus six Grammy nominations and one win for her 2022 album “Revealer” – she’s garnered the colloquial title of “the artists’ artist.” But Cunningham admitted that she doesn’t know what that title means or if she even wants it.
“I always get afraid that it means I’m pretentious, which is the last thing I want to be categorized as,” she said. “But I also believe that it’s said with kindness.”
Though Cunningham’s art is thoroughly impressive and her live performances even more so, pretension is nowhere to be found. On stage, when Cunningham isn’t lost in the music, she’s wearing a genuine smile or thanking the audience for sharing the night with her. It’s always a joy when you can visibly see an artist taking pride in their work and loving what they do.
Run of Show
The concert opened with “Shatter into Form I,” then moved right into “Shore,” a tender, vulnerable track about the shame of missing someone who caused emotional hurt. Cunningham and Jesse Chandler, one of her leading musical collaborators on “Ace,” were stationed on opposite sides of the stage – perhaps referencing the lyrical extremes and themes of separation Cunningham plays with on the album.
“The line you keep between your anger and me,” she sings on the balladic “Take Two” before launching into “All I’ve Ever Known,” the bouncy, yet desperate opening track of “Revealer.” It’s clear at this point that before us are two virtuosos creating a musical soundscape you could live inside. Chandler, playing flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, keys, and Mellotron – sometimes two simultaneously – and Cunningham with her powerful vocals and dexterous piano and guitar fingerpicking skills make it sound like there’s a full band on stage.
We see more opposite poles like, “It’s a little too narrow, / a little too wide” on “Skeletree,” a crowd favorite which relieves the set’s breathless, unyielding pace from the first four songs leading directly into each other; Cunningham starts the piece on piano and stands to finish on guitar, facing the audience for the first time. The first words she speaks of the entire night don’t come until after “Skeletree” concludes: a simple, humble, “What the f*ck’s up, Atlanta?”
There’s the sense that the show has only just begun when Cunningham swings into “Mummy.” “All in time and suddenly,” she sings, displaying even more antitheses. The duo expertly loops musical phrases, speaking to each other in a silent, obviously well-practiced language. Near the end of the quiet, ethereal piece, the audience gasps as Cunningham harmonizes in perfect tone and timbre with Chandler’s woodwind – in that moment, she herself becomes a woodwind, an instrument, a vessel of her music. It’s utterly hypnotizing.
She shatters the trance with “Break the Jaw,” a percussive, angry track about the violence of broken trust and the lamentation of trusting someone you shouldn’t have. She chants “I put my weight in your arms, / and I fell right through,” then wails “I may never forgive you, you may never forgive me. / We may never forgive each other, / but I may never, I may never forgive myself.”
The tension is calmed with an old favorite single, “Broken Harvest,” then revs back up again with the relentless “Golden Gate (On and On).” After an explosive performance of “Hospital,” one of Cunningham’s most well-loved songs judging by the raucous cheers at the first notes, she looks into the audience, grinning, and says, “Thank you. Music’s fun.”
The wind-down begins with “Wake,” Cunningham’s collaboration with Fleet Foxes, which sounds like birdsong, trilling and bright. She drifts back to her piano for “Shatter into Form II” – played exactly at 10 p.m., again displaying the duo’s clockwork efficiency and precision. She then plays “My Full Name,” a mournful song about the intimacy of separating from someone that you knew well. Then comes “Goodwill,” the penultimate song on the setlist which included a cathartic, extensive jam session.
We surface from the river with “Best of Us.” Blue lights swirl behind Cunningham and Chandler as they play the lullaby, singing the audience goodnight. It’s the perfect closing track of the album and the perfect send-off for a live show.
A standing ovation accompanied the duo offstage, which lasted until Cunningham came back on alone. She took a moment to tell the audience that “this is [her] favorite thing in the world to do” and thanked them for being there before playing “Life According to Rachael” for the encore. It’s a song from “Revealer” about grief, specifically Cunningham losing her grandmother. Sniffles from the audience could be heard in the quiet between verses. She earned a second standing ovation as she walked off and the house lights went up – promptly at 10:30 p.m.
When It’s Time to Say Goodbye
“Ace” came together in one sweet rush in August 2024. Cunningham had just moved apartments and was bursting with inspiration.
“It’s the best when everything happens all at once, when you’re not having to, you know, kind of chase down lyrics for a really cool melody, or vice versa,” she said. The emphasis on piano over the guitar that prevails on her previous work was due to her father’s piano being gifted to her. “I love the way it sounds,” she said. “I was just kind of obsessively playing it for probably two years straight, and songs just started to kind of happen there.”
Though the album is a little different from what her fans are used to, it’s still undeniably Madison Cunningham.
“I’ve started to notice maybe a melodic bend that I have, or like I think I have come to start to write melodies in a more specific way,” she said about the thread that carries through her albums. “And I think that melodies are so wonderful, because they can mutate, and they can kind of take any environment and still feel like you recognize who the person is.”
A heartbreak album seems to be a sort of rite of passage for every singer, but Cunningham doesn’t want to believe the adage that artists do their best work heartbroken.
“I think artists do their quickest work when they’re heartbroken,” she said. “There’s an urgency that happens when you’re in the thick of it, right? It’s almost like relieving an infection or something.”
Despite how quickly the album came together and the high that came from that, Cunningham never wants to return to that emotional space.
“People keep themselves in perpetual sadness and heartbreak, they romanticize that because they believe that that’s the like, fountain of songwriting youth or something, and it’s not,” she said. “I hated that time as much as there was so much to love about it, too, and it brought me where I’m at today, but I like being finally happy. I think it is such a task and a beautiful one to write from a place of love and happiness, and I think I’m more impressed, actually, sometimes by those records.”
The tour began in January on the west coast and Midwest, then she took the show to Europe in February and early March. With Atlanta being the second city on the third leg of the tour, the “Ace” era is coming to a bittersweet end. Before the leg began, Cunningham said, “I get this feeling that since we’ve just put in so much groundwork in these last two tours that this one’s going to feel like the most beautiful send off of this chapter.”
“I’m dreading [the end] too, because I don’t want to say goodbye,” she said. “Maybe I have my own version of treasuring pain and being afraid of what’s next and being afraid to write those happy songs, you know, I’m super afraid of that, and really excited, too. Excited to have something happy to write about.”
You can listen to “Ace” on any streaming platform, and check out “Ace” live performances here.
