FEATURE: Spotlight: Madison McFerrin

FEATURE:

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: VAM Studio

Madison McFerrin

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I was pretty sure that I had…

written a Spotlight feature about the wonderful Madison McFerrin. Maybe she can correct me but, looking through the archives, there does not seem to be one! Rectifying this, I wanted to explore an artist who I have been following for a while. Her debut album, I Hope You Can Forgive Me, was released in 2023. I raved about it when it came out. Her new album, SCORPIO, was released on 24th June. It is another fabulous album from an artist that people need to know about. Perhaps more acclaimed in her native U.S., there are fans here in the U.K. that would love to see her perform. I will end with a review for SCORPIO. However, before getting there, I want to include a few interviews from earlier this year. Maybe it does not go into as much depth about SCORPIO as other interviews. However, FLOOD Magazine recently chatted with Madison McFerrin about a successful Tiny Desk performance and a remarkable second studio album. This stood out to me:

“McFerrin is thriving, fresh off a successful Tiny Desk, a new album—Scorpio—and a blooming relationship through it all. So when she tells you how well she’s doing, understand: this is not bragging, it’s the factual self-assessment of an artist objectively on the rise. “[The Tiny Desk video], in terms of the numbers that I’ve been seeing, has been doing better than a lot of the videos in the last couple of months,” she tells me frankly one sunny Los Angeles morning over Zoom about a month prior to the album drop. “I’m really excited because I think I’m a really great performer, and I think that the fact that now people get to see that is only going to help expand my career, because performing is also my favorite thing to do. I’m really grateful to have had the opportunity to do it.”

This is Madison: no aw-shucks-who-me? false modesty, which can be so grating anyway. She’s ever humble and ever grateful, but we both know the drill. If she weren’t also very, very talented, we wouldn’t be talking about her music. So let’s talk about her music: Her instrument is her voice, layered over itself and looped back to create smooth and funky soul a cappella harmonies unique in the modern pop canon. “I hear harmony in my head and can sing it best—it takes me a second to figure it out on the piano, but if I hear harmony in my head, I can sing it. I feel very rooted in that,” she says, explaining that her signature vocal layers developed organically during her early live shows, playing around with a loop pedal and synthesizer.

She’s also extremely generous—generous with praise (re: Tiny Desk: “For my band mates who went along with me, I think we all did a really fantastic job and it wouldn’t be doing as well as it is if it weren’t for the collective”) and generously judicious with her output. She knows listeners don’t have infinite hours to listen to new music, and if she wants them to digest an entire album in one go, well, it just can’t be that long”.

I want to go back to 2023 for now. I found an interesting interview with Fifteen Questions that I think provides some good background. A bit of context around her debut album. The point of these features is to discover as much as possible about artists who are either coming through or hit a new stride. It is worth heading back a couple of years to get a sense of what McFerrin was being asked in 2023:

“Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? What role do often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?

I honestly can’t say where the impulse comes from, I can only explain it to be from a higher power.
Even though I’m really into writing down my dreams, they don’t often make it into my songs. Instead, I’m usually drawing from personal experiences, relationships and what’s happening in the world around me.

For example, my song “(Please Don’t) Leave Me Now” came directly from experiencing a near-fatal car accident.

Do you have certain rituals to get you into the right mindset for creating? What role do certain foods or stimulants like coffee, lighting, scents, exercise or reading poetry play?

I don’t, but maybe I should start! I love some green tea. Baking also gets me in a zone.

I’ll try writing a song after the next time I make scones.

What do you start with? How difficult is that first line of text, the first note?

I always start with the groove, be it the chords or the drum beat. Having that flushed out makes the rest of the writing process flow much easier.

When do the lyrics enter the picture? Where do they come from? Do lyrics need to grow together with the music or can they emerge from a place of their own?

Lyrics come last nine times out of ten. I really love writing melodies, that’s where I try and challenge myself. A great example of that for me is my song “Know You Better.”

Often, while writing, new ideas and alternative roads will open themselves up, pulling and pushing the creator in a different direction. Does this happen to you, too, and how do you deal with it? What do you do with these ideas?

All the time! But in the spirit of following the ideas, I generally just go with it. Sometimes you need to go someplace else to really figure out where you’re going.

Some of my best songs are the product of going in that other direction when it wasn’t my intention.

There are many descriptions of the creative state. How would you describe it for you personally? Is there an element of spirituality to what you do?

It’s one-hundred percent spiritual for me. My creative state, being writing or performing, is when I feel most connected to a higher power”.

I am going to move to a feature where Madison McFerrin took a track-by-track guide through SCORPIO. However, before getting there, I want to bring in this interview from Type.Set.Brooklyn as she is one of three singers who appears on Tyler the Creator’s new album, Don’t Tap the Glass. For her, this is a huge moment where she has that Tyler co-sign and also has released her second album. An artist that you definitely cannot ignore:

“That conviction has been with McFerrin since childhood. She decided she’d be a singer in kindergarten and never looked back. Now 33 and based in Los Angeles, she’s spent the past decade quietly building a body of work that reflects both her artistic lineage and her distinct vision. Her father is Bobby McFerrin, the legendary jazz vocalist behind “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” and Madison says watching someone live out their passion daily gave her permission to believe it was possible, too.

“I never had any kind of question that it wasn’t a possibility for my life,” she recalls. “People keep asking me what I'm going to be when I grow up. I’m going to be a singer. And I just stuck to it.”

That belief is paying off. This year alone, she’s delivered a standout NPR Tiny Desk set and released Scorpio, her second full-length album, both of which show an artist in full command of her craft. And now, she’s found herself alongside Yebba and Pharrell as one of the few featured voices on Tyler new project.

Despite the moment of mainstream shine, McFerrin isn’t switching gears. She’s still independent—and still moving on her own terms. This summer, she’s headed out on tour, determined to continue her momentum.

“I've gotten so many messages from people being like, ‘Wow, I can't wait to dive into your catalog,’ and that’s such a big win for me,” she says. “If you're going to be independent, you have to have confidence. You can't be independent and be like, ‘Oh, I don't think I'm very good.’ It’s not going to work that way. I had to stick to my guns and just be like, ‘I’m really that girl,’ and now the rest of the world is going to find out”.

I am going to shift now to a great piece from Wonderland. Talking them through the making and creation of her sophomore album, Wonderland hailed SCORPIO is “Groove-laden and subtly cinematic”. If you have never heard Madison McFerrin, then I would thoroughly recommend you dig this album out. It is one of the best of the year. Madison McFerrin talks about all the phenomenal tracks on SCORPIO. I have selected a few from the interview:

“From the very opening refrain of “Heartbreak”, the first track that blesses the stunning sophomore album from Madison McFerrin, the artist’s intention is clear — to overawe. Across SCORPIO, the acclaimed singer-songwriter uses her voice with purpose and nuance, an instrument as well as a guiding narrator, deftly spin webs of encompassing harmonies that complete and augment much of the subtle soul-tinged backdrops.

It’s a work that is confident and exploratory, full of musical highlights and sticky songwriting; the produce of an artist fully accomplished in her lyrical vision and sonic ideology. To breakdown the record, McFerrin drops by Wonderland for the latest edition of our track-by-track series.

Read the track-by-track…

Track 1 (Side A): “Heartbreak”

“Heartbreak” was one of the last songs I wrote on SCORPIO, but I instantly knew it was the opener. It goes on a musical journey that is very similar to my own – starting a cappella and gradually adding more instrumentation. Not only that, it sets the stage for the storytelling of the album, which is very important to me as a songwriter. It’s the full Madison McFerrin experience in a single track.

Track 2: “Ain’t It Nice”

When co-producers Julius Rodriguez and Maddi St John first played me the beat for “Ain’t It Nice,” I was hooked. I was having so much fun listening to the music that the melody and lyrics just flowed out of me. I was freshly single and dating when we wrote this and I wanted something that reflected that fun cat and mouse period that happens at the start of a new connection. The song is flirty and fun in an old school kind of way that I absolutely love – you can’t help but dance!

Track 7 (Side B): “Run It Back”

I go back and forth, but “Run It Back” might be my favourite song on the record. I wrote it late one night, hours before I was going to be hopping on a flight to Tokyo. Horniness is a pretty universal feeling, particularly when you’re single. This is essentially the drunk text you want to send, but definitely should not. Originally it was just going to be me on piano, but why do that when you can have the incredibly talented Cory Henry instead???

Track 8: “Lesson”

The 2 saddest songs on SCORPIO are also the hardest technically for me to sing (there’s a therapeutic analysis in there somewhere). I cried while writing “Lesson,” it struck that deep of a cord. This had been my first breakup, and after 8.5 years, there was a lot of grief to deal with. I was asking myself a lot of questions around why I had gone through such a difficult relationship, “Lesson” is all of that in song form. I knew I wanted significant strings on, so I brought on my friend JasmineFire (who also provided strings on “I Don’t”) for some added co-production. Grief is an important part of life, writing this song really helped me get through mine.

Track 9: “blue”

So the joke of it all is that I’m being dead serious when I say the refrain “but it seems it isn’t fair/when blue’s the only colour that you wear” – he very literally only wore blue. Because of that, it took me a second to not only associate that colour with him. I needed a blue detox, and my favourite way to detox anything is to write about it. It’s an intimate song, so my dear friend, Balam Garcia, and I got together to make this beautiful piece. Sometimes voice and guitar is all you need”.

Let’s come to the review that I said we would end with. Albumism shared their views on the tremendous SCORPIO. They rightly point out how Madison McFerrin’s vocal and lyrical gifts come to the fore on her second studio album. The more I listen to it, the more I get from it. Such a rich collection of songs that demands repeat listening:

“Madison McFerrin’s second album SCORPIO finds her making strides forward from her loveable, if at times, slight debut album I Hope You Can Forgive Me (2023). Here, she extends and develops her vocal arrangement skills and songwriting whilst retaining the same attitude to brevity that her debut embraced.

Affairs of the heart, the breakdown of relationships and ex-lovers’ comeuppances are the main subjects and what she excels at is changing the dynamics in a song and making songs that last barely three minutes seem greater in scale as a result. There is also a feeling that her voice is stronger here than on her debut album—the delightful harmonizing was always there, but here there are runs and notes held than belie extra confidence and strength, such as on one of the standouts, “Run It Back.”

And “Run It Back” is a fine example of the various strengths of the album. It begins with just her voice and the piano, before handclaps and backing vocals arrive as it builds to a climax. There’s no bass and drums, but it is funky, a prime example of the notion that sometimes it is not the notes themselves that create the atmosphere (as pretty as they may be), but rather the gaps between them. McFerrin drips with sultry seductiveness throughout and her vocals are magnificent.

“I Don’t” is another song that feels grand in scale but is actually less than three minutes. Once again (as throughout) her vocal harmonies are a delight, but the intensity of the piece is accelerated by a welcome fuzzed-up guitar solo from Willow (Smith). I’m always really happy to hear an electric guitar solo in R&B or soul music, as it echoes work by such luminaries as Ernie Isley and Prince—reminders that Black guitarists from those genres belong in the upper echelons of those never-ending (and slightly boring?) conversations about “the greatest” and so forth.

On “Blue,” it is the acoustic guitar that accompanies McFerrin’s remembrance of a loved one and the simplicity of the accompaniment offers proof that her vocals don’t need to be steeply banked and harmonized to kingdom come to be striking, emotive and memorable. There’s a rare appearance of strings on the melancholy “Lesson” and, again, her voice shines while there is a hint of Billie Holiday phrasing when she sings “you were a lesson.”

Perhaps the overriding impression on the album is strength. I’ve mentioned already the change to her voice, but the lyrics also tell the tale of someone knowing when to walk away from a relationship. On penultimate track “The End” she says, “I need a little more than you’re willing to give” and on the dance floor inflected “Over > Forever” she sings, “time to get your shit together” to her (ex) lover. She knows when to demand her worth.

This album definitely demonstrates a deepening and widening of McFerrin’s talents and deserves a place in people’s collections or on their playlists”.

At the end of this month, Madison McFerrin starts a tour of the U.S. and North America. She is going to bring SCORPIO to her fans. I do hope that she plays in the U.K. soon. It has been an important and exciting year for her. I loved her debut, I Hope You Can Forgive Me, so I was curious what she would deliver with a second studio album. It is remarkable and affirms my love of her music! An extraordinary artist that I know is going to keep building and searching and will be making albums for many years to come, everyone needs to follow…