Songs of the Week 2026: Take 2

Neil Morton

FEATURED SONG OF THE WEEK

Break The Jaw: Madison Cunningham

Watching Madison Cunningham flit from piano to various guitars with Jesse Chandler as a multi-tasking sidekick, it was hard to believe we weren’t hearing a full band. Her show at Shepherd’s Bush Theatre was a jazz-infused tour de force with her latest album Ace high on the agenda. Here was a songwriter stretching the boundaries of risk, musically and emotionally, her stately voice the most wondrous instrument of all.

The challenging songs on the album were written towards the end of 2024 in the wake of a traumatic divorce. Following their move from Orange County in California to Los Angeles, the daughter of a pastor and the teenage sweetheart she met at church had decided to part after five years of marriage. We are spared the details but the pain seeps through every line. Ace is a diary of a fracturing relationship with chapters on true love, vulnerability, heartache, disillusion and forgiveness.

Break The Jaw, our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com, emerged from a band jam with its compelling rhythms and lyrically feels like a dispatch from the eye of a personal storm.

I’m walking around

Dragging along

A heart wide open

As a broken jaw

And it’s never been so quiet

In the pressure machine…

I put my weight in your arms and I fell right through

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

I abandon my post

And you pick at the latch

You can’t find the heart

So you lean on the craft

But broken people

Don’t have to break people too

Cunningham has been described as the musician’s musician so players in the room might have found this song jaw-droppingly impressive. We prefer to be more inclusive and regard her as the discerning listener’s musician. Ace is not as accessible as her 2022 Grammy-winning record, Revealer, and more introspective than its predecessor, from which she selected Life According To Raechel as a solo encore at Shepherd’s Bush. This gorgeous love letter to her grandmother is a former Song of the Week here.

On our latest choice Break The Jaw, Cunningham’s jagged, jazzy guitar displays chamber pop dramatics typical of the off-kilter melodies beloved of Rufus and Martha Wainwright. We thought Skeletree (‘Did I get your love/ At the cost of my mind?’) could not be surpassed for its swaying intensity and storytelling heft but Break The Jaw takes us as deep into her dismantling as we are entitled to travel.

Elsewhere the Californian achieves an almost classical sophistication in beautifully intimate ballads such as Shore, the Joni-esque Take Two and My Full Name. The young Madison was experimenting with open tunings before she discovered Joni Mitchell; secular sounds took time to woo her away from the constrictions of megachurch worship music. All of her third studio album was written in the tuning of CGDFAC, which offered infinite sonic possibilities, and mainly on the gift of a piano from her father.

Cunningham is celebrated for her indie folk guitar virtuosity but piano was the instrument she mastered first as a youngster and Ace is largely a piano-led collection of songs. ‘I wanted to play guitar more like a pianist,’ she told Bluegrass Situation. To her tone is everything, and co-producer Robbie Lackritz helped achieve the goal.

On tour the stage has been illuminated to appear as if she and Chandler are performing underwater amid a set of marshy reeds and rocks. Chandler, whose playing and arrangements contribute artfully to the new album, floats subtly between clarinet, flute, saxes and other instruments as well as synth and loops.

That submerged setting seemed apt for the most memorable image of My Full Name, the album’s lead single…

There’s a water leak the size of Berlin

Coming from this vessel that we’re in

Running from my eyes to your chin

Love’s a kind of sorrow worth saving

Wake, her duet with Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold, who she calls ‘the king of harmonies’, is a conversation between partners nearing the end of their relationship. ‘Robin’s voice is just like a warm fire.’ The track, the first she wrote in that alternate tuning, contains her favourite lines on the record. Devastating lines too…

As the grand illusion frays

It hits me as I drive away

I’ll never see your hair go grey

Her approach to melody is fearlessly innovative, the candour of her lyrics unflinching. ‘It’s been a really challenging record to live inside of,’ she told Line Of Best Fit. ‘I just didn’t think that it was still going to hold all of this emotional weight, and it really does. They’re still alive in me, almost like radiation or something left over from a big explosion. It feels like there are a lot of landmines around talking about this record and living with it.’

At 29 Cunningham has survived a period of turbulence – married young, divorced young – normally experienced by people much older than her. Instead of retreating, she turned the ordeal into a meditation on the difference between happiness and contentment. ‘Happiness is hollow and shiny, contentment is rooted and rich and doesn’t deny sadness or joy,’ she told Leo Sidran on his Third Story podcast. ‘We want to numb pain away and that just means you numb eveything else too. Contentment isn’t afraid of the feeling of pain.’

Resilience and hope arrive in the shape of the album’s graceful closing track Best Of Us. ‘Who gave up first?/ That depends on who is lying/ Maybe the best of us are only good at trying.’ She acknowledges that the relationship is over, but the burden no longer feels calamitous. ‘I’m learning how to be alone and to not feel loneliness. Those don’t have to be the same thing.’ Like the word Ace, it has more than one meaning. Low or high, the suit has to be hearts.

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