CR 063: Maia Sharp on Writing from a ‘Playful, Inspired’ Place
The celebrated singer-songwriter discusses her 10th studio album, “Tomboy.”
Maia Sharp has a lot on her plate. In addition to writing and recording her own songs, writing and producing songs for other artists, touring the country, running a Patreon account, and serving as an adjunct faculty member at NYU, the acclaimed indie singer-songwriter is promoting her 10th studio album, Tomboy.
The album’s title track, which also served as the first single, was the result of a lighthearted argument Sharp had with her co-writer, Emily Kopp, over who looked more like a boy when they were kids. “I showed her some photos of me, and she showed me some photos of her,” Sharp says. “We were just laughing our asses off. It led to a conversation of how it felt then, because then we both felt a little not like the others. You’re the only one in your friend group that looks like this. You go into the hair cutting place, and you pick one of the boy cuts. You go into the mall to get your school clothes, and you go over to the boys’ section. You know you’re a little different. And how awkward that could feel. We both realized little kid us were a couple of badasses who did this thing that nobody else was doing and somehow knew that it was okay because it was the true version of ourselves. It was uncomfortable and awkward, but we both held to it.”
Sharp says the uplifting tone of the song and its message of self-acceptance influenced the rest of the album. “It wants to feel like a celebration,” she says. “It wants to acknowledge a little bit of darkness and a little bit of awkwardness and a loneliness, but it’s all on this foundation of looking back at it now with pride and a celebration of that and also being able to fully be that now.”
Sharp recently chatted with me over Zoom about the making of the album, her musical influences, and that time Cher recorded one of her songs.
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SANDRA EBEJER: I often ask the musicians I’m interviewing when they began playing music. From what I’ve read, you were creating from a very young age. Was there ever a time in your life when playing music, songwriting, and performing weren’t things you wanted to pursue? Or have you always known that this is what you wanted to do?
MAIA SHARP: Some life in music and creating has always been the path, but it definitely had a few different versions early on. My dad found a recording of me that he had made when I was five and it sounds like I was already writing songs. It was definitely the first song I had ever written, but I don’t think I wrote another one for maybe 15 years after that. [Laughs] Early on, I thought I was going to be a saxophone player. I started playing oboe in my junior high band and I was in the Los Angeles Junior Philharmonic. I remember looking over from the oboe section to the saxophone section and seeing how much more fun they were having, so I switched over a year later and fell hard for the saxophone. I went to college for that. I was a music major in saxophone performance. Then about halfway through college, when I was trying to get my head around Sonny Rollins and Wayne Shorter and all these guys, I realized that’s not really where my passion is. I grew up listening to Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne and James Taylor and Joni Mitchell and Phoebe Snow. My parents had a hell of an album collection, so that’s what I was listening to as a kid. About halfway through college, I started to feel a disconnect there, like there’s this other kind of music that I really love. And I was falling for new music from k.d. lang and the Indigo Girls and Annie Lennox. I was listening to some horn-forward things, too, like Howard Jones.
So I started writing songs. I’m sure those first few to maybe few hundred were not to be shared with the world, but I still fell for the process of it. I saw early on what it did for me as a person. It was a way to find the language for ways that I was feeling—on the outside looking in and a little bit other. And how do I express this? I was seriously introverted, so I wasn’t the kind of person to just open up about it and have a conversation with somebody. I needed to go away alone. I’m an only child, too, so being alone with it and figuring it out in my own time and my own space was already my thing, but now to have the music along with it—there’s something about having music in the room that gives more license to maybe confess or explore things that you might not otherwise. There’s a bravery offered there.
Once songwriting seemed to be connected to my own forward motion as a human being, I was in. I grew up in Los Angeles and I’m thinking, “I love this craft so much. I’m gonna have to figure out how to make a living at it.” At the time, I loved the writing more than the performing. I wasn’t ever in it for an excuse to get on a stage. I only got on the stage because I wanted to share the songs. So I got the record deal eventually and I got the publishing deal, and at the same time as that artist pursuit, I had opportunities to have my songs recorded by other artists. Cher was the first one who recorded one of my songs. So I was hooked on that, also. From very early on, I’ve tried to pursue both of those things, writing with and/or for another artist and also recording my own albums. In both of those cases, I feel like I find a little bit more of something that I didn’t know I was looking for.
Well, if you’re going to have other people record your songs, Cher is not a bad way to start.
Yeah, that was really cool. And it’s just full Cher on the song. Imagine her voice singing your words. It was so surreal. It was great.
Do you write and play every day?
I would if I could, but there’s so many other elements that have to be taken care of when you are doing the DIY thing. It is very Y. There’s so much follow-up to things. I’ve finally learned how important the preparation part is for me. If I feel myself getting even a little bit behind the eight ball, my anxiety goes way up and then it affects the work. I’m constantly trying to stay ahead of things and that makes for a to-do list that is pretty much all day. I have to really carve out the time. I put it in the calendar: This is when I’m gonna prepare the Patreon song, this is when I’m gonna run the set, this is when I’m gonna record that overdub. It’s not just like, this is my creative time. I haven’t had that in a while.
What is the writing process like for you? Do you start with a melody? Or are you more driven by lyrics?
It’s taken every form. There were times where I would sit down and start with music and make sure it was something that I would want to play over and over again, and hopefully somebody would want to hear over and over again, and then I would see what vibe that inspired for the lyric. But probably the last three albums and last maybe five years, it’s been very much lyric first. I need to have something that I want to say first, and then I sit down with that. Now, after I’m in it, it becomes more of a volleyball game, and the music is going to affect the lyric here and there. But I need to know what the hell I’m going to say and how I want to come at it before I start the song.
I still co-write a lot. I moved to Nashville in part to write with all of the wonderful writers and artists here. So I do that as often as I can in the schedule, and sometimes that’s going to be that they have something they want to say and it’s going to take me having a piece of music ready. But if I’m writing for me, I’ve got to show up with here’s my line, here’s my story, here’s my side of it, here’s the angle.
Do you typically go into it with an idea of what you want to write? Or do you just start writing and let ideas happen organically?
It’s a combination. I will totally walk in like, “This is what I’m going to write about,” but I try to stay nimble about it. If I happen upon some other idea that I thought maybe was going to be a subordinate one but I start seeing a bigger thing, then I’m going to follow that. I don’t necessarily stay loyal to the early ideas if I feel like something else shows up that’s even stronger.
The video for “Tomboy” is fantastic. How was it to revisit these images of little you tomboying it up?
Oh, man. I sat in this chair looking through a series of photos that was on a DVD—which tells you how old it is—that my parents had made I don’t even know how many years ago. It had the picture of me in the football helmet without a shirt and a football under my arm on the cover of the DVD. And it’s just on a shelf over there and it’s been there since I moved in. I don’t even know if it was made years before and it came over in a box when I moved here and I just kept walking by it. It’s just there. And when it was time to look for some video content for “Tomboy,” I was like, “I wonder what’s on this thing?” I put it in the CD-ROM—I’m glad that even still works, because I hadn’t used that for years—and it was 100 photographs of me as a little kid looking like a boy. I’m sure that I welled up, because there’s also a lot of pictures of my folks and me in there. So, I [had] all the visuals I needed.
It was an easy next step to do more of a public ask for anybody that wanted to send in photos of themselves looking like a tomboy. And I got a whole other video full of photos of other women that had all these great pictures in their baseball uniforms, totally covered in mud on the soccer field, halfway up a tree. It was awesome.
You wrote on Instagram that your mission for this album was to make it “more percussive than ever without using a drum kit.” Do you typically go into a project with an idea of how you want it to sound?
In the past, it has always been wherever the songs take me. Pre-Mercy Rising, when I was still in Los Angeles, I was usually either a co-producer or somebody else was the producer. I would bring the songs in, maybe I would have a demo of them or a guitar vocal or a piano vocal of them, and it was like, “Let’s see where the songs want to take us.” This album was the first time where I was like, “You know what? I want to think about the production from hour one.” This is the first time I ever gave myself a mission about it. And part of that was, I don’t want it to sound like the last two albums or the last nine albums. I want this to be something else, and I want it to have a light but focused energy. “Tomboy” and “Counterintuition” were the first songs that I decided, “I want these on the next record, so I need the other eight to fit with these.” That also helped to inform how the album wanted to sound sonically. And the playfulness is something that I haven’t really just let myself do. I’ve been a perfectionist. I probably don’t have to tell you about this. [Laughs] I have a feeling, only child introvert who’s a writer, that you’ve probably gone here a few times.
Absolutely.
Old me would have just called that a guide and then circled back to do the final. And new me was like, “That’s great!” And I keep it, and everybody plays to that, and then that’s the energy. It came from a playful, inspired place, and so it stayed. And hopefully people hear that.
Do you think going forward that’s how you’ll approach recording, where you’ll have an idea in mind?
I think so. I don’t think it’ll be that specific idea, necessarily, but this kind of “let myself go to the new place and trust it for a minute and don’t necessarily polish it up right away,” I think I’m gonna carry forward. And maybe it will be without a drum set again. I don’t know. But I do like the idea of having a production assignment for myself.
Do you ever have creative blocks? If so, how do you break through them?
I had one valley of it somewhere [around] ‘08, ‘09, and I remember referring to it as less of a block than a shrug, which to me was even more scary, because ever since I started writing, I just assumed that my enthusiasm for writing would always be there no matter what. I would always want to write. There were always ideas. There was always something to explore. Whether I had a deal or had any kind of attention or had a lot of attention, that wouldn’t affect this well of, I love to write songs.
There were some external factors. I had a publishing situation that wasn’t awesome. But that shouldn’t have mattered, and it never mattered in the past. But for some reason, the shitty stars aligned and I just ran out. I just didn’t care. And it was really scary. I tried to write things and it all just sucked, or maybe it didn’t, but I didn’t see it anymore. It was months of not really making anything worth a damn and having a really hard time even sitting down to try. Finally I rallied, and I got myself to a place of, for days, maybe a week, just going into the studio with nothing else on the calendar. Just, you’re going to write until you love it, you’re going to write till something shows up that you like. It was pages and pages of crying and frustration. Is this it? Am I done? Am I out? I didn’t even see the finish line, but apparently, I crossed it.
And then this little nugget of something started to show up. It sounds hokey, but it ended up being about a phoenix, which I know is a cliché, but writing about the thing that I was trying to do helped me out of it. Art imitates life imitates art, you know? It got me through that. And once I had “Phoenix” written, then that opened up the gates to a bunch more songs. And it also opened my perspective to some past songs that I had overlooked. I was like, “Oh! That makes sense now, and that works with these songs.” And I pulled those in, and then I had another record. I haven’t hit that again, and I think there’s enough momentum going now where I can’t imagine hitting the shrug again. But also, I didn’t imagine it then, so I need to be careful.
You mentioned earlier that you grew up listening to Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne. Who are some of your influences? Who do you turn to when you need inspiration?
Well, Bonnie has been one from the very beginning, and not just listening to her music, [but] being able to work with her and learn from her and see how she masterfully walks the line of confidence and humility. How do you do that? How do you have a mojo like that, and you’re also humble? [Laughs] She’s been an ongoing inspiration.
I listen to a lot of Bon Iver, which probably doesn’t make any sense. I’m definitely viscerally inspired by him, especially when I need to chill the fuck out. Like if I’m on an airplane or something and it starts getting rough or I’m starting to worry about things, I put on a Bon Iver album and it levels me out. Huge fan of Phoebe Bridgers, Jason Isbell, Elton John, Fleetwood Mac. I’m kind of all over the place. Madison Cunningham, I’m a big fan of hers. Oh, Lizzie McAlpine—she’s great. So soulful.
You’ve toured with and worked with so many incredible musicians over the years. Do you have a bucket list of people you’d love to work with?
Annie Lennox. I don’t know that I’d be able to keep my shit together, though. She looks like a nice enough person that she would just wait while I spun out and acted like an idiot. And then she would understand.
I’m sure everyone does it to her.
I’m sure. How do you possibly just act like a regular human being around her? I’ve met Sheryl Crow a few times, but we’ve never worked together. That also feels like something I would really like to do.
What advice would you give to aspiring songwriters?
Writing wise, it’s important to divide yourself up. When you are the creator, let her create. Let her rip. Sit your editor down in the corner. Don’t second guess her yet. Let her flow and find something. Maybe I go in with an idea and I think I know exactly what it’s going to be about, but if I kept on editing her to go to that place that I was planning on, I might miss a turn to a cooler place, so I just let the creator roll. And once you feel like she’s exhausted, then you call the editor in and the editor has her turn at all that, and she’s a little more objective. And now the sorting starts—where’s the really juicy stuff? It might not be the first line, and it might not be the thing that you walked in with that you thought, “This is what it’s about.”
It’s important to let those initial ideas really flow. But just as important, respect the editor. Make sure it’s the best that it can possibly be. Take a few hours or a few weeks or whatever. Isn’t it worth it to love your song in 10 years, so you don’t have to say, “God, I wish I’d spent a little more time on that”? The editor is just as important. She has to come in and really look at it. If I’m writing alone, I need to go away. To get fresh eyes on it, you’ve gotta leave and come back and look at it in a new light. It takes patience, but it’s so worth it at the end.
Then in the survival part of it, let your experience inform you to what you really want. When I was a 23-year-old starting to look for a record deal in Los Angeles, I was told what success looks like: You get the deal, you get on the radio, the ultimate success is when you get a Grammy and maybe you play arenas. Okay, that’s some people’s version of a winning creative life. But I didn’t know enough yet to know if it was mine. I let it weigh me down. I’m leading what I now see to be a successful life, but at the time I was like, “I’m not playing arenas.” [It’s important] to check in with yourself using the experience that you’ve accumulated. Because I’m not 23 anymore. I know more than I did then, more than I did at 33, more than I did at 43, and all of that stuff informs me for what I really want now, what really feels like a full, successful, creative life as a songwriter. If I didn’t reassess that, I could miss a lot of really cool things that I didn’t plan on because I didn’t know enough to plan on them. It’s okay—it’s highly encouraged—to let yourself write what success is for you.
To learn more about Maia Sharp, visit her website.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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Great interview. She has a lovely voice. I enjoyed her song Tomboy.