09/03/2026
GET TO KNOW THE ARTISTS FROM THE SOUND OF NASHVILLE CONCERT PART 4 - MAGGIE ROSE
Maggie Rose “Half Moon” Album BIO
The latest album from Maggie Rose, Half Moon reveals the rare magic of hard-won momentum meeting a creative spirit in peak bloom. After devoting more than a decade to deepening her craft and unlocking the full force of her extraordinary voice, the Nashville-based singer/songwriter experienced a rapid rise in recognition, including scoring back-to-back GRAMMY nominations for her 2024 LP No One Gets Out Alive and 2025 single “Poison In My Well” and earning an Emerging Act Of The Year nod from the Americana Music Association in 2025. Rather than succumbing to the pressure of heightened expectation, Rose immersed herself in the making of her new album with effusive abandon. With its lovely alchemy of soulful symphonic pop, R&B, and Americana, Half Moon arrives as a document of divine expansion and self-discovery—ultimately extending an invitation to embrace every facet of ourselves with grace, courage, and a wide-open heart.
“At first it felt strange to receive all these accolades I’d been wanting for a long time—instead of grounding me, it made me feel anxious,” says Rose, who made her acclaimed full-length debut with 2013’s Cut to Impress. “But then the new songs started pouring out, and it felt like such a gift. I realized the recognition had come at a time when I was finally able to fully articulate who I am through my music, because of how my voice and my songwriting have evolved over the years. So if people are looking at me more closely, I’m glad they’re looking now.”
Co-produced by Lawrence Rothman (Amanda Shires, Margo Price) and Daniel Tashian (Kacey Musgraves, Leon Bridges), Half Moon took shape through a charmed and fluid process that began with the three musicians meeting up every few weeks to write in Tashian’s home studio, taking advantage of his abundant stash of instruments (e.g., Mellotron, upright bass, a saloon-style piano). “We’d leave each session with these beautiful, fully conceived demos, and after a few songs it became apparent that something special was happening,” says Rose, who was eight months pregnant at the outset of the album’s creation. As they gave voice to the complexities of her inner life—her lived experience of womanhood, the sacredness of her closest bonds, the thrill and overwhelm of expecting her first child—the trio of collaborators surrendered to a shared journey Rothman sums up as “a year-long wild ride of writing, producing, crying, laughing, babies being born, and dreams coming to life.” Tashian, meanwhile, compares their creative kinship to “a bunch of kids building sandcastles on a beach and just enjoying the sunshine…We were all passengers, and the songs were taking us wherever they wanted to go.”
Six months after the birth of her son Graham, Rose headed to the historic RCA Studio A in Nashville and recorded Half Moon with an elite lineup of over two dozen musicians, finding the album’s true cohesion through the kinetic energy of people gathering in a room and giving the songs their fullest life. Along with top-tier players like guitarist Tom Bukovac (Emmylou Harris, Stevie Nicks), bassist Dennis Crouch (Elvis Costello, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss), and keyboardist Peter Levin (The Highwomen, Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit), that lineup included Rose’s touring band: percussionist Tim Burkhead, bassist Judd Fuller, guitarist M.P. Gannon, and multi-instrumentalist Cav Mims. The follow-up to her 2025 EP Cocoon, Rose’s fifth studio LP marks a bold departure from the rootsy soul of No One Gets Out Alive—a Best Americana Album GRAMMY nominee featured on best-of-the-year lists from the likes of Rolling Stone. Thanks in part to its lavish string arrangements and velvety horns, Half Moon unfolds with both sophisticated ease and daring grandiosity—a direct reflection of her newly widened emotional world.
Partly recorded at Sound Emporium Studios, Half Moon takes its title from its soul-searching centerpiece, written just two days before Graham was born. For Rose, the album intimately chronicles a season of profound personal transformation—a period in time she refers to as “this amazing moment of expecting and then giving birth, and re-emerging with a completely new part of my identity.” In sharing Half Moon with the world, she hopes to provide listeners with a similar sense of refuge and release.
The Sound of Nashville Concert at The Bardavon in Poughkeepsie. Tuesday, October 6th, Benefitting Mental Health America of Dutchess County. Buy your tickets: https://mhadutchess.org/soundofnashville/
