Matt Wallock on April 21st, 2022

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Madison Cunningham this week released her first single following 2022’s Grammy-nominated “Wednesday (Extended),” and it’s a bristling folk-pop number called “Anywhere.” “You could convince me of anything,” Cunningham marvels in the track. “Any day now / I’ll find myself free of it.”

“‘Anywhere’ is a song about the inner dialogue you have with a person when they’re not there, saying all the things you would say if you could,” says Cunningham. “And the combusting madness that comes with letting people’s opinion of you hold too much weight.”

The song was initially inspired by Argentinian singer-songwriter Juana Molina (who headlines The Troubadour on May 7), then written with Cunningham’s longtime collaborator Tyler Chester and produced by Mike Elizondo. “‘Anywhere’ is a classic example of a song that took many iterations to find,” Cunningham told Consequence. “It started out as an improv piece prompted by one of my favorite artists, Juana Molina, during the pandemic, and then sat formless for about a year.” The final product is brisk and kinetic.

“Anywhere” also comes with a video that shows Cunningham performing for a crowd of French-speaking puppets (courtesy of the Bob Baker Marionette Theatre in Highland Park). “When it came to making the music video for the song, my friend and director Caitlin Gerard had the idea of me performing to an unimpressed crowd of marionettes, and trying to win them over,” Cunningham continues. “Which I think is a comical way to speak to the song’s meaning. Breaking your back to win over the opinions of people that aren’t even real.”

||| Watch: The video for “Anywhere”