Join Grammy-award winner Madison Cunningham in the Hunter Center for a night of folk music following the release of her latest album, Ace.

With support from Julia Cumming

Depending on the game, an Ace can be the highest or lowest card, zero or infinity. A breakup feels similar—one path crumbles, while all others remain infinitely possible. How do you write about heartbreak when you’re going through it? Ace, Grammy award-winner Madison Cunningham’s third record for Verve Forecast, tracks every part of it: falling out of love, having your heart broken, and then falling in love again. Co-produced by Cunningham and Robbie Lackritz (Feist, Rilo Kiley, Bahamas, Peach Pit), the fourteen-track album is honest and full of heart, even as it breaks.

Ace builds off of the success of Revealer (2022), a darkly funny portrait of an artist that won Cunningham her Grammy for “Best Folk Album,” but it is a different record. A slow burn until it wasn’t. It follows a period of writer’s block. On Revealer and her debut album Who Are You Now (2019), Cunningham says that she was writing songs about heartbreak, but they weren’t about her heartbreak. They were sketches, observations. Cunningham wanted Ace to be emotions first. Heartbreaking and lush and bold. Cunningham’s first single from Ace, “My Full Name,” was released to praise by PASTE who calls the lyrics, “simultaneously sprawling and intimate,” recalling “an ancient work of poetry.”

On Ace, which Cunningham serves as co-producer, she wanted piano to move into the foreground. “I wanted it to feel like a mountain peak,” says Cunningham, “I wanted Ace to feel like a mountain we built together.” Ace is a record that feels alive and lush in all the ways Cunningham hoped for when she started writing. It is a record of mastery and honesty. Cunningham loves every single song on it. You can tell.

About Julia Cumming: 

Drop the needle on Julia Cumming’s solo debut Julia and the very first notes you hear are her voice. A clear, and unadorned declaration of stepping out on her own. Within seconds, she sings her agency into being, fingers meet the piano keys, striking just the sparest of chords. As the hi-hat kicks in, Julia sweetly recites a litany of ways that she has been told she’s too much or not enough, wrapped in halcyon production that has echoes of Burt Bacharach and Dionne Warwick. Album opener, and debut single “My Life” packs a punch in a warm embrace. A belted-out proclamation of liberation — doubters, misogynists, and the industry be damned. Not only is she not too much, but she has always been enough.This thesis statement of a song was the key that unlocked a creative door that New York City-born multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, and Sunflower Bean’s bassist, Julia Cumming, had been waiting for since her teens.