Maia Sharp interview

interview by Bill Palmer

While you’ve probably heard Maia Sharp-penned songs performed by The Dixie Chicks and Bonnie Raitt and Trisha Yearwood, the songs that Maia has written for other artists don’t begin to tell her story. A singer and multi-instrumentalist in her own right, the native Southern Californian’s latest album Echo has her opening up more about herself than ever. Just home from an east coast tour, Maia and I chatted about Echo, the art of songwriting and more…

You’ve said that this is your first album where every song is the truth to some extent. Is it more of a challenge to write songs that are based in truth than it is to write songs that are fictional stories?

I didn’t consciously feel like it was more of a challenge, I just felt like that’s what really wanted to happen now. Except for the very last song on the record, The Girl On Her Way, that was a challenge because in that moment, or in those weeks that it took me to write it, it was a little too true. I knew I needed to finish it, I knew I needed to say it, and I’m so glad that I did because I’ve never felt so relieved after finishing a song, just to get it out of me, and get it off of me, really. But that one was tough cause it was so true, cause I had to face the shit was really going down, like, right now. This is what I’m feeling and it’s bringing me down and it’s making me sad, and I’ve gotta write about it. So that was more challenging because of its truth. But the other songs, it was actually a lift to be able to just think about what I actually felt and what had actually happened.



And I’m not ragging on the past stuff, cause I love to craft a story and I love to just see a nuance and try to make a story out of it, or observe something in friends or family, or have a couple lines that sing well and rhyme and lead to something fresh, you know? I’m all for that. Just for this album, for some reason, they all have some or a lot of truth in them.

You write a lot of songs for your own use, and you write a lot of songs that other artists end up using. Is it a different approach when you’re writing for yourself vs. writing for others? Or do you even always know, when you’re writing it, who it’s going to end up being for?

Absolutely do not. I never have. In fact I’ve had three publishing deals where they’re like, “Okay, so and so’s looking, and they’re looking for something like this. Faith Hill’s looking and she wants something that sounds like this song, or blah blah blah.” I have never once landed anything like that, where I’m writing for the assignment. It hasn’t ever found a home where I was shooting for, where I thought it would. So I finally just learned to write, and then if I love it and I feel a connection to it, maybe some other artist will, and that’s the way it happens.



Like I never thought that the Dixie Chicks would ever want Home, you know? My publisher thought of that. He pitched them Home, and I was like, really? Okay. I mean it’s just this little acoustic thing, and are they really gonna go for that? And they did. It’s like okay, dude, I’m out of it, don’t even listen to me anymore (laughs). Crooked Crown, on the Bonnie Raitt [album], I never would have thought she wanted to sing that lyric, that she felt that, that she would do some twisty-ass C-alt everything chord. That she felt that, that she wanted to do that? Never would have thought.

The story about how you ended up doing the vocals on Bonnie’s album is almost as random too.

Well the first time I sang with her it was because she really liked what was on the recordings that she had heard of the songs that she ended up putting on her album. She really liked the demos, she liked those harmonies, so she asked me to come in and sing on the album. The second time she asked me to come in and sing, it was just totally random. She was doing this one song for a film, it was a movie called Lucky You with Drew Barrymore.



She needed a high harmony like that night, and called me, and it was the only 911 voicemail I’ve ever gotten on my phone, and it was Bonnie. “I need a high harmony, where are you, are you even in town?”

You basically had Hollywood at your back door growing up. As an outsider you would look at that and think that it would make it easier for you to have gotten your feet wet in the industry growing up because it was right there on your back porch, as opposed to someone who moved out there from Alabama. Did that turn out to actually be the case?

Well I don’t know. It would be impossible to compare. I remember not really hopping the hill very often. I went to elementary school, junior high, high school, even went to college in the valley and I didn’t get over the hill until I started to play out. I don’t know that playing LA, playing Hollywood, I don’t know that that is always such an advantage. It’s such a saturated market. I’ve lived here thirty-four years, and I make a point not to play my own hometown more than like twice a year, cause it needs to be a big event. You’ve kind of got to save it up. It’s not like I can just willy-nilly play whenever I think about it in LA. There’s so much happening here, there’s so many choices that people have every night, you’ve gotta make a deal of it.

Echo is available now in iTunes. Learn more about Maia Sharp at MaiaSharp.com.