Soon after Madison Cunningham won her first Grammy, early in February 2023, a hero invited her to breakfast.
Wendy Melvoin had been the guitarist at Prince’s side in the Revolution four decades earlier and had endured the music industry’s wild vicissitudes — dream sessions, dead friends, dramatic reunions. She liked what she heard in Cunningham’s “Revealer,” which won best folk album. But she was surprised to learn that Cunningham, then 26, had been married for five years to a man she’d met as a teenager in church.
She told Cunningham she sensed a problem: “You have something to say, and you aren’t saying it yet.”
Cunningham climbed into Melvoin’s truck and rode through Los Angeles, listening to songs. Melvoin played a Martha Wainwright tune, its title a string of expletives and its howled lyrics the antithesis of an apology for the mess life had made. Cunningham bawled.
“Martha had that moment: I’m going to say all the things that I feel,” Cunningham said, smiling during a recent video call from her Los Angeles apartment, two weeks before turning 29. “There was all this anger in me that had gone unexpressed. I was afraid of it. Wendy was the dog hearing the earthquake before it happened.”
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