Depending on the game, an Ace can be the highest or lowest card, zero or infinity. A breakup feels similar—one path crumbles, while all others remain infinitely possible. How do you write about heartbreak when you’re going through it? Ace, GRAMMY award-winner Madison Cunningham’s third record for Verve Forecast, tracks every part of it: falling out of love, having your heart broken, and then falling in love again. Co-produced by Cunningham and Robbie
Lackritz (Feist, Rilo Kiley, Bahamas, Peach Pit), the fourteen-track album is honest and full of heart, even as it breaks.

Ace builds off of the success of Revealer (2022), a darkly funny portrait of an artist that won Cunningham her GRAMMY for “Best Folk Album,” but it is a different record. A slow burn until it wasn’t. It follows a period of writer's block. On Revealer and her debut album Who Are You Now (2019), Cunningham says that she was writing songs about heartbreak, but they weren’t about her heartbreak. They were sketches, observations. Cunningham wanted Ace to be emotions first. Heartbreaking and lush and bold.

Cunningham’s first single from Ace, “My Full Name,” was released to praise by PASTE who calls the lyrics, “simultaneously sprawling and intimate,”  ecalling “an ancient work of poetry.” On Ace, which Cunningham serves as co-producer, she wanted piano to move into the foreground. “I wanted it to feel like a mountain peak,” says Cunningham, “I wanted Ace to feel like a mountain we built together.” Ace is a record that feels alive and lush in all the ways Cunningham hoped for when she started writing. It is a record of mastery and honesty. Cunningham loves every single song on it. You can tell.

Mike Viola is a producer, musician, songwriter and singer. Viola may be best known for his work with Panic! at the Disco, Andrew Bird, Ryan Adams, Jenny Lewis, Fall Out Boy and Mandy Moore, but his solo career stands on its own starting with a number of acclaimed records as the leader of New York based cult favorite Candy Butchers and 7 critically adored Mike Viola records. His original music has been featured on soundtracks for movies such as That Thing You Do!, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and Get Him to the Greek.

Decades into his career, his music continues to resonate with and inspire new generations of musicians and music lovers.

Starting in 2019 Viola hit a prolific streak and released fan favorite records The American Egypt, Godmuffin, and Paul McCarthy, all recorded in his Los Angeles studio Barebones. His recent albums have garnered a whole new fan base and sold out shows around the US. His latest album, “Rock Of Boston”, was released on September 20th 2024 on Good Morning Monkey/Grand Phony in the US, Lojinx in Europe and SONY Japan and an international tour followed.

Rock Of Boston was recorded over the winter of 2023 on ½” tape at Barebones, Viola’s home studio in Los Angeles. Once again joined by his friends Jake Sinclair on bass and Brendon Urie on drums. Viola says, “I’m always writing songs, or pieces of songs, or riffs. My writing process changes every song, so I never get trapped in a method. I let the song lead me. While I was on a world tour playing guitar for Panic at The Disco, I wrote the bulk of this record on the bus between soundcheck and showtime. On the days off, I’d find a recording studio wherever we were and I’d book studio time to sneak away to lay down a few ideas. When the tour finished, Jake and Brendon came home to LA and we never stopped playing music together. We just switched from touring with Panic! to recording Rock Of Boston pretty seamlessly without a break. Maybe that’s why the riffs seem bigger on this record, we had spent all those months in hockey arenas around the world playing big music.”

Viola is currently working on the follow up to Rock Of Boston to be released in the Winter/Spring of 2026 with a tour to follow. Never slowing down.