The Road To Hell And Back

Album: Reckless Thoughts (2023)
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Songfacts®:

  • Maia Sharp wrote many of the songs on her Reckless Thoughts album about the breakdown of her marriage, her new life in Nashville, and the challenges of a pandemic, but the inspiration for the powerful album closer came from a different source.

    Sharp is a regular attendee at the SongwritingWith:Soldiers retreats, which has songwriters writing tunes based on the experiences of veterans, active duty service members, first responders and/or their families. This time around, she was paired with Amanda Voisard, a photojournalist from the Washington Post who traveled around the world amid humanitarian and refugee crises. Sharp expected Voisard to tell her how capturing disturbing images took a toll on her, but instead she told her the story of a group of women in South Sudan.

    Sharp told Songfacts the story in a 2023 Songfacts interview: "She had spent years in South Sudan observing the women in an Internal Displacement Camp and she wanted her song to be about them and how they walked the road to hell and back (her words) every day to find anything useful to bring back to their families. They were in constant danger and working in an environment that was yielding less and less but sometimes, on their walks, they would sing. It took my breath away when Amanda said that.

    She showed me photos of her time there, some beautiful and some heartbreaking. We tried to capture both sides of that in the song. There are too many layers of the day-to-day struggle and tragedy that is still going on there today, but we did our best to capture one slice of it."
  • Sharp, who self-produced the album, knew she had to take a different approach compared to the other tracks on the release. She told antiMusic how she assembled a team of musicians and vocalists to recreate the South Sudan women's journey through song:

    "I called Eric Darken and his deep pocket groove to play a few different kinds of African percussion and, because we are talking about women singing, I called three powerhouse vocalists Emily West, Wendy Moten and Shelly Fairchild to tease us in the verses and then stack the hell out of the choruses. The opening acoustic part is unapologetically influenced by my love of Meshell Ndegeocello. It took me about 20 tries to realize I need to break up the line, play it on two tracks and hard pan them apart like a call and response."
  • The album yielded the singles "Kind," "Old Dreams," and "She'll Let Herself Out." It was mostly recorded at Nashville's Resistor Studio, where she tracked her previous album, Mercy Rising.

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