"Sadness is such a common language": Madison Cunningham on songwriting, sorrow and the Beatles

Acclaimed singer-songwriter Madison Cunningham joined host Kenneth Womack to talk about the Beatles song that blew her mind, the sadness in songwriting, her Grammy-Award winning album "Revealer" and much more on "Everything Fab Four," a podcast co-produced by me and Womack (a music scholar who also writes about pop music for Salon) and distributed by Salon.

Cunningham, who says her grandmother was a "fabulous" guitar player, took up the instrument as a child and began writing songs by the age of eight. As she told Womack, though her father was also a guitarist, she didn't hear a lot of popular music around the house and specifically remembers him saying, "I just don't like the Beatles." Being young, she "didn't have any context for who that was." A few years later, when she was 17 and working on her own album, a producer gave her copies of the "Rubber Soul" and "Abbey Road" albums as a graduation gift.

At the time, Cunningham had a job that included delivering cookies around Orange County for a local business. "I was driving my grandpa's old truck, which had no air conditioning but did have a CD player, so I put in one of the albums and 'Come Together' started playing. All of a sudden, it was like everything just kind of stopped and became still, because I had heard these songs out in the wild, but I was putting a name to the voice for the first time."

Having not rolled the truck windows down so she could better hear the music, all the cookies melted. "The lady I was delivering them to was so pissed, but my defense was, 'Have you ever heard Abbey Road?' It just completely changed the musical landscape for me."

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Now an accomplished musician herself, Cunningham has famously covered the Beatles' "In My Life" (with Mike Viola), and of course, written plenty of her own songs that strike an emotional chord with listeners. "We're all in tune with our sadness, more than our own happiness," she explained to Womack. "It's rooted. Any time somebody sings to it, people can relate. Sadness is such a common language."

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In terms of the songwriting process, she said, "A good lyric is always earned. The irony is that the most effortless-looking things take so much effort. That's kind of the deal. There are times when you've written a song and think, 'I need to buy myself a drink, that was good!' I mean, can you even imagine being the Beatles?"

Listen to the entire conversation with Madison Cunningham on "Everything Fab Four" and subscribe via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google, or wherever you're listening. "Everything Fab Four" is distributed by Salon.

Host Kenneth Womack is the author of a two-volume biography on Beatles producer George Martin and the bestselling books "Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles" and "John Lennon, 1980: The Last Days in the Life." His latest project is the authorized biography and archives of Beatles road manager Mal Evans, due out in November 2023.