What's Up?
"Backburner is one clever lyric, but the beauty of the song is that it isn't cloying or cutesy. The arrangement is steady and unswerving, like on the cruise-control mode in your car...."Backburner" conveys regret without ever sounding maudlin. To extend the metaphor, it stays on simmer and never overheats."
- Rolling Stone
"I think I have my favorites then another slays me. Maia is a master in her absolute prime — out of the ballpark once again, but this one really ignites everything that is different and brilliant about her writing, singing, songwriting and production. I’m running out of superlatives! "
– BONNIE RAITT
Life & Work
Bio:
Maia Sharp returns with Mercy Rising, her boldest, most confessional offering to date. After living in the Los Angeles metro area for most of her life, Maia moved to Nashville at the beginning of 2019, partly to be in an unapologetically songwriter-centric town and partly as a personal life reboot. She reflects, “In the last 2 years, just about everything that could have changed has changed and it feels now like those long walks outside of all of my comfort zones were heading toward this album.”
Maia has always managed to play all sides of the songwriting field. She has had her songs recorded by Bonnie Raitt, The Chicks, Trisha Yearwood, Keb’ Mo’, Cher, Edwin McCain, Terri Clark, David Wilcox, Art Garfunkel, Lizz Wright, Paul Carrack, Lisa Loeb and more. She produced Edwin McCain's album Mercy Bound (429 Records) and two songs for Art Garfunkel's retrospective double album The Singer (Sony). And through it all, Maia has continued to record her own albums. She has eight solo releases (on Ark 21, Concord, KOCH, eOne, Blix Street and Crooked Crown respectively), a collaborative project with Art Garfunkel and Buddy Mondlock Everything Waits to be Noticed (EMI Manhattan) and a duo project called Roscoe & Etta with writing/production partner Anna Schulze. Each release has led to extensive touring throughout the US and UK and appearances on Mountain Stage, Acoustic Cafe, World Cafe, NPR's "All Things Considered," CBS Early Morning and the Today Show to name a few. Maia is also an adjunct professor at NYU for the Summer Songwriter Workshop and she has been writing for Songwriting with Soldiers since 2017 where active duty service members, veterans and/or their family members are paired with professional songwriters to share their experience and turn it into a song.
Her new album, Mercy Rising, is out now to critical acclaim and features co-writes and guest appearances by Mindy Smith, Gabe Dixon, Noah Guthrie and P.J. Pacifico.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).