MADISON CUNNINGHAM

What were you doing when you were 23? You probably weren’t making Grammy-nominated albums. But then, Madison Cunningham isn’t your average twenty-something. The Costa Mesa native might have only that album, Who Are You Now, and her 2014 indie debut Authenticity under her belt, but the now-24-year-old’s star was on the rise long before she received a nod for Best Americana Album from the Academy back in January. She played the iconic Newport Folk Festival last year, and no less than John Mayer has heaped praise on Cunningham’s intricate jazz-inflected guitar work, which pulls inspiration from Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell one minute, Jeff Buckley the next.

Despite all this, the Grammy nod came very much out of the blue. “It was completely unexpected!” says Cunningham from her home in Los Angeles in April. “A lot of people had been stressing to me, ‘Your debut record on a major label is a big statement, it’s your first impression, and you have to figure out what you want that to be’. I think I put a lot of pressure on myself to figure that out. I was more like, ‘I’ve really got to dig deeper and figure out what the heck I actually want to say with my songwriting voice’, because that’s a big deal.

“I think, in some ways, all the pressure that I had felt up until the moment we released the record… the Grammy nomination served to alleviate all that. I was like, ‘Oh, what we did and what we worked for was a good thing’. That’s not to say that the Grammys are the final word on what’s good and what’s not but it changed things in the sense that I didn’t think that the