Maria Taylor

Sometimes it's the quiet ones you need to watch out for. Nestling under your skin and infiltrating your day-to-day, a great album can be something delicate, seeping in when you least expect it.

Though often referred to as half of the duo Azure Ray and 1/4 of Saddle Creek's Now It’s Overhead, Maria Taylor's talents have seen her name attached to an impressive roster of musicians. She's popped up on Crooked Fingers' Bring on the Snakes, Bright Eyes' Lifted or the Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground, and Moby's 18. Her distinctive, luminous vocals provide a unifying thread through such unlikely releases as The Bruces' Shining Path (2004), The Faint's Wet From Birth (2004), and Bright Eyes' I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning (2005).

Maria doesn't scream her angst or snarl out her problems. She doesn't warble melismas with the glut of high-strung chart divas. With understated grace and aplomb, she writes the sort of classic, sad songs once favored by the first ladies of American songwriting. Her soulful melodies and honeyed vocals conjure those leaked from radios on nights we fell asleep in the backseats of our parents’ cars. Without leaning on nostalgia, Maria’s first solo full-length, 11:11, evokes the artistry of greats like Carole King, Laura Nyro and Rickie Lee Jones while it spans the spectrum from acoustic folk to electronic dream pop.

11:11's all-star cast features the talents of Cursive's Gretta Cohn, Now It's Overhead's Andy LeMaster, and Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis. LeMaster and Mogis each lent his talents to the recording, production, and engineering of the record, as well, resulting in an album that sets Maria's compositions awash in an ethereal, melancholic glow.

Saddle Creek released Maria Taylor's 11:11 on May 24th, 2005.

To follow up a stunning debut, Maria has put together another glimmering collection of songs in the shape of her second solo record, Lynn Teeter Flower.

The songs for Lynn Teeter Flower, an album named after a family friend in Maria's native Birmingham, Alabama, were written in between tours for 11:11. The collection reveals a woman settling very well into her role as a solo artist, peeling back some of the layers of the last album to reveal a more organic sound, one that resembled the hundreds of shows she had done all over the globe in support of 11:11 over the course of the last year. She began her new recording sessions with Spoon's drummer Jim Eno in Austin, hopped over to Athens to record four more tracks with Now It's Overhead's Andy LeMaster (who worked on 11:11), and then ended up in Memphis to work with Doug Easley (Cat Power, Pavement). The record sees contributions from Maria's brother and sister – bassist Macey Taylor and keyboardist Kate Taylor, both of whom played in her live band, as well as Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst, who co-wrote and sings on “The Ballad of Sean Foley.”

With Lynn Teeter Flower, Maria Taylor is taking her songcraft to new heights, mixing together soaring guitars, bubbly electronics, feathery farfisa organs and sugary layers of vocals into the sweetest confection of an album you'll hear all year. Opener “A Good Start” is propelled by a vicious groove, setting the tone for an album more influenced by rhythm, very possibly the result of one of Maria's favorite hobbies: playing the drums. “Smile and Wave” weaves a bed of “Strawberry Fields”-esque mellotron with ribbons of Maria's rich voice, while “My Own Fault” strips everything down to a sparse drum machine, a dry electric guitar and a seasick organ mingling with Maria's lament. “Irish Goodbye” picks up where 11:11's “One for the Stockholder” left off, dancing in a place where acoustic guitars mix effortlessly with a crisp electronic beat, and “Lost Time,” with its lone acoustic guitar, melancholy piano and plaintive vocal, reminds us of some of the moments that made us entranced by Maria Taylor in the first place: a voice as smooth and sweet as honey spinning marvelous, insightful tales of the world around us with much aplomb.

Lynn Teeter Flower was released by Saddle Creek Records on 03/06/2007.