Retreating to his home in the English countryside following the pandemic in 2020, singer and songwriter Charlie Cunningham went back in time. He trekked through mid-century jazz, familial ties, and spirituality linked to more present-day musical permeations of loss and grief, connectedness, inhibitions, and other snapshots from a more reclusive period all enclosed within his third album, Frame.
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“Five months before the pandemic, I had moved from London to the countryside, which turned out to be pretty fortuitous, given how bonkers it all got,” Cunningham tells American Songwriter. Before his rural hiatus, Cunningham had finished a majority of the tour around his 2019 album, Permanent Way, before the pandemic forced him to cancel his remaining six shows.
Nothing, musically or lyrically, came at first, during this solitary confinement, until Cunningham sat at the piano again. “I was pretty burned out,” he shares. “I got back and was like ‘Okay, well, this is potentially going to be quite a while, so I just started playing the piano a lot more.”
Cunningham continues, “It was a wonderful thing to do because there were no pressures or timeframes. It was the first time in years I didn’t have that, which was liberating, but it was also twinned with the awfulness that was happening around us, so it was a real bizarre mixture of emotions.”
Forced to reflect on everything coming to the surface, even mortality, prompted an influx of melodies and feelings bordering Frame. “I knew that it was a significant moment for all of us and that I was going to have some kind of responsibility to myself to make sure that this period of time was marked in the best and most accurate way to me possible,” shares Cunningham. “I needed to be able to look back at the album that I made during this crazy time, but it was a difficult one to navigate.”
Echoed mostly by piano and sharpened lyrics, Frame captures the intimacy of Cunningham’s stories within this timeframe. Delicately stepping into the revelatory “Shame I Know” — Maybe he’s sick and tired of this design / Something’s broken, goes to show / A sign of the times, our own demise — the sweltering “So It Seems,” and “Friend of Mine,” accented by Cunningham’s guitar playing, picked up from his three years living in Seville, Spain, Frame exposes self-doubts, uncertainties, and longing for renewal.
On the tender “Bird’s Eye View,” Cunningham faces the grief of losing his grandmother, who passed away at 100 years old prior to the pandemic.
Some nights, I can feel you’re somewhere above us / With a bird’s eye view, and all the others / That we once knew, rediscovered, sings Cunningham on the gently paced track, balanced by a spiritual connection—Fly away in the night / I wish you good luck, I’ll see you on the other side.
“My grandmother was quite religious, and growing up, whenever I was with her that stuff was more of a reality,” shares Cunningham. “When she died, I had a momentary reconnection to that whole thing [religion] through her, and I let myself have that moment of faith come in, even if it was fleeting.”
Before the quieter close of the piano-led “Frame,” the starker and penultimate “End of the Night,” finds Cunningham pondering You don’t hear me, until you know me / I don’t fear you, and then you show me. “‘End Of The Night’ is a song that looks at feelings of isolation and withdrawal, contrasted with a desire for connection and acceptance,” shared Cunningham of the track in a statement, “both in relation to the self and a wider community.”
Backed by producer Sam Hudson Scott, who also worked on Permanent Way, Cunningham’s framed narratives also slip through heartache in the deep cutting “Starlings,” and mental anguish of “Downpour”—Boyhood dreams pulling you down to your knees / Leave you questioning your worth, anything you once believed.
Everything comes back to feeling for Cunningham because that is what makes a song. For him, the music typically arrives before the lyrics do. “The feeling’s the thing,” shares Cunningham. “With all of this, the lyrics are always the thing that comes much later.”
Another part of the essence within Frame was studying and absorbing jazz pioneers like Miles Davis and Bill Evans, who guided many of Cunningham’s compositions. Particularly moved by Evans, the intro for “Shame I Know,” came from listening to the jazz pianist, who composed the emotive “My Foolish Heart” and “Waltz for Debby.”
“I had quite a terrible gap in my musical knowledge with the golden-era jazz stuff from 1959 to 1960,” he says, adding that his band members would often have Evans and Davis playing on tour. “I think I had always been very intimidated by some of that music, but I saw a real opportunity to try and listen to it and learn about it.”
He continued, “And it was amazing, particularly Bill Evans. I was like, ‘Who is this dude?’ So when I was playing my piano, I put a kind of filter pedal on it.”
Though he doesn’t believe his work is in the “world of” those earlier jazz pioneers, their cues are evident in the measured fluidity of his opening one-minute “Intro” on Frame.
“I just love the type of feeling that he [Evans] could evoke with his playing, and the ‘Intro’ is a slight nod to having this free-flowing kind of meandering intro, rather than going ‘Boom this is song one.’”
Fastening Frame near its end is a second instrumental, “Water Tower,” inspired by an actual water tower near Cunningham’s country home, just an hour outside of London. “I’m fairly instrumental, and the emotion is so lyrical in that song,” says Cunningham.”It’s all kind of there, so I didn’t want to take away from that by trying to match the feeling lyrically.”
Cunningham recognizes when particular moments within a song are ready, and tries to leave them alone. “Now, I really embrace those quite big moments when they come as a relief or like a revelatory moment to be embraced, rather than something skewed or sat on for too long,” he shares.
“But I stew. It’s a nightmare,” laughs Cunningham. “It really does take a lot out of me, because it is all-encompassing, which is why I call it now when I feel like it’s there,” Cunningham adds. “With songs and the emotion, I’ll think ‘I’ve really caught that there,’ so anything outside of that is indulging myself on what else it could be. But sometimes it just doesn’t need to be anything else.”
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Frame track list:
- Intro
- Shame I Know
- So It Seems
- Bird’s Eye View
- A Friend of Mine
- Starlings
- Watchful Eye
- Downpour
- Pathways
- Water Tower
- End of the Night
- Frame
Charlie Cunningham North American Tour Dates:
October 15 – Washington, DC – Songbyrd Music Hall
October 16 – Ardmore, PA – Ardmore Music Hall
October 18 – New York, NY – Bowery Ballroom
October 19 – Somerville, MA – Crystal Ballroom
October 20 – Quebec City, QC – Grand Théâtre
October 21 – Montreal, QC – Corona
October 24 – Toronto, ON – Allied Music Center
October 25 – Ann Arbor, MI – The Ark
October 26 – Chicago, IL – Lincoln Hall
October 28 – Milwaukee, WI – Back Room @ Collectivo
October 29 – Minneapolis, MN – 7th Street Entry
November 1 – Denver, CO – Bluebird Theater
November 2 – Salt Lake City, UT – Urban Lounge
November 4 – Seattle, WA – Abbey Hall
November 5 – Vancouver, BC – Hollywood Theatre
November 7 – Portland, OR – The Old Church
November 10 – San Francisco, CA – Great American Music Hall
November 11 – Los Angeles, CA – Masonic Lodge @ Hollywood Forever
Photos: Courtesy of BMG
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