Andrew Bird & Madison Cunningham - Cunningham Bird

2024

Generally, when artists of note record a tribute to other artists of note, they assume their listeners have a reasonable familiarity with the original performances, to give the new recordings context. 2024's Cunningham Bird is a rare exception -- it features singer and guitarist Madison Cunningham and singer and violinist Andrew Bird performing all ten songs from the 1973 LP Buckingham Nicks, which Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks recorded as a duo three years before they would join Fleetwood Mac and transform the onetime British blues act into one of the most successful and influential pop groups of their time. Given that backstory, you would imagine Buckingham Nicks would be a widely circulated album, but it was a commercial flop on its original release, and for a variety of reasons, it has never been reissued.

Though needle-drop bootlegs of Buckingham Nicks are not terribly hard to find, Cunningham Bird will offer many people their first opportunity to hear these songs, and the artists have chosen to present them in a way that bears little resemblance to the 1973 album. Cunningham and Bird have set aside the polished yacht rock sound of Buckingham Nicks, which in many ways sounded like a dry run for 1975's Fleetwood Mac and 1977's Rumours (both of which were produced by Keith Olsen, who was also at the controls for Buckingham Nicks), and reshaped these songs with a spare, intimate tone -- indie folk with a sophisticated feel and enough space for all the elements to stand individually and as a group. (The only musician on the sessions besides Cunningham and Bird is Mike Viola, who added percussion, bass, and keyboards as well as producing.) In fact, if you don't have a strong familiarity with the original album, you might never guess these are covers; Cunningham and Bird clearly respect the beauty of the melodies and the textures of Buckingham and Nicks' harmonies, but they've taken them as a rough sketch that they've followed only as much as they feel necessary.

Judged on its own merits, Cunningham Bird is often strikingly, sadly beautiful, with the grace of Bird's violin carrying the tunes and defining the mood, while Cunningham's guitar lends thoughtful support, and their voices parry and thrust with an intuitive balance that matches the emotions of the sounds. The vocals are what connect Cunningham Bird most closely with Buckingham Nicks -- the bittersweet tension that was the undertow to so much of Lindsay and Stevie's performances together finds an analog in the subtle but unmistakable ache Madison and Andrew bring to their vocals. It might have been a grand prank if Cunningham Bird had been released without songwriting credits, waiting to see when their fans caught on to the origins of the material; even as they come clean about their sources, they offer a superb demonstration of just how differently a piece of music can be interpreted without losing sight of its intended meaning or power.

Mark Deming