One of the more unique albums of the year comes out on Friday, and some folks in Iowa are among the few who heard it live before its release.
Andrew Bird and Madison Cunningham have teamed up for a new album called Cunningham Bird. It’s a song-for-song cover of Buckingham Nicks, by the duo of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. It’s a curious, somewhat forgotten album that many music fans aren’t aware of, and Bird and Cunningham discovered it while planning their first big project together.
“I think Andrew reached out to me first,” said Cunningham, who also appeared on Bird’s Christmas album HARK!. “We had talked for a long time about making something together, but then he kind of discovered the Buckingham Nicks record and then it kind of just snowballed from there.”
“Really, I just wanted to go do a run of shows where we play each other's songs,” said Bird. “And then this idea of playing the Buckingham Nicks album and doing our interpretation of it presented itself.”
The original album was released in 1973, shortly before Buckingham and Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac. “It's a big production, this album,” said Bird. “It's very complex and it's just full of youthful ambition and ideas, you know. Stuff I wouldn't do today and stuff that even when they joined Fleetwood Mac, they kind of cleaned up. It’s a very eclectic and strange piece of work, and I guess it didn't light the world on fire at first.”
Although Buckingham Nicks has become a bit of a “cult classic” album over the years for Fleetwood Mac fans, the album has never been reissued in any format and isn’t available on streaming services. Cunningham and Bird were forced to resort to more modern solutions to learn the album.
“Andrew found it on SoundCloud,” said Cunningham. “I think there was also a YouTube link that we were referencing. It was really frustrating because we had to remember all the time stamps because it's just 35 minutes of music. There weren't really a lot of indicators for where the song started and stopped. So yeah, it was an adventure.”
Not being overly familiar with the songs gave Bird and Cunningham lots of freedom when learning the record and making it their own. “I learned the tunes just to make sure we were on track,” said Bird. “Sometimes when you cover a song, you can kind of cast it in a different light to ‘pull up the shag carpet.’ Every measure is chock full of ideas with intention, so I think it was due for a ‘rethink,’ because there's such good songs underneath all that.”
Bird credits Cunningham for a lot of the creative decisions they made, largely because of her lack of familiarity with the original record. “I think it was a good thing that (Cunningham) came in kind of more ‘blank slate,’ because (she) was generating a lot of interesting ideas of how to rearrange the material,” said Bird.
“Going into it, I didn't have a particular attachment or fondness because of ignorance. I didn't know (the record) very well,” said Cunningham. “So I kind of went in thinking ‘we're just going to dissect these songs. This is going to be such a fascinating process. We're going to learn so much through this.’”
“And then it took this turn for me where the songs started to reflect some of my own life back at me in this very unexpected way, and that's when the record became... it took on a completely different purpose in my life,” said Cunningham. “It wasn't just an experiment. It felt like it was prophesying or like speaking into my very life.”
Another noteworthy thing about Cunningham Bird is the gender-flipping of some, but not all of the songs. Cunningham said this started with a discussion of the famous album cover, but the final decision came down to what was most practical for each song.
“We had talked at the beginning, like, what if we just switched us on the cover too? And it just became like an irreverent idea,” said Cunningham. “But I think we tried to take that on in terms of switching genders in the actual songs, and then committing to doing a whole album was such an undertaking that we ended up just going what works for the arrangement for our voices.”
“We liked the idea of switching genders at first, but we kind of just went song-by-song,” said Bird. “But (the album) is very ‘1973’ as far as gender goes, so we thought it could use an update in that way.”
This year, Bird and Cunningham have played the album in its entirety at just a few events, including the Bumbershoot Music Festival in Seattle, the legendary Newport Folk Festival and the Infinite Dream Festival in Iowa City. They also performed at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, where Buckingham and Nicks played their first shows.
As Bird originally envisioned, the live performances are a mix of his and Cunningham’s songs, with the Cunningham Bird album opening the show. Both Bird and Cunningham discussed the difficulty of playing the songs live.
“I mean, my own stuff is not super easy, but I find that the harmonies are extremely intricate and the stuff I'm having to do on the violin while I sing is very challenging. And it's a 35 minute album! And then we launch into our own material, which is interesting how it reflects on that, going into ‘Sisyphus’ and then some of Madison's songs, which I find quite complex too. It makes for a very dynamic and varied show.”
As for what’s next for the duo, both left it open. “I don't know how Maddy feels about this, but I feel like this is just the first thing we decided to do together,” said Bird. “We could have done anything, and it's just a matter of how the material filters through our sensibilities. So I don't know what we'll do next, but it'll be something.”
Cunningham Bird will be available on Bandcamp and streaming services. It's also available on their website. Bird and Cunningham have a few tour dates scheduled for 2025, but a formal tour schedule has so far not been announced.