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Maia Sharp - Tomboy |
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After getting to know our friend, singer, songwriter and musician Maia
Sharp for several years, we are not surprised that her new album coming
out September 12 (2025) is called Tomboy. It describes her perfectly
when she was growing up and nods to whom she is today. We suppose she
could have called it “Cheeks,” as one of her friends has aptly nicknamed
her for her smile to use an old cliché lights up a room or in this case
a Zoom call and conversation.
This collection of songs is beautiful and the album overall is elegant,
both lyrically and musically.
“As most albums unfold for me, I am not necessarily sure that I am
writing for my own album until I am one or two songs in. I am writing
all of the time. Sometimes I am writing for other people and sometimes I
am writing for me to pitch to other people. About every year I look back
at what I have written and if I do that about one year after a record, I
can have the next album out about two (more) years after that album. It
takes me about a year to do the finishing out, choosing the songs,
recording, mixing, mastering, marketing and all of that stuff. On all
the odd years when I don’t have a record that is when I start looking at
when the next one is going to be.
Knowing Maia Sharp, not only as a regular guest at Riveting Riffs
Magazine, but also as a friend, we were curious if the song “Tomboy,” is
somewhat autobiographical.
“Oh my gosh. My
co-writer Emily Cobb and I have been writing together for a while now.
She came over and we started this competition of old photos and who
looked more like a boy when we were
kids (she laughs lightly).We laughed and had fun, and said I look
more like a boy than you, but then it was oh yeah, what about this one?
It felt like a celebration of those little kids who knew who they were
somehow. I remember don’t even try to put a dress on me. My folks didn’t
even try. I remember maybe when I was a baby some other family member
tried to put a ribbon on me and I could barely move my arms, so I ripped
it off (she has a big smile). I knew so early what I wanted to wear, how
I wanted to present. Even though it felt awkward at the time and from
the outside looking in, because I was the only one in my friends circle
who was like that. The girls were kind of girly and the boys were doing
the boys stuff. When you went to the hair cutting place it was like
these are the boys’ choices and these are the girls’ choices. I want the
boy’s choice number two. (She holds her hands out as if to say what
am I supposed to do) I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t want any
of those other things. Fortunately, my parents never fought me on it.
There were other family members who really wanted me to wear a dress to
a wedding or whatever. It was always rough. Somehow looking back now it
is man, how did she (meaning her) know that already? She is five and she
knows, she wants the boots, she wants short hair and she is never going
to wear makeup. How did I know that? Hopefully, now there are more
examples of that and exposure, so it is not oh there is something wrong
with me and it is awkward.
I was five in 1976 and I was fifteen in 1986 and that is when it is
really rough and you are kind of thinking about it. You have to find
your people. Again, I am very fortunate, my parents are awesome. They
are live and let live and we love you for you.
That is who they have always been and they still are. I am
extremely fortunate. I have so many friends, countless friends who are
not. The other thing about the “Tomboy,” thing that was really fun to
see was the video I made and put out. It is a series of still photos of
me as a kid. It you saw them know you would think they are a bunch of
pictures of a little boy.
I did a follow up video of fans and friends and asked them to send in
photos of themselves looking like a tomboy or acting like a tomboy and I
re-edited the video completely. I am not in it at all. It is just a
series of other people who sent in their photos and they are awesome and
they are not all LGBT. It is probably 50 / 50. I love it that there are
a lot of hetero women and bi women. It doesn’t even matter. They didn’t
want to play hopscotch or whatever the girls were supposed to be doing
at the time. They wanted to play a sport. I wish there were assignments
like that. What do you want to play? These are all the things a little
kid can play,” she says.
Okay let’s talk about the song you named with one word this writer has
difficulty not tripping over, "Counterintuition" (Editor’s note it
helps you if you break the word into two halves.)
Maia Sharp (smiling as this writer tries to not trip again over the
name of the song), I
wrote that one alone, which always takes a long time. I felt I had
finished that song. The production “Counterintuition” started to feel
like the “Tomboy” production and the approach to both of those songs
started to sound similar enough. I thought hey, maybe I have a creature
here. Maybe there is a theme. Those two songs, which just happened to
randomly be songs one and two on the album. I don’t know it probably
isn’t a random thing, but that is where they ended up. They were the two
songs that let me know how I wanted to treat this next album and started
to inform me as to which songs would fit with those.
I went a little eclectic and the other eight don’t necessarily sound
like those, but there are common approaches and common themes. I think
the voice is true through all of the songs. I didn’t write all of them.
The very last one is a cover of a U2 song (“I Still Haven’t Found What
I’m Looking For.” I have never recorded a cover before and in fact I
resisted even playing them (covers) live. Finally, it just felt right.
I am a little embarrassed to say I had done this whole recording of it
for a Patreon post during the pandemic. I started a Patreon page in June
2020. It is still going and people can go there and hear songs that have
never been released or they can hear songs in their earlier forms. They
can hear songs that I wrote for other artists or how I recorded them and
sent them to the artist. I just needed a post. It was in the heart of
all of the questions, the angst and the isolation (of the pandemic). I
had just gotten over COVID and I had it really bad. I woke up with it
the day that America admitted that it was here. It was super scary and I
finally got through that. Then there was what’s next? How am I going to
make a living now and kind of a reformation of what a lot of us had to
do in the midst of the fear and the anxiety. There is something about
that song “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” there is
something about the searching language of it that I really related to.
I was married for twenty-one years and I moved here (Nashville from Los
Angeles) as a single person and I had not been (single) for many years.
In fact, I was in a relationship before my marriage, so I hadn’t been
single for twenty-three years. I never lived alone. There were all of
these new things. I realized there were a lot of things I was looking
for that I hadn’t found yet. Some I still have not found yet (she
chuckles, dimples showing). I have not found what I’m looking for on
a personal level. I have found what I’m looking for in pretty much all
of the other ways. Professionally this is a total fit for me. It is
really right for me and socially it is wonderful for me. The community
here is incredible. There are a lot of versions of that. There are a lot
of circles here that you can move through and move easily from. Some
people know each other. I like to introduce people that I love to other
people that I love. People do that for me all of the time. I meet more
people here. I am more extroverted here than I have ever been in my
entire life,” she says.
Maia Sharp continues with the story, “When I recorded “I Still Haven’t
Found What I’m Looking For,” I just kind of dove in. I had the time.
Everybody was under lockdown. I learned the U2 song and I don’t usually
do that and it was more fun than I expected it would be. I realized he
(Bono) is such a crazy great singer with a range from hell. It was too
high for me (she smiles). I took it down a whole step. The way that it
works for me is to take the way he sings it and (make) it a whole step
lower.
I did my own thing to it and then I sent it off to some friends in LA.
Garrison Starr sang five tracks of vocals on it and my buddy Vanessa
Freebairn-Smith played three cellos on it. I just had them do their
thing. I did it, I posted it and then I put it away. Life went on. I was
looking for songs four years later for something else and I don’t think
I was (even) looking for hey what’s another song that could be on my
album? I was just looking through a folder for some old thing a
co-writer asked me about. I found this folder that said U2 cover and I
had forgotten that I did it.
I opened it up, I listened to the whole thing and I started crying. I
thought what is my problem. (She laughs and has
a big smile. Even her eyes are smiling). Why haven’t I put
this out? Where have I been? Am I losing it? How the hell did I forget
that I did this? I was in such a different place when I sang it and I
hear that in the vocal. I felt like I wanted to honor that. There is
something else happening. It is also a celebration of being past that
place emotionally, but lyrically, it still applies, because I guess you
could say, I still haven’t found who I am looking for. I have not found
her.”
We catch our breath every time this verse from the song “A Fool In Love
Again,” are sung or even to read them on a page, “I can’t imagine
running breathless down the street / In the rain to catch the one I’ve
been dreaming of / From where I’m standing so firmly on my feet / I just
want to be undone like a fool in love.”
They are words that remind us it does not matter who you are in life or
what your sexual orientation, it does not matter if you are black,
white, brown or have polka dots tattooed on your forehead, if you are a
woman in love with a woman, a man with another man or a woman and man in
love, love is still love and most of us want that magic in our lives
still or again.
“I wrote that with Emily West. It is funny, because we also wrote (she
sings the title) “Is That What Love Does.” We wrote that one with
her story at the time in mind. She was falling for somebody. That didn’t
work out and the next time we wrote together we wrote this whole other
song, about gosh I just really want to fall in love again. Emily and I
were in the same headspace at that point.
That might be a favorite (of mine) on the record, just because it is
saying something that is very true to me now. I miss that and I remember
it. I hope that it shows up again, but I don’t know. You are right, it
is just human to human. Everybody’s ability to fall in love and with
whom they would fall in love. It is going to feel different, but who
cares. The feeling is the same.
It is desperation to
be with them to run in the rain to find that man. All of those things,
like a Romcom. I think we even said that our bridge needs to be a
Romcom. That is where we went in the bridge. It has to invoke a little
bit of the cheesy scene, like you barely catch up with her at the
airport or you are running in the rain. She finds you. She turns around
and realizes you are the one. We need to try and capture that. Also,
with a little bit of absurdity. Right now, that sounds absurd in my
life, but I am hoping there will be a time when it is not absurd, when
it is real,” she says.
Since you mentioned it let’s talk about “Is That What Love Does.”
“Emily West was
falling for somebody and we were at Emily’s house writing this song.
Also, we are friends. We have been friends for years. She is one of the
best singers I have ever known in my life. It is a whole other thing. It
is wonderful. As most co-writes start, how are you, what’s going on? She
told me about this love that was starting to show up and how she had
literally cleaned the shelves of all the photos that were on it. She
wanted a fresh view of her own home and of who she was. (Editor’s note
therefore the words) “The shelves that held the burden / Of who I
used to be / Are empty, clean and open / Making room for me…”
There are all these photos of her as a kid or of her winning an award or
getting an induction or whatever it was. She was just like, you know
what I just want something new now.
The language is exactly what she was in the middle of. She took down all
of the pictures and of all the things that were on the shelves, cleaned
them and left them open. The last line you just said, “making room for
me,” she wanted them to be open to see what was really coming after
this, who she is now and how her home is going to reflect that. She was
intentionally opening up all of that shelf space. She was literally
taking all of the blinds off of the windows, which is the first line of
the song, “the blinds are off the windows.” She literally did
that.
It was pretty easy, she was just walking around the house and saying I
took the blinds off the windows. It was word for word of everything that
she was sharing,” Maia Sharp recalls.
The song runs counterpoint to a song we talked about a few years ago
from the album Mercury Rising, your song “Things To Fix,” when you were
in a different place in your life.
“Yes, it was very opposite. It is while you are trying to get over
somebody and you are just not addressing the main heartache in your
life. You can easily find one hundred other things in your house that
have to be done and that you are choosing to prioritize. I still do
that, when I am really anxious about something, my house gets really
clean. There is nothing that you can change (about the relationship),
but the thing you can change is that nick on the door,” she says.
In exploring the sound of horns that Maia Sharp utilized for the album
Tomboy, we discovered something we did not know about her (hard to
believe!). She plays saxophone.
“Saxophone was my first instrument. I actually went to college for that.
I was a music performance major on saxophone. I thought that is what I
was going to do for a living and about halfway through college I started
writing songs and I fell hard for that. I try to keep the sax around and
I still have them all. I have an alto and right over there I have a
soprano. I pull it out every now and again, but I never want to abuse
it. Once each record it will show up.
In the search for the signature sound on each song, maybe something that
isn’t on any of the other songs, I wanted to put flugelhorn and then it
felt right to flesh out the section with a tenor sax. On “Edge of the
Weatherline,” I did a solo. Then the groove and the chord changes had
this eighties vibe, so I started leaning into that. I am going to play
an eighties style saxophone solo or at least I am going to try and write
and play the kind of solo that I would have played along to as a kid in
the eighties, because that is when I started to play, probably ’83 or
’84. I was playing along to Sade, George Michael and all of these bands
that had saxophones. Do you remember how popular sax was in the eighties
and nineties and then it wasn’t anymore. Sheila E, Billy Ocean, all of
those classic solos and as soon as they start everybody knows those
solos. (We both reference how Stax Records in Memphis had lots of
horns.)
I love it and I am still a fan. I still listen when I just want to chill
and not have any lyrics around. I listen to a lot of Jazz. I love that.
On “Is That What Love Does” I heard this little “chimey” thing, but I
didn’t want it to be chimes, because I had used a xylophone chime like
sense throughout the album, so I did a pair of soprano saxophones. It
kind of sounds like chimes. That was fun,” she says.
This seems like a good time to tell our readers that Rod McGaha plays
trumpet and flugelhorn on this album. “Edge
of the Weatherline,” was co-written with May Erlewine, who also plays
bass on the song.
(When I wrote)
“with Sarah Holbrook (featured on background vocals and violin) and
Shannon LaBrie (background vocals and piano), I felt like I was in a
very wistful place. I still am on and off in a wistful place about LA.
There are a lot of things about it that I loved. Also, the realization
and the relief that I am grateful that I never got really, really
famous. I don’t want that. Before I started this whole thing, in my
early twenties I thought that is what came with it. If you did a good
job and you were successful then that would be one of the elements. I am
so glad that is not true. I feel like I am living a successful,
autonomous life. It might be a family influence. We are not a
materialistic family. I have famous friends who are the most ego free
wonderful human beings. It is something that just might happen along the
way and that it didn’t happen to me, I think probably in my twenties
after my first or second album I was like what’s wrong with me and now I
am, thank god. I am so glad that I get to operate under the radar and
have the respect of my peers and other artists that I love, is ideal.
That last verse may have a little twinge of wistfulness and it might
sound a little sad, but it really is not. It is supposed to be like an
arrival,” says Maia Sharp, about the song that uses the Hollywood Walk
of Fame as a metaphor.
Treat yourself and visit Maia Sharp’s website now to purchase your copy
of Tomboy. You don’t have to be a tomboy to enjoy great music,
but if you are, it will be even more fun.
All photos by Emma-Lee
Photography are protected by copyright © All Rights Reserved.
#MaiaSharp #MaiaSharpMusic #MaiaSharpInterview #TomboyMusic #RivetingRiffsMagazine #RivetingRiffs #MaiaSharpEntrevista
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At
that point after my last album Reckless Thoughts, I had Tomboy
already. I had that song already written and I had a little bit of
production fleshed out on it, before the Reckless Thoughts album.
There was just something about it that just didn’t quite fit in with the
rest of those songs. I had always loved it, but I just set it aside,”
she explains. 