Maggie Rose

When it comes to music, Maggie Rose doesn’t let other things define her — not prevailing trends, not marketing labels, not even her own past.

Maggie Rose defines herself.

A woman of exceptional versatility and variety, the Nashville-based artist draws from the many musical genres at play in the city — a love of storytelling and substantive lyrics learned from country music, an affinity for finely crafted pop production, R&B’s commitment to an irresistible groove. Familiar elements all, but Maggie Rose combines them in a singular way. It’s always honest, always her.

Maggie Rose’s new tracks “Just Getting By” and “Pull You Through” show a powerhouse singer in complete command not only of her live-in-the-studio recording sessions but also of her creative and prolific career. Recording in Nashville with an 11-piece band, Maggie’s making the most exciting music of her life as she taps into a soulful countryside in the vein of Linda Ronstadt and Adele.

Maggie envisioned a unique level of rawness for these sessions, an approach to the recording she had never taken before. Rather than building the tracks through overdubs, she wanted all the players — the rhythm section, the guitarists, the vocalists — in one place together, taking cues from each other and responding in the moment. Her band consists not of the city’s studio talent but of members of The Morrison Brothers Band and Them Vibes, as well as friends from Nashville’s music scene who are plenty talented in their own right and have played with Kelly Clarkson, Brothers Osborne, Steven Tyler and others. The sound springs from the shared experiences of a community.

Maggie’s entire career has prepared her for this moment. She’s just now reaching a point where she can fully express the music she always has held inside herself. “I have a level of confidence now that’s allowing me to make my music the way I want,” she says. “I have been waiting to seize this opportunity and I didn’t even know it.”

“Just Getting By” and “Pull You Through” encompass the lifetime of a relationship. “Just Getting By,” which Maggie — a newlywed — wrote in the wake an argument with her husband, shows a couple wrestling to establish a unified identity. “It’s not simply about the feeling of falling head over heels in love or of being in an argument, it’s about profound commitment to one another,” Maggie says. “It’s about having hope and believing in yourselves. It’s kind of romantic that we’re in hustle mode as much as we are. I feel like I’ll look back on this time of my life, and it will seem dreamy to me.”

Maggie wrote “Pull You Through”, a soulful ballad, while she was engaged, imagining years into her future — and the implication of the phrase “’til death do us part.” “You grow up your whole life knowing that’s part of the wedding ceremony, but to hear it and realize its gravity is overwhelming,” she says.

Shortly after she wrote the song, Maggie’s grandparents, married for 66 years, died seven weeks apart. “Suddenly, these people who had been together for decades were gone,” she says. “In retrospect, their passing made the song mean that much more to me, as I understand more about what committing your life to someone looks like.”

The new tracks come just months after Maggie’s acclaimed ‘Dreams > Dollars’ EP. In 2016, CMT named Maggie one of its Next Women of Country, and this year she has toured with Martina McBride and opened dates on Tim McGraw and Faith Hill’s Soul2Soul tour. Taken with recent releases ‘Dreams > Dollars’ and ‘The Variety Show Vol. 1,’ “Just Getting By” and “Pull You Through” reveal a singer crafting a sound as varied and nuanced as her musical interests. “It’s nice to be able to feed my creative spirit as often as I want and not be a one-dimensional artist,” she says.