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The profile · researched 1 October 2026
Madison Ryann Ward: from Sooners outside hitter to her own label, and a third album called Standing Tall
The Lawton, Oklahoma singer went viral in a university dining hall, was signed by Rick Rubin, then walked away to run her own label. In 2026 she is touring a record that is still unreleased.
Lawton, 961 kills and a phone video
Madison Ryann Ward was born on 16 September 1994 in Lawton, Oklahoma, and reached music by a route that had nothing to do with music. At the University of Oklahoma she was a 6ft 1in outside hitter for the Sooners between 2012 and 2016. She took All-Big 12 Freshman honours in 2013 and was a unanimous pick for the All-Big 12 first team in 2014, finishing her college career with 961 kills.
The turn came in the summer of 2015, when a phone video of her singing an Aretha Franklin song in an Oklahoma dining hall was posted to Twitter, picked up by WorldStarHipHop and passed on by the NFL player Chad Johnson. It was an accident of circulation rather than a plan, and it was enough to make a volleyball player into a prospect.
The two strands in her singing were already fixed by then, and she has since traced both to the house she grew up in: hymns from her mother playing piano at church, and blues and soul from her father's barbecue restaurant. Speaking to Relevant in April 2026 she named Aretha Franklin, Bonnie Raitt and Lauryn Hill as the voices she measured herself against. She finished a degree in creative media production at Oklahoma's Gaylord College and moved to Nashville.
Signed by Rubin, then unsigned
Ward was picked up by American Recordings, Rick Rubin's label, and released her debut single, "Mirror", in 2018. She performed on David Letterman's talk show, and followed the single with the EP Beyond Me in 2019. On paper this was the ascent working exactly as advertised.
It did not hold. By 2023 she and the label had parted. In the Relevant interview published on 7 April 2026 she put her time there at roughly two to two and a half years, described the music business as "the wild, wild west", and said of herself in that period: "I didn't really have my feet planted deep in what my faith was." Rooms full of major producers and writers had been destabilising rather than clarifying.
Her response was to go home to Lawton, which she characterised as a stretch spent "licking my wounds". That gap — roughly 2019 to 2023, with no album to show for the deal that was meant to produce one — is the hinge of her career. Everything she has released since has come out the other side of it.
Zelda House: two albums and a steady drip
Rather than look for another deal, Ward set up her own label, Zelda House Records, and released her debut album, A New Thing, in 2023. Purified Love followed in 2024. PBS filmed her for Recorded Live at Analog in November 2024, which remains the most widely available document of what she does in a room with a band.
Since then she has largely stopped working in album cycles. Through 2025 she put out "Rolling Stones", "DON'T STRESS", "Morning Messenger" and "Ripple" as standalone singles, along with "Standing Tall" on 22 August 2025 — a two-minute track credited to Zelda House Records and filed under R&B and soul. The pace did not slow in 2026: "Oasis of Hope", "On & On" with the keyboard player James Poyser, "Get Up Again", "At Your Side", and "GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!" on 17 June 2026.
The independence is the point, not a fallback. "If I'm not compromising on the things that matter the most to me, it just feels so much more free," she told Relevant. Her catalogue sits awkwardly across the usual shelves — reference sources class her as contemporary Christian, while the streaming services file the recent singles as R&B and soul, and the writing pulls in gospel, blues and folk. The hymns and the barbecue restaurant are both audible, often in the same song.
Standing Tall, and where it has got to
The third album takes its title from the August 2025 single. Asked to reduce it to a sentence for Relevant in April 2026, Ward offered standing tall no matter what comes — a posture she ties directly to faith, and specifically to an inner steadiness that is not set by other people's judgement or by things going wrong. Given the four years she lost to a deal that did not deliver, the title reads as a verdict on her own recent history rather than a slogan.
As of early October 2026 the record has not appeared. Her own site carries a short note that reads, in full: "Working on album number 3. About to go to bed…God Bless. See you on tour!" The singles are arriving regularly enough that it is not clear whether they are previews of the album or a deliberate alternative to one.
The same April 2026 interview set out the touring plan for the year: dates across the United States, a first European tour, and the possibility of shows in South Africa in the autumn. The American leg happened. The overseas legs are not confirmed by any dated listing that can be checked.
A working touring act, not a streaming one
The live side is where Ward's independence shows up as volume of work. Songkick logs 101 past performances, with 19 shows in 2024, 25 in 2025 and 18 across 2026. New York is the city she has played most often, eight times. The acts she has shared bills with most are Kings Kaleidoscope, twelve times, and Hozier, six — which places her between the Christian indie circuit and the mainstream singer-songwriter rooms rather than squarely in either.
The 2026 run, billed as Standing Tall, worked its way east across September. Setlist.fm records Chop Suey in Seattle on 3 September, Saturn in Birmingham on the 15th, Victory North in Savannah on the 18th with doors at 7pm, and Radio Room in Greenville on the 20th. The run then closed out on the east coast with two consecutive nights at Sony Hall in New York on 22 and 23 September, the Howard Theatre in Washington DC on the 26th, and Union Transfer in Philadelphia on the 27th. The Sony Hall nights were co-billed with the talkbox player Byron "Mr. Talkbox" Chambers.
These are clubs and small halls — a few hundred capacity rising to around a thousand at the Philadelphia and Washington end — booked back-to-back-to-back with a day or two between cities. It is the schedule of an artist funding her own records off the road, which is precisely what she is.
The show, now
The current show is the Standing Tall tour, and in September 2026 it ran as a tight east-bound club run: Chop Suey in Seattle on 3 September, Saturn in Birmingham on the 15th, Victory North in Savannah on the 18th, Radio Room in Greenville on the 20th, two nights at Sony Hall in New York on 22 and 23 September, the Howard Theatre in Washington DC on the 26th and Union Transfer in Philadelphia on the 27th. Rooms are small — a few hundred standing, rising to around a thousand at the Washington and Philadelphia end — with standard doors at 7pm for an 8pm start. The Sony Hall nights were co-billed rather than supported, pairing Ward with the talkbox player Byron "Mr. Talkbox" Chambers. Setlist.fm has ten dates logged for 2026 but no complete song lists; its running tally of her most-played material across all years is "Anchor", "Higher", "I'll Wait", "Mirror" and "Other Side", which spans every phase of her career from the American Recordings single through to the independent albums. The bills she takes elsewhere locate the audience: twelve shared dates with Kings Kaleidoscope and six with Hozier. PBS's Recorded Live at Analog, filmed in November 2024, remains the best available look at the band arrangement she tours with.
Researched from en.wikipedia.org · relevantmagazine.com · music.apple.com · music.apple.com · setlist.fm · songkick.com · songkick.com · madisonryannward.com
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