It's Always Good To Hear Maia Sharp

 By Henry Lipput

Mercy Rising (Crooked Crown Records) is the wonderful new album from Maia Shop, her first solo effort in six years.  It's full of the smart, literate lyrics we’ve come to expect from her and the spare, tuneful arrangements match their tone. 

Sharp, a native of California, recently moved to Nashville, not, it seems, for the country music scene as much as for the community of like-minded songwriters and musicians. And except for some pedal steel guitar Mercy Rising is in no way a country album.  The basic tracks were recorded at Joshua Grange’s Resistor Studio in Nashville with Ross McReynolds on drums, Will Honaker on bass. and Grange on electric guitars. Sharp then brought those tracks back to her home studio where she performed and engineered acoustic guitars, piano, Wurlitzer, and her vocals as well as the vocals of her friends and co-writers. 

Most of the songs on Mercy Rising are co-writes but if I was to guess I’d say the lyrical tone is from Sharp.  My favorite song on the album, "Always Good To See You," is a bonus track (it’s on the CD but I’m not sure if it’s on the vinyl) that Sharp wrote for the SongWriter podcast and inspired by “The Ordinary Miraculous” essay from Cheryl Strayed‘s book Tiny Beautiful Things. 

This title of this post is a reference to the title of that song, a beautiful and yet sad gem. As you get older, more and more partners, friends, and family members are no longer with us. So it seems even more important that through luck or the fact these people have never really left us we see or hear something that reminds us of them:  “I am still amazed at your ways of checking in/A cardinal on a wire, a yard sale dress/It’s always good to see you.” 

The lyrics in Sharp’s songs are straightforward and she doesn’t seem to have much time for metaphors. However, she uses one on “Back Burner” but it’s clear what she’s singing about: “It’s a hell of a way to pay for my desire/It’s a hell of a way to say turn the flame up higher/I try to put you on the backburner/When I put you on the backburner/You set the place on fire.”

There’s no question of what the sexy “You’ll Know Who Knows You Tonight” is about; it’s about a hoped-for seduction and there‘s more than a little funk in the arrangement: “Slow dance slow in the kaleidoscope glow of a lava lamp light/Thermostat down, sip of Crown and if I get this right/You’ll know who knows you tonight.”

“Things To Fix” is a classic Sharp song. It makes the connection between what has to be repaired around the house with what needs to be fixed in a relationship: “I can work on something ‘til it shines like new/But I just couldn’t bring myself to shine for you/What I should’ve said and should’ve done/Yeah, I keep skipping over number one/On my list of things to fix.”

And “Not Your Friend” relates the pent-up feelings you have for someone who doesn’t see you as more than a friend when you want so much more: “I’m not your friend/Friends don’t pray their friends undo another button/I’m not your friend/Friends don’t lose their breath all of the sudden/You might say that you never want to see me again.”