DJ: Maia Sharp, thanks so much for taking some time to talk today. I realize you have a show this evening, right?

Maia: Yes, I do. Um, absolutely. And thanks for having me. Yeah. I’m playing the, Iron Horse tonight in Northampton.

DJ: Nice. Well, I know you’re based in Nashville, but from LA and you still get back to Los Angeles – and now you’re doing shows in both October and November. That’s a busy schedule.

Maia: Yeah, I kind of put the pedal to the metal when I have an album out. I don’t tour all year all the time, but when there’s a new. project out there and, you know, I’m just excited about it and I want to get the word out. So I hit the road a little harder than usual, and the Northeast has been friendly, since the very beginning. I think some of the radio stations, in this area. Like all the way up to Portland, Maine and, kinda all the way down the coast have been supportive since my very first album. So I try to make a habit of it and I really try to make a habit of getting up to this area, in October.

DJ: Oh yeah.

Maia: It’s a, it’s a kind of seasonal that I never knew back in Los Angeles and I still don’t really see it in Nashville.

I get a little closer to it in Nashville, but it’s not like here.

DJ: Yeah. Well, the November show, you’re doing October and November shows, but the November one is at City Winery. I went to the City Winery in St. Louis for the first time a couple weeks ago. I had never been to a City Winery in any city. I know they’re in several cities. 

Maia: Oh yeah. 

DJ: But, yeah, it’s a nice, intimate venue, so I was glad to experience that.

Maia: Yeah, I’m really looking forward to that. Uh, Bill Deasy is an old friend of mine and we’re gonna share that night. And, uh, Pittsburgh has also been one of those towns that’s just been like a favorite stop that I try to do. Every time I have an album out, I try to get back to Pittsburgh.

DJ: Nice. Well, I really love your new album Tomboy, and I do want to talk about the album, but first, I’d love to hear about your early years kind of leading up to your career as a musician and songwriter. You were born in Central California, but your family moved to Los Angeles when you were pretty young, right?

Maia: Yeah, I was five when we moved down. So I pretty much only remember L.A. – I don’t really know the Central Valley very well.

DJ: Yeah. Well, usually I ask what kinds of music a person was exposed to as a child and if their parents introduced you to any particular music. In your situation, your dad was a Grammy Award-winning songwriter from many great artists and bands. A lot. Do you remember though, like what, at what age of awareness… like when did you realize what your father was doing as a career?

Maia: Oh, always.

He’s been a, he’s been a singer songwriter from as long as I can remember, and he still is. Yeah, there was just, there was always music in the house. My folks actually met singing together in a band in high school, so she also sang, it was just always around, but it was never assumed of me, you know, it was never pressed on me. If I had any questions about music or how to get around in the studio or an instrument, they were always there with the answers, but they never offered it unless I asked. I know that I could have been whatever I wanted to be. It just. I don’t know. I was pulled first, I was pulled to being a saxophone player. That was the first thing that I did. I went to college for that and then about halfway through college, I think I just, I heard those, that early echo of like wanting to be a poet, wanting to be like those artists that I grew up with. And to your earlier question, my parents, I’m very fortunate that the music that was playing in the house when I was a kid that my parents chose is the good stuff, man. I mean, I mean Bonnie Raitt and James Taylor and Paul Simon and Jackson Browne, and Rickie Lee Jones and like that’s who I grew up on. So I had that in me. When I thought I, I was gonna be a saxophone player and I still play, like I play on two tracks on the new album, you know, but like shredding, like Coltrane solos and even though it’s super challenging and really cool, wasn’t really hitting me in the heart. So something happened right around 2021 where I was like, you know what? This is the music that really moves me still. And also some of the offshoots of those artists. Like I got really, really into K.D. Lang and like Annie Lennox and just, you know, like even like some eighties folks like. Howard Jones, you know?

DJ: Right. Yeah.

Maia: So those were the influences that were like, you know what, maybe it’s time to try your hand at this.

DJ: Yeah. 

Maia: And I fell hard for it fast and like, okay, I still wanna keep the saxophone up, but songwriting is, is the pursuit now of the day. Like, this is what I want to try to do. And I was living in L.A. and the way to do that as a career was to get a record deal. This is in the late nineties, middle to late. You know, I signed my deal in ’96. My first album came out in ’97. The way to do that is to get a deal and to get a publishing deal and to try to get your songs cut by other artists and to try to get on the radio and then you gotta stay on the radio and, you know, so that was the hustle for a really long time.

DJ: All right, so you play saxophone. You obviously play guitar too. Uh, you play piano and I believe oboe.

Maia: Oh my gosh. You really did, you really did some digging. Yeah. Oboe was first. That was my, that was my choice uh, in junior high. And this, I remember this like, it was last week, man. It was the, my dad and I were driving to my first day of junior high in la That is seventh grade and that’s the first time also in L.A. public schools at the time where you could learn music in school and.

So we’re driving to school and we’re listening to the classical station, and an oboe solo comes on and dad says, you know what? I bet if you chose oboe you could work, because I know there’s so few oboe players in town. And I like hadn’t even picked up an instrument. I hadn’t chosen my instrument yet, but that made perfect sense to me. I’m like, yeah, you know what? I’m gonna play oboe. And I was the only oboe player in school for that entire time. Until I looked over at the saxophone section and saw how much more fun they were having than I was having, trying to learn oboe ’cause it’s such a beast. And so I, included saxophone ’cause the fingering is similar and I, so I was learning saxophone at the same time. And then in high school and college, it was just all about the saxophone.

DJ: Hmm. Well, prior to learning all those instruments, you recorded your first song at an even younger age. Am I right about that?

Maia: My gosh, yeah. Now, so that was kind of a one off, like I didn’t, it wasn’t like I was writing songs from the age of five, but yeah, because music was always in the house and my dad always had a way to record. Handy. I remember coming out, I was five and I, I walked up to him. I’m like, “Hey dad, I wrote a song”, and he had one of those cassette recorders just literally just handy, like sitting right there that you, you know, you have to hit the record and the play at the same time. It was one of those,

DJ: Exactly.

Maia: And he recorded the song on a cassette, and then we don’t know what, where it went. And then a friend called, right as we were wrapping up my second album in 2002, a friend called like, “Hey, I found this cassette in a box in a closet. And I think you want to hear it”. And he sent it down to us. It took a little bit of cleaning up, but we ended up putting it at the end of that album so you can hear it. “Ghosts” is the name of it. 

DJ: Yeah.

Maia: It freaks me out a little bit because I was five and like did I see a ghost? Like did a ghost show itself to me? I don’t know, but you can hear the song. It’s a minute long and…but it wasn’t like I kept on going after that. Like I took a break and did other things and then I came, I came back to it in my early twenties.

DJ: That’s very cool though. Well, when you got to the point of playing music, you know, fast forward to now you’re a little older, you’re, you know, got to the point of playing music out at venues. Were those initially like solo gigs or did you play in a band at that point or with another musician?

Maia: That’s a really interesting question. I haven’t, had the chance to answer this one in a while, but it’s interesting. I started with the biggest band I could possibly put together. Like I wanted, as all of, I wanted as many of my friends on that stage with me as I could muster up. So I think I started with like a six piece band or seven piece band. I had like. Violin and there’s keys and there’s another guitar and bass and like, just everybody please, you know. And then I pared it down. I started to pare it down and then as I toured, I had to pare it down, I think to a trio. And then it, I went out as a duo. And I remember resisting the solo acoustic show for a really long time. Like, no, no, no, no. I need somebody up there for the energy. For the eye contact, for the support, and at some point I took a leap off that cliff and did a solo acoustic show in a big venue.

DJ: Hmm.

Maia: And I remember it was pretty terrifying, but also liberating. And now it’s kind of my favorite way to go. So most of my shows now, unless I’m in. If I’m home, it’s fun to put together a band, but anytime I’m touring, um, at least for now, I, I really love to do the solo show. You get to push and pull, you get to, you get to try things. It just feels more intimate. It’s more just about the lyric, which is the thing that I’ve worked the hardest on and all of these songs, and it just, I love it now.

DJ: And then there was one.

Maia: Exactly. Yeah.

DJ: Well, your debut album, Hardly Glamour, was on the Copeland Brothers label Ark 21. How did that come about? When did you cross paths with like Miles Copeland, or how did that come to be?

Maia: So early on in my, realizing that I wanted to be a songwriter, I would go see my friends’ bands that I was going to college with. I would just go see them and if they, uh, if there was somebody in the band that I feel, that I felt like, “Hey, I would love to write with this person”. Again, this is a terrifying thing. I’m like in my early twenties and like you’re handing somebody a cassette, you know, this is before like, Hey, listen to me on Spotify, it was like, here’s my song. Do you wanna write together? You know? So my buddies Joe and Josh were playing with a band called The Borrowers in L.A. and the lead songwriter in that band, uh, is a guy named Mark Addison, who is still a friend and just such a talented human being. So Mark and I started writing together and we wrote a song, called “Don’t Come Around Here Tonight”. And I didn’t have anything going on yet. I didn’t have a label, I didn’t have a publisher, didn’t have a manager, didn’t have any of that. But Mark signed a publishing deal and his publisher pitched our song to Miles Copeland for one of his artists.

He was managing, well, let me see, Belinda Carlisle at the time, and he, he passed on the song for Belinda Carlisle, but he really liked the voice on the demo and the vibe of the demo and. I was the singer on it and he wanted to hear some more songs from me. So that started my relationship with Miles and it took a couple years of playing songs for him and us kind of talking about what it would look like. IRS was folding into Ark 21, so like it was like becoming an imprint and Ark 21 was gonna be his new label and I was gonna be one of the first artists on that, which I was, but also, this is, this is really cool ’cause this all kind of happened at the same time. Mark’s publisher kept on pitching the song and pitched it to Cher’s producers who loved it and put it, and Cher recorded it on her album. It’s a Man’s World. It came out in ’96, I think. So I had a Cher cut. So I had a Cher cut now and yeah, and like talking to Miles and it was all just because. I mustered up the nerve to give a cassette to Mark Addison and say, Hey, you wanna write together?

And we did. And that’s, that’s what happened. And that, that was like the start of both of the forks in the road there that I, I never chose one or the other. It was like, I love writing songs that other artists record and I love making my own albums. And I, both of those things started in that same year. 

DJ: Wow. So you had a deal, you had an album. Um, then came the self-titled debut album, or I guess it was just called Maia? 

Maia: Sharp, yeah. No, yeah. I never went with this, with the one name thing. I got asked about that a lot. Like, yeah. Do I wanna be Madonna, Cher? No, I think I wanna be Maia Sharp.

DJ: Was that the first, obviously not the first time in your life, but on record, was that the first time your dad appeared on one of your records, or did, was he on the first one too?

Maia: He was on the first one too. Yeah. Yeah. So we co-produced the first one. We did a lot of co-writing on that first one. He played a lot on it. Um, yeah, he was a major, a major influence on that and like a shepherd through those early, days in the studio. You know, like there was a lot of that that I. if I recorded it alone, it was because of what he taught me. But a lot of it was also recorded with him and also with Mark Addison. yeah. And then the second one, I know dad was involved. I’m not like, looking at the credits now and it feels like so long ago. But yeah, all, all of the out the first nine, nine out, no, sorry, the first seven albums before I moved to Nashville and became. My own label and produce them all alone now. which I love also, but those first seven albums all have a story of like co-producing or somebody else producing and everyone has kind of a different, uh, adventure to it.

DJ: Well, throughout your musical career, you’ve not only collaborated with, with a lot of amazing musicians, but your songs, as you me mentioned, have been covered by a lot of great artists. I mean, you mentioned Cher. You’ve had songs done by Bonnie Raitt and Dixie Chicks, or should, am I supposed to just say The Chicks now?

Maia: Well, they were the Dixie Chicks back then, but yeah, they’re The Chicks now, and I, I, yeah, I understand that.

DJ: Uh, yeah. Lisa Loeb, Keb’ Mo, we already mentioned a couple though.

Maia: Yeah.

DJ: And a lot of people. I’m sure I’m not even covering all of them well, and again, we’ve already mentioned a couple that your dad worked with so many great people too.

Maia: Oh, he’s had some great ones

DJ: It’s so cool that you guys are able to work together, too.

Maia: I know. I love it. It’s, and it, yeah, it feels, it feels like just a really lucky thing. We enjoy working together. You know, it’s not, there’s no strain or weirdness. We like, we truly enjoy working together and learning from each other.

DJ: Well, for your new album, which I think is your 10th album, Tomboy.

Maia: Amazingly. Yeah, it’s number 10.

DJ: You recruited, Eric Darken, who’s such an interesting percussionist using found objects. That’s something I always loved. I’ve never been a drummer or percussionist, but I can remember experimenting years ago when I was just. Dabbling in, like recording songs. I had an old showing my age, but I have an old reel to reel, you know, when I was just dabbling in recording songs.

Maia: Oh yeah. 

DJ: But I would, yeah, occasionally just grab like a, a bottle of vitamins or something handy and just kinda shake it along to the beat just to see what it sounded like. I think I just, I’ve always had a fascination with that, but, and Eric, there’s someone else who is recorded with some very big names as well, but, um, like working with him, what’s the process? Do you just say. Here’s a song. What do you think? What should we do?

Maia: Well, the best way to get the most out of him is to let him do it from his place because he’s, he has, he has a loft in his house that is just filled with these instruments that he’s clearly collected from all over the world. And it just great, just incredible. Like if you, asked him to come to your studio, like he would only be able to maybe carry a 10th of what he has. So the way we did it, The way we did it on the last two albums, ’cause he was on the last one also, was that I would send him files and I would get the songs far enough along where he could tell like, where the accents are and where the syncopations are and like where the like arc of the dynamic of the whole song is. And I would give him some. Clues about what I’m looking for or even put in like a guide of something where just like you said, I grabbed a vitamin bottle or I slapped the top of a book with a sandbag or whatever, and I was like, I need kind of something like this, you know? but you know, or like, Hey buddy, do you have a bass drum? Like, do you have a giant kind of marching band sounding bass drum? He is like, uh, I have three of those, you know, so like, so I would send him the files and he would send back every time he’d give, give me a lot, like eight to 20 tracks of things that he did and always just so in the pocket. This is why I love to work with Eric, where he hears the pocket and where I hear it are the exact same place. And that’s, you know, it isn’t a right and wrong, but like when you’re working with a drummer or a percussionist, we, you know, not everybody hears like where it really settles in, in the same place. Like some people are on top, some people are way on the backside. Eric and I are somewhere like middle back is kind of where I want it. And he’s just there, he just lives there. It’s so cool. Um, and he would, he, so he would send me back these traps and also be just the most like team player guy, like, and if you have any comments. I can change anything or add anything or take anything away, like, okay. So if I had a couple comments, he’d be like, sure. And they’d be there in a couple hours and then they’d be just right. So, yeah, he was, he was huge. He was the first on this latest album. I spent more time alone first framing it out and. Creating a foundation with a guitars, maybe a worldlier, a synth theme, some percussive suggestions that our mayor or may not keep. And so he was the first person, on this project that heard what I was doing. Like he was the first outside person that I led in on it. I, it was just me for hours until I sent it all out to Eric.

DJ: Hmm, that’s great. Oh, in the area of atmospheric sounds, your, your sax playing on “Edge of the Weatherline”. It’s really nice. Boy, that’s song just has such a wonderful feel.

Maia: Thank you. Yeah. I wanted to, you know, there’s a line about, there, a line about, the eighties, right? I’m a sucker for an, eighties song and the saxophone was so, was such an eighties thing. Like I, and I even tried to, so I even tried to like carve out a solo that might have been played on an eighties song, like a George Michael song or like a Sade song. that’s what I was listening to as a kid who fell in love with saxophone, like saxophone was everywhere. Oingo Boingo, Howard Jones. Right. Um, and like every hit had a sax solo in it, Sheila E.,  Billy Ocean. And, and they were glorious. They were like, they were works of art, the sax solos. And so, that’s what hooked me. And then now you hardly ever hear one.

DJ: Well, you achieved a great sound on that.

Maia: Well, thank you. Thanks.

DJ: Well, you appeared on Fancy Hagood’s latest album and you also employed a lot of other great musicians for the album. I mean, he’s on your album, uh, your new one, and you’ve employed a lot of other great musicians for the album. Had you worked with all or most of them previously?

Maia: Um, interestingly, you called out Fancy ’cause that he was the one that I had not worked with before except for that one song that I produced for him, which is a killer cover of the Steeldrivers song “Where Rainbows Never Die”. And he asked, he asked me to do that and play everything on that production and I said, yes. And had no idea. First of all, I just wanted to work with him ’cause he is such a talent and just such a good human being. Like he just, everything that he represents and he seems to be on a mission to just like be inclusive and optimistic and all of the things that I wanna support. So I said yes, like didn’t even hesitate. And then realized how fricking hard. That riff is in that song, and like I had to put it together. I mean, I did it and it was, it challenging and it’s, it was, it ended up being a lot of fun to do too. But it was, man, it pushed me. I did get Sara Holbrook on there too. She played some violin on that, on that one. But, and then, yeah, for my album, I had worked in some capacity with everybody on it, uh, Matthew Perryman Jones that I had written together and we wrote that song that, he’s a guest vocalist on Emily West. Terry Clark and I had written together, I had sung on her albums before, Garrison Starr, Sarah & Shannon. Yeah, Fancy was the newest person to the list for me.

DJ: And of course your dad appears on this album as well.

Maia: Yeah.

DJ: That’s great. Good old dad.

Maia: Yeah, I know. Well he’s a hell of a steel player, so yeah, I got him to do that. And a 12-string player and he, he’s such a 12-string fan. He’s such a Byrds fan that he has like every kind of 12-string that you can have. He like finds it on eBay and he buys it. And now I know anytime I need a 12-string, anything I can just call dad.

DJ: Yeah. Speaking of City Winery in St. Louis, I, I regret this, but I missed Roger McGuinn was just there recently.

Maia: oh, 

DJ: Or you know, the more they think about it, it might’ve been The Sheldon, I think it was The Sheldon, which is another beautiful venue. But, uh, yeah, I am a huge Byrds fan as well.

Maia: Yeah, I bet that was good one.

DJ: Well, Tomboy closes with a really beautiful rendition of U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” with Garrison Starr, who you mentioned, adding harmony.

Maia: Mm-hmm.

DJ: Uh, besides being a classic, gorgeous song, was it something you always wanted to cover or do you in fact feel like you still haven’t found what you’re looking for?

Maia: Yeah.

DJ: I hope that isn’t too personal.

Maia: No, that’s okay. It’s more the second one. Um, I, you know, I, I wasn’t, I haven’t been drawn to covers really, in any way up to this point. Like, I didn’t even ever put ’em in shows really. Uh, I think maybe once or twice in the 25 years. I played one live, I hadn’t even considered putting one on the album. I recorded that for, my, uh, Patreon page at the end of 2020. I was looking for some new thing to do and I also, had asked my film and TV sync licensing. Folks, if, if there was some, if there was like a list of friendly songs that maybe I, I could do a cover. You know, it was a, I don’t have to tell you, it was a strange time. The end of 2020, it was like, okay, I need to kind. I need to kind of till the soil. I need, like I need to try some new things and I need to shake out of this. Um, and they gave me a list of friendly songs where if I were to record them and they were to get them placed, the artists, the writers of the songs would probably agree, you know? So that song was on the list and I revisited it. It, you know, I’d heard it forever of course, because we all have, but I hadn’t really listened to it and I hadn’t really let myself feel it. I think, and it, whatever the cross section was of that song and the end of 2020, man, it leveled me. I was like, okay, I gotta try this. And then I learned it and I realized that, uh, Bono sings it too high for me. And

DJ: It’s not in your range?

Maia: He, no, he is a whole step higher than what I did on, on the album. But it was, yeah, it was, it was really therapeutic to learn it and to put it down. And then, uh, I’m embarrassed to say I kind of forgot about it. Like I put it up on the Patreon page and thought, okay, that’s that, you know, I gave it to my sink folks and like thought I was done. And, uh. Then I, I, it just kind of went in the hard drive in a folder somewhere. And years later I was looking for something else entirely and saw this folder that said, U2 cover. And I still didn’t remember what it was. I thought, oh, did I do, did I do a cover for somebody? Like, ’cause just seeing a cover just didn’t feel like something I would’ve done. I had literally forgotten about it. So I opened up the file and played it, and I, and I, I welled up like, I can’t believe this almost. Just had this one quick life on the Patreon page. And then there’s a lot of things on that page that I should probably revisit because I get really inspired and I make something and I post it just there for the people who are signed up for that. And it, it doesn’t always get any other life. I mean, I’m happy for them and I’m happy for me ’cause I still got inspired to do that thing. But. yeah, I, once I heard it, I was like, okay, this, I gotta get this out. And then it felt like a great last thought for this album. That’s 

DJ: It’s really nice. Really nice.

Maia: Thank you.

DJ: You mentioned, um, Matthew Perryman Jones, who is on Tomboy. Uh, you and Matthew played a show at Nashville Sunday nights recently. Um, he’s based in Nashville also, right?

Maia: Yes, he is.

DJ: I thought he was.

Maia: Yeah. Yeah. He opened the show and, uh, that was like my local album release show. And then we sang our duet together for the first time. For the, so far, the only time. Yeah. It was really fun.

DJ: Well, at this point, are there more songs and maybe an 11th album in the works? Maybe all those songs from Patreon will lead to that?

Maia: Well, I, I mean, I, I have, I have a little bit of a thought in mind for what might be next, but also I, I’m so, I feel so connected to this album. I really wanna milk it. Like I just, I wanna get it out there for as long as I can to as many years as I can. And so I, I’m probably gonna be calling it my new album for another year, and I’m just gonna be out there playing it as much as I can.

DJ: Oh, well, I found myself traveling more than I thought I was going to be in the last couple months, a couple times unexpectedly, and two of those were road trips and I had Tomboy playing and the on the road, and it was nice. It’s just such a nice album.

Maia: Sweet. Well thank you so much. Thanks.

DJ: Maia Sharp. Thank you so much for this, this has been a lot of fun.

Maia: It sure has been. Thank you Dave.