Madison McFerrin Used Her Wedding Budget to Fund Her Breakup Album

A broken engagement and the end of an eight-year relationship would be enough to make just about anyone spiral. For singer Madison McFerrin, the fallout was compounded by the fact that her ex was also her longtime manager, and all aspects of their lives were pretty much intertwined.

As she soon figured out this new chapter of life, her piano bench was where she’d process her emotions, improvising jazz-inflected vocal runs, penning snappy R&B hooks and layering harmonies. The result is her latest album, SCORPIO. Across a cathartic 13 tracks, McFerrin’s crystalline voice takes listeners through the emotional rollercoaster of a breakup — the pain (“Heartbreak”), the self-empowerment (“I Don’t”), the pettiness (“Over > Forever”), the chaotic horniness (“Run It Back”) and, yes, the sorrow (“blue”).

When it came time to finance the project, McFerrin, who prides herself in being an independent musician, realized she had a budget: the money she’d been saving for her wedding.

“It 100% felt like a flex,” jokes McFerrin, noting that moment felt cosmically aligned.

“I really just felt like that’s what [the money] was for,” she says. “That’s why it’s going to come back 50-, 100-fold. It’s just like, it was being used for its proper purpose, which was to not marry that person and to make a dope record instead.”

McFerrin was born in San Francisco to a family with deep musical roots. Her father, Bobby, is a virtuosic vocalist, conductor and 10-time-Grammy-winning sonic shape-shifter who’s collaborated with all-time greats like Herbie Hancock and Yo-Yo Ma. Madison’s grandfather Robert, an opera singer, was the first Black man to perform with the Metropolitan Opera.

McFerrin and her older brothers, Taylor and Jevon, followed their family’s artistic path: Taylor beatboxes and plays improvisatory, synth-driven jazz, and Jevon is an actor best known for performing multiple roles in Hamilton on Broadway.

There was a time when McFerrin felt intimidated by her family legacy; now, she sees adding to it as an honor. “The McFerrin name comes with a lot,” she says. “And I think that that’s incredible. It comes with a lot of Black American history … and I just want to carry that forward.”

The family moved to Minneapolis when McFerrin was young, and she grew up mostly there and in Philadelphia. (Her parents are now back in San Francisco, and Bobby performs every Monday at The Freight in Berkeley.) She spent her adult years in Brooklyn on the performance grind; she recently relocated to Los Angeles, where a culture of casual invites to the studio has led to fruitful collaborations.

After Tyler, The Creator slid into her Instagram DMs to compliment her April Tiny Desk performance, McFerrin joined him in the booth for what would become a lullaby-like interlude on his dance-heavy, new No. 1 album, Don’t Tap the Glass. She didn’t even realize her track had made the cut until one of Tyler’s producers congratulated her at his listening party.

“Girl is crazy good,” Tyler recently told Ebro in the Morning, praising McFerrin’s vocal tone and jazz-inflected delivery.

Willow — Smith, that is — also reached out to McFerrin with words of affirmation over social media. Once the two met in person, Willow came on as a co-producer for “I Don’t,” a punchy, piano-driven track with distorted guitar and McFerrin intoning with the sonic equivalent of a hairflip: “We were supposed to get married today / So I put on my ring just to sing about our love crumbling.”

Linking up with Willow led to McFerrin reconnecting with her Berklee College of Music classmate Zach Brown, Willow’s frequent collaborator; he came as a co-producer on SCORPIO.

Much of SCORPIO’s beauty is in the little details; the way a precisely chiseled melody might give way to an unconstricted vocal run and then a deadpan comedic aside. Though it’s about a breakup, it doesn’t leave the listener with much room to wallow (except “Lesson,” where McFerrin’s airy soprano over moody strings might leave you crumpled on the floor). The dreamy neo-soul groove of “Ain’t It Nice” is perfect for locking eyes with someone on the dance floor and moving in close; “Over > Forever,” with its four-on-the-floor house beat, offers comic relief in a softly sung harmony of “It’s time for you to get your shit together.”

McFerrin credits her songwriting process with allowing her to untangle herself from the relationship and step into a more empowered place. “I think I needed to get away from it, de-center it, center myself, understand who I am, understand what my needs are, understand just who I want to be as a person,” she says, noting that she’s now happily in love with someone else.

McFerrin is now preparing to take the album on tour, with a stop at August Hall in San Francisco on Oct. 3. (No trip home, she adds, is complete without a stop for carnitas at La Taqueria, which her parents have proudly patronized since 1979.)

“I’ve told a joke on stage about how I make art out of my trauma, and we might as well dance to my trauma,” McFerrin says. “’Cause, why not? It feels better.”