Moving to Nashville must be working for Maia Sharp

By Henry Lipput

Having moved to Nashville from her native California, Maia Sharp has taken advantage of the local music scene, a city that American Songwriter magazine described as “the natural songwriter’s habitat.” The result was her album Mercy Rising, (one of my favorite albums of 2021) and her first solo release in six years.

Her superb new album, Reckless Thoughts (maiasharp.com), builds on the relationships she’s made with the many musicians and songwriters she’s met in Nashville and has also had over the years with friends and colleagues since her debut in 1995. The new album, like Mercy Rising, is a self-produced collection and recorded in Nashville’s Resister Studio. It contains co-writes with Dean Fields, Mindy Smith, Garrison Starr, and Kim Richey but Sharp’s views of life and love are always front and center.

Working with a supporting cast of seasoned musicians, Sharp’s production on Reckless Thoughts is a low-key affair highlighting each song’s melody with subtle arrangements that wash over you like a warm bath and then come back to revisit you. The literate lyrics are polished to a gem-like finish with just enough detail in the characters and conversations to double as a pitch meeting for a Netflix series. (If you look up ‘literate’ in the dictionary you’ll find Sharp; she’s part of a pantheon of currently working great American singer-songwriters that also includes Lucinda Williams and Freedy Johnston).

Standout tracks on Reckless Thoughts include “She’ll Let Herself Out” (“She’ll let herself out/The gate to the cages she’s been living in/Now that she’s realized they lock from the inside/She’ll never be something she’s not/Not again”), “On A Good Day” (“There are days it’s harder not/To bring you up in conversation/All the ways you still exhaust her/Move in steady slow rotation/With a good day”), “California” (“You were always good to me/I never thought that I would leave you/California”), and, my favorite track (hence the extra lyrics), the glorious, bluesy “Fallen Angel” (“She said, ‘Honey don’t fall for this fallen angel’/I said ‘Don’t tell me what to do/If I want to drop to my knees all fuckin’ faithful/Well it’s really not up to you/Besides you with a halo is like me with a crown/And that ain’t the way we make a joyful sound/I’ve been waiting so long’”).