Sat with her back to the audience, Madison Cunningham is performing an eerie, unreleased ballad, her white dress mirrored in a glossy black upright piano. The theatre is pin-drop silent as the California singer-songwriter’s astonishing voice, classic and characterful, pours into a heavily reverbed microphone.
“That was a funny way to say hello,” she grins afterwards. The “pitch” for this one-off show, part of Celtic Connections festival, she tells us, is that it will comprise almost entirely new songs, from a record not yet announced. It’s a bold gambit – usually fans come to hear the songs they know – but Cunningham has a winning confidence in her rich, complex new material, and how it develops her sound. One song, with a restless piano melody that echoes Joni Mitchell, slips organically into a verse from Cunningham’s Grammy-winning folk album Revealer, the lyrics altered to address the wildfires in her home town: “You’re all I’ve ever known, Los Angeles,” she mourns.
