Maia Sharp returns with bold new album
Mercy Rising is the result of a personal reboot, and a move from L.A. to Nashville.
After settling in to her new Nashville digs, and two years where everything changed, Maia started recording Mercy Rising at Resistor Studio, owned by her friend Joshua Grange, an accomplished musician and engineer currently playing with Sheryl Crow and Lucinda Williams. They tracked drums (Ross McReynolds), bass (Will Honaker) and electric guitars (Josh) there, then Maia brought those tracks to her home studio where she performed and engineered acoustic guitars, piano, Wurlitzer and vocals. Friends and co-writers Mindy Smith, Peter Groenwald, PJ Pacifico, Anna Schulze, Thomas Finchum, Cyd Greenwood and Gabe Dixon contributed to the album as well.
It’s a richly textured, beautifully produced offering with Sharp’s usual standout vocals aching with emotion and her lyrics rich with life experience, true and heartbreakingly alive. Mercy Rising consolidates Sharp’s position as one of the more underrated contemporary singer-songwriters in the country/rock/blues scene. Every track is killer but “Not Your Friend” and “Nowhere Together” hit where it hurts.
It’s little wonder that Sharp has written for artists such as Bonnie Raitt, The Chicks, Lisa Loeb, Trisha Yearwood, Art Garfunkel, and Cher, as well as recording her own albums. Through the years, “I Need this To Be Love” (Hardly Glamour 1997), “Willing to Burn” (Maia Sharp 2002), “Red Dress” (Fine Upstanding Citizen 2005), “Death By Perfection” (Echo 2010), “Me After You” (Change the Ending 2012) and “Nothing But the Radio” (The Dash Between the Dates 2015) have all enjoyed Triple A (AAA) radio success. Her last two releases were with her duo Roscoe & Etta (with writing/production partner Anna Schulze) yielding another Triple A favorite, “Broken Headlights.”
Get the album here or stream it here.
