10 minutes with...Madison Cunningham
The Grammy®-winning singer-songwriter brings her distinctive voice to MASS MoCA
Fall 2026
Madison Cunningham has built a career out of finding beauty in musical contradictions. Her songs can be intricate without sacrificing intimacy, cerebral without losing emotional immediacy, and rooted in folk traditions while freely absorbing elements of rock, pop, jazz, and experimental music. On Friday, September 25, the singer, songwriter, and guitarist brings The Ace Tour to MASS MoCA’s Hunter Center in North Adams. She will perform an intimate, stripped-down format accompanied by multi- instrumentalist Jesse Chandler, with special guest Julia Cumming. The performance marks a return to MASS MoCA for Cunningham, who appeared there with Andrew Bird in 2019. Following the release of her third studio album, Revealer, which won a Grammy® in 2023 for Best Folk Album, Cunningham turned away from the observational distance that had characterized some of her earlier songwriting and placed herself squarely inside the story. Her latest album, Ace, was written largely during a concentrated creative period following heartbreak and writer’s block. Ace traces the dissolution of a relationship, its emotional aftermath, and the possibility of beginning again. The record also brought a musical reset: Cunningham, long celebrated for her distinctive guitar playing, increasingly gravitated toward piano, allowing the unfamiliar instrument to alter both her songwriting and her relationship with the guitar.
You’ve described Ace as the first time the heartbreak and relationship dynamics you were writing about were unmistakably your own rather than something you were observing from a distance. Does that feel like a fair description?
Yeah. I think that’s how I was describing it to people. All of the years of me being a younger writer were so much about being an observer, and that’s how I started painting my creative world. This time, I was the subject, not the observer, in the telling of this specific story. It was a completely different writing challenge, and there were different hang- ups this time.
What was it like bringing that degree of autobiographical and emotional honesty into the music?
The whole time, I was caught in this in-between of feeling like I was saying too much and too little. I think maybe that meant I was in the right place. That’s now the feeling I’m looking for when writing something that feels fraught with emotional honesty. I think it’s of utmost importance to keep making the picture more and more translucent, but there’s such an interesting line to walk between privacy and secrecy. I don’t really want to keep secrets, but I also want to have the stories that are meant to be mine versus the ones that are meant to be forward-facing. It’s still confusing to me to know what my threshold is there, but
I found it to be very cathartic this time. I felt like I wrote myself out of a pretty deep ditch. It felt liberating, but it came with a lot. I still feel the weight of those words, and they’re hard to talk about.
Although guitar is your primary instrument, piano takes centerstage on parts of Ace, and at times it feels like the emotional center of the record. What did the instrument allow you to express differently?
Piano always feels like a softer landing. It’s just, by nature, very beautiful. I thought it was interesting to use that as a way to soften the blow a little bit of some of the things I would say. At the same time, it wasn’t that calculated while it was happening. I was just falling in love with piano again. In the personal identity crisis I was going through, I kind of threw everything out, and guitar was one of those big things for me because there was too much mounting pressure around that instrument. It felt really great to liberate myself with something that I was less familiar with. Cool things came out of my sort of juvenile relationship with the piano. I needed to be a beginner in a very real sense again, and it felt really nice to do that in musical form and see what it led me to. It led me to a lot of my strengths. It made my strengths on guitar a lot clearer, and it made me want to play guitar differently. It felt like there was some accidental metaphor happening there, but really, I was just enjoying it.
On “Wake,” your collaboration with Robin Pecknold feels less like a conventional guest feature than two musical voices occupying the same emotional landscape. How did working with him impact the song?
I’ve been such a big fan of Fleet Foxes since I was in high school. Randomly, probably in 2023, we ended up at a couple of the same festivals, and I caught a couple of their sets. I was just like, “This has got to be one of the best live bands I’ve ever seen.” That started to get my wheels turning. Robin’s voice is so classic. You put it anywhere, and you know it’s him.I thought it would be cool to have an identifiable voice that could also blend perfectly, and that’s literally everything I pictured he would do. He did, and more. He was such a professional and made it very clear: “I won’t leave until it’s right for you.” And it was right immediately. He’s such a prolific singer, writer, and performer. He cares so deeply. I’ve never met anyone who’s cared more about songs and music than that guy.
You’ve also worked with Lucy Dacus. How did that collaboration come about, and how was that experience different?
Lucy was a total surprise. I didn’t know that she knew about me. The way we met was that I was walking down a street past this sushi restaurant. She was in the window, and she knocked on the window and was like, “Come inside.” I walked in and said, “Oh, so nice to meet you. I didn’t know you knew who I was.” She was so friendly and kind and almost immediately said, “No shot you would want to play on this record?” Things like that don’t ever really happen. It felt a lot more kismet—which is one of my favorite words. It was spontaneous and kind, and it made me excited about living around the corner from cool things happening all the time because you never know who you’re going to meet, what that’ll spark, and where it’ll take you. Lucy is such a wonderful human being. She’s such a star and so many people respect her, but I was taken aback by her kindness and her genuine humanity.
Some descriptions of your recent performances have emphasized how spacious, cinematic, and atmospheric they feel. Was that something you consciously wanted to develop for The Ace Tour?
Yeah. The whole time leading up to making these shows, the thing I kept saying was, “I want it to bean experience. I want people to not get what they expected out of this.” I wanted to take my whole band, and there were some logistical things around that weren’t going to work this time. I was heartbroken about it, but then that quickly turned into creative limitation. Jesse and I went on the road together, and we were like, “Okay, how can we get as much mileage as possible out of basically just having two stations?” I built a little looper station.He built a ton of looping and delay stuff with all of his woodwinds, and we decided to make it this living, breathing medley, where each thing bridges into the next. It was so satisfying to find a way to incorporate older things, too, and put them through the filter of the Ace world. We were going to play things that people would like to hear, but keep them in the feeling of this medley. Some parts of the show, we wouldn’t know how we would get to the next place. We would just let those be two-minute improvisations, and that kept everything pretty on its toes and exciting the whole time.
You’ve performed at MASS MoCA before, with Andrew Bird in 2019 at the FreshGrass Festival. What do you remember about that experience?
We were on an outdoor stage, and there was a festival happening. It was really gorgeous. I couldn’t believe that we had access to all of the exhibits, and we walked around. I did a virtual reality thing where I was flying this plane, and it’ll stick in my memory for a long time. I met Amy Helm there, and I saw my friend Aoife O’Donovan play. It was very special.
You’ve built a career where musical exploration and artistic identity remain central. What advice would you give young musicians trying to protect that creative freedom while also finding an audience?
I think saying “no” to things that don’t feel aligned with you at the beginning feels harder, but it gets so much easier the older you get. It really does set the precedent for what you are giving yourself permission to do in the future. So, I would say get really clear on what it is that is the most important thing to you and don’t budge unless there’s a really good reason for budging.
-Benjamin Lerner
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