Some may think of Nashville as the city of country music, but that’s obsolete for this era. Consider the work of Maggie Rose, who appears at Lafayette’s Music Room on Thursday, March 30th. She’s a Nashville-based, genre-smashing artist whose publicity describes her music as a “collision of rock n’roll, soul, folk, funk, and R&B.” Note the absence of “country,” despite the fact that many have filed her under that tag since she began her career in 2009.
Such categories mean little in this post-Taylor Swift world, and Rose has clearly taken that message to heart. Case in point, Rose’s 2021 album, Have a Seat. Produced by Ben Tanner of Alabama Shakes, it was cut before the pandemic at the inimitable FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. That alone screams out soul and rock and roll, all the more so because the studio band included heavy-hitters like bassist David Hood of the Swampers (the session musicians who backed up the likes of Aretha Franklin and Etta James) and guitarist Will McFarlane (Bonnie Raitt, Levon Helm), not to mention Rose’s longtime bandmates/collaborators Larry Florman, Alex Haddad, and Sarah Tomek.
The Wurlitzer electric piano that begins Have a Seat sets the tone for the rest of the music to follow with a spot-on soul vamp. String and horn sections further establish the roots of Rose’s sound here. And then come the lyrics of songs composed by Rose and a small army of co-writers.
Notably, her genre studies aren’t always on the nose. “I diagnose myself with the internet, minor aches and pains, death is imminent, I think the twitch in my eye might be permanent, you got a cure for it?” she sings in “Help Myself,” and it almost sounds like Supertramp with it’s bouncy keyboards. Yet she returns to the land of soul for the album’s closer: “Don’t ya give me the floor and then leave the room/I know that I’m speaking for myself but I’m talking to you,” she sings in “You Got Today.”
The latter song underscores the strong streak of women’s empowerment in Maggie Rose’s career. And that goes beyond her music. She also hosts a podcast, Salute the Songbird, which features her conversations with fellow women artists about their lives in and out of music, not to mention music industry-adjacent women like music journalist Marissa Moss, whose book Her Country is an inside look at the world of women in country music. Other guests have included erstwhile Memphis artists like Valerie June and Shannon McNally.
This sensibility of solidarity is echoed in Maggie Rose’s music, which spans over a decade now, making her Thursday show at Lafayette’s (with a full band that includes Kaitlyn Connor on keys, Kyle Lewis on guitar, Judd Fuller on bass, and Tim Burkhead on drums) the perfect way to wrap up National Women’s History Month.