Hear our full chat on my podcast “Beyond the Fame with Jason Fraley.”
Bobby McFerrin won the Grammy for Record of the Year with the catchy tune “Don’t Worry Be Happy” (1988).
This Sunday night, his talented daughter, Madison McFerrin, performs songs from her first full-length album live at The Barns at Wolf Trap, a rustic indoor venue that she’s never played before in Vienna, Virginia.
“I’ve heard really great things about it, so I’m super excited,” McFerrin told WTOP. “Until I get the fan base that calls for the [bigger] amphitheater — like I’d love to play at Red Rocks one day — but I love intimate venues and to be able to have that vibe with people to really feel that connection and that energy.”
Born in San Francisco in 1991, McFerrin grew up in Minneapolis before the family moved to Philadelphia, but it took a while for her to realize that her father was a famous musician with a chart-topping radio hit.
“It came out before I was born, so it was always around,” McFerrin said. “When you grow up in something, it takes a while before you recognize that it’s a little different than what other people are experiencing, but my parents did a great job of giving me a relatively normal, happy, healthy upbringing. … I decided I wanted to be a singer when I was 5. … I had a reference point that you could do something that made you happy in life.”
After attending the Berklee College of Music in Boston, she moved to Brooklyn for eight years before settling in Los Angeles. Along the way, she released a few EPs, including “Finding Foundations: Vol. 1,” “Finding Foundations: Vol. 2” and “You + I.” The lattermost project was coproduced by her brother, Taylor McFerrin, and featured the song “Guilty” about Derek Chauvin’s conviction for murdering George Floyd in 2020.
“I knew that the verdict was coming out that day, so I was scrolling Twitter,” McFerrin said. “I got picked up from the studio to go home. While we’re in the car, it comes out that he’s guilty. … Literally, as soon as the verdict came out, that loop came in my head. As soon as we stopped the car at my apartment, I ran out like, ‘I gotta get this out right now,’ sat down, did the loop and within 15 minutes, I had put it out and it went viral.”
A very different drive, a near fatal one in 2021, inspired her new song “(Please Don’t) Leave Me Now.”
“My partner and I were driving from Brooklyn, where we were living at the time, to Chicago, where his family’s from,” McFerrin said. “I merged from the right lane into the left lane, hit a patch of black ice, spun out 360 on the highway and we flipped upside-down into a ditch. It was the most terrifying experience. … I walked away feeling like I had a new lease on life. … I wrote the song three or four days after the accident.”
The song is the seventh track of her first full-length album, “I Hope You Can Forgive Me,” which dropped this year. She produced 70% of the album herself in an industry where 97.2% of music producers are men.
“A lot of it was deeply personal, trying to go through what I means to be an adult and learn and grow and not hold onto things in your past,” McFerrin said. “I was forgiving myself essentially, so I could let go of mistakes that I had made. … I really wanted to release that energy. … I wanted to acknowledge my own self-work in that process. … Forgiveness is a really important thing to have for other people and especially for ourselves.”
Listen to the full conversation on my podcast below:
