Madison McFerrin - I Hope You Can Forgive Me (Deluxe Edition) (2024)

A couple a cappella extended plays and a Taylor McFerrin-assisted third EP to her credit from 2016 through 2019, vocal dynamo Madison McFerrin tried her hand at production in 2020, and by the end of that year issued her promising first self-produced single. She follows all the way through with I Hope You Can Forgive Me. It's a concise debut album that, with the exception of a few tracks aided by either Biako or Andrew Lappin, McFerrin produced herself, and it also exhibits her range as a singer and lyricist. No matter how much one song or approach differs from the next, she keeps everything tied together. Titles notwithstanding, "(Please Don't) Leave Me Now" and "Stay Away (From Me)" belong in consecutive sequence. The first of the two, inspired by a car accident that nearly killed McFerrin, confronts mortality with terse phrases like "Takin' it for granted 'til we're beggin'." Cast in a rolling atmospheric groove with beatific and faintly eerie qualities, it fades out to give way to what starts as a downcast piano ballad and unfurls into an intimate percussive house track in which McFerrin, aching with a twinge of bitterness, asks for clarity from her partner: "Am I runnin' in your mind, or am I runnin' out of time?" "Stay Away (From Me)" is brief to a fault -- perhaps to stress that she won't stick around for nothing -- and so is the sonically tantalizing "OMW," a slinking, booming dispatch seemingly sent at the end of a day spent on emotional perseverance during a rift. Her use of lower range there is nearly as compelling as her more common celestial melodies. "Run" and the successive "God Herself" could not be much more different in terms of subject. The former was written after McFerrin learned of an ancestor who escaped slavery, and is sung from the perspective of a vigilant abolitionist. What follows is a supreme act of self-assurance ("Make you wanna come inside and stay for life"). Even those two songs make sense together, as they're either mostly or entirely a cappella, treats for her earliest followers. Bobby McFerrin makes "Run" extra familial with his voice providing deep bassline riffs and lively trumpet accents, while "God Herself" goes skyward from the first notes with subtle support from fellow singers Melissa McMillan and J. Hoard. McFerrin makes all the contradictions complementary.

Review by Andy Kellman