“You know I’m afraid to write a simple song,” Madison Cunningham sings. This, the opening line of her song “Take Two,” comes after about ten minutes — or has it been twenty, or thirty, since she walked on stage? — of swirling, intricately constructed, decidedly unsimple music. How many songs had there been, before now? Two, three, four? Or had it been one long, multipartite song, variations on theme, and not an “Abbey Road”-like medley? Was that surging lyricless section even a song that exists on streaming platforms? Her vocal lines could have been improvised, but were they not a bit too precise to assume so?
It is hard to tell these things with Cunningham. Her virtuosity, before you are accustomed to it, is a bit disorienting. You have to just settle back in your stance — as I and the rest of the audience did for whatever amount of time that was at the Higher Ground theater in Burlington last Wednesday — and listen to it happen. The problem is that hers is not just one kind of virtuosity, supported by other, lesser proficiencies. It is a totalizing thing, as present in her songwriting and singing as in her ability of the guitar and piano. On her, the spotlight becomes a bit like a Spielbergian spaceship beam, an awed illumination of the extraterrestrial just dropped onto the stage of a small room in the back of a parking lot.
But maybe virtuosity is the wrong word, with the wrong implications. As the friend who I went to the show with pointed out: it’s all “felt.” This is not the cold pyrotechnicality you get from Berklee-trained classical pianists or that strange breed of person who becomes a shredding-and-tapping Instagram guitarist. Cunningham’s skill serves to dazzle, but it also operates in service of emotion. On that front, Joni Mitchell — another Californian lyric-poet with a large palette of harmonic colors — is the obvious analogue. She’s often used as a reference point when a young, long-haired solo artist is playing an acoustic instrument and singing with a certain shrewdness about her interior world, and often the comparison is lazy. But with Cunningham, it’s only appropriate.
Both write with a density and lightness of touch that exist simultaneously, rather than trading off song by song or verse by verse. Anything from Mitchell’s “Blue” works as an example of anything you want to say is good, but take the opening verse of “A Case of You”: “Just before our love got lost you said / “I am as constant as a Northern star” / And I said, “Constantly in the darkness” / Where’s that at? If you want me I’ll be in the bar.” From grand metaphorical pronouncement to “I’m going to the bar,” in the time it takes to unscrew a lid, with nothing extraneous and nothing left out — that kind of poetic economy doesn’t always work in songwriting, but it’s neither strained nor hard to follow with Mitchell.
So it goes with Cunningham at her best. Take the rest of the first verse of “Take Two”: “You know I’m afraid to write a simple song / Not out of shape as you are at being wrong / And the people are now dying in reverse / Are now having to work out the second part.” Sure enough, the song does not remain simple, changing keys and spurning its meter after the second verse. As with many of the songs on her recent record “Ace,” this isn’t unusual. “Wake,” which features Fleet Foxes singer Robin Pecknold, starts out with a piquant, seesawing melody, then finds a new harmonic register, and then a new rhythmic one, but only for as long as the lyric requires before returning to where it started. As on the record, Cunningham manages every such shift on stage with ease. With the assistance of a large pedalboard, and her sideman Jesse Chandler — who played keyboard or various woodwinds on every song — she can do just about whatever she wants.
The best song of the night — and probably the best song on the recent — was “My Full Name.” There’s a certain kind of applause that happens when the audience is a bit too taken aback to fully applaud. There are no whoops or whistles, just hands steadily beginning to clap. So it was after that “My Full Name.” It’s an example of what Cunningham can do when she does write a simpler song — an arpeggiated piano walkdown, an inevitable melody, and words that cannot meaning anything other than what they do: “I’m finding out that I’m allergic to / Every living thing that isn’t you / And as I say it now, I know it’s true.” On the “true” is when the strings come in and she pulls the word out, picking it up again on the next breath and pushing the melody to a heartrending note of non-dissonant dissonance. What can you do, at the end of that one, but hit one hand dumbly against the other?
At certain moments, some may want a simpler show from Cunningham — myself, and herself, apparently included. But why pout at what’s on offer from an artist when you know that it is honest? If the world appears to you in that many colors, how could you write only simple songs? Besides, with most “musically complex” artists, you get the sense that the equation works in reverse: they are trying to force the world into technicolor with the assistance of some overwrought production or senseless key changes or convoluted rhymes. With Cunningham, it is just there: baked in, an elemental substance. It would be hard to go to that show and believe otherwise. You know it because you feel it.
