Stephanie Chapman is a singer and songwriter whose lyrics employ many of the scenes from her pastoral childhood in rural West Virginia to form a painterly landscape in story and song. Stephanie credits this fertile soil and her dad’s eclectic taste in music with shaping her song style. In 2001 a fortuitous meeting in Normandy, France led to 22 years of marriage and musical collaboration with her husband Nathan Chapman. A Nashville-born son of Steve and Annie Chapman, revered and celebrated Christian singer songwriters, Nathan had decided to leave the music industry in his past until he met his wife and they formed a duo, got a record deal and started recording music together. Stephanie’s songs seem to keep finding homes with some of the best artists in music and now she has had songs recorded by Bonnie Raitt, Ricky Skaggs and Sharon White, Eric Church, Mickey Guyton, Martina McBride, and Lady A and more. After a long absence on music row to tend to her three children she released a full-length album called Under An August Sky on May 24th, 2024.

Maia Sharp returns with Mercy Rising, her boldest, most confessional offering to date.  After living in the Los Angeles metro area for most of her life, Maia moved to Nashville at the beginning of 2019, partly to be in an unapologetically songwriter centric town and partly as a personal life reboot.   She reflects, “In the last 2 years, just about everything that could have changed has changed and it feels now like those long walks outside of all of my comfort zones were heading toward this album.”   Maia has always managed to play all sides of the songwriting field.  She has had her songs recorded by Bonnie Raitt, The Chicks, Trisha Yearwood, Keb’ Mo’, Cher, Edwin McCain, Terri Clark, David Wilcox, Art Garfunkel, Lizz Wright, Paul Carrack, Lisa Loeb and more. She produced Edwin McCain's album Mercy Bound (429 Records) and two songs for Art Garfunkel's retrospective double album The Singer (Sony).  And through it all, Maia has continued to record her own albums.  She has eight solo releases (on Ark 21, Concord, KOCH, eOne, Blix Street and Crooked Crown respectively), a collaborative project with Art Garfunkel and Buddy Mondlock Everything Waits to be Noticed (EMI Manhattan) and a duo project called Roscoe & Etta with writing/production partner Anna Schulze.  Each release has led to extensive touring throughout the US and UK and appearances on Mountain Stage, Acoustic Cafe, World Cafe, NPR's "All Things Considered," CBS Early Morning and the Today Show to name a few. Maia is also an adjunct professor at NYU for the Summer Songwriter Workshop and she has been writing for Songwriting with Soldiers since 2017 where active duty service members, veterans and/or their family members are paired with professional songwriters to share their experience and turn it into a song.  Her new album, Mercy Rising, is out now to critical acclaim and features co-writes and guest appearances by Mindy Smith, Gabe Dixon, Noah Guthrie and P.J. Pacifico.

These are the words that open Digging Up The Scars, Neilson Hubbard’s new album. Hubbard has been making beautiful music for decades, as a member of Strays Don’t Sleep (with Matthew Ryan), The Orphan Brigade (with co producer Ben Glover), as a solo artist, and as one of Nashville’s most renowned producers. But with Scars, Hubbard has reached an apex of his art, epic and intimate, symphonic and simple, the record is a pleading question to a lover and the universe at the same time, asking “What do I believe in? What do you believe in? What do we believe in?” It’s a rare artist that can ask such synchronous questions of simplicity and grandeur in an album based on soft acoustic guitar and pedal steel under a sweeping orchestration of strings and still keep the songs direct and personal. Nobody is making records like this anymore. Scars contains songs that touch on fierce love and loyalty to beliefs and time. As a songwriter, Hubbard has always been concise and descriptive, illuminating specific details wrapped around epic choruses that ask the big questions, direct pleas to both the Divine and mortals: “Where you been,” “will you wait for me?” But with Digging Up The Scars, Hubbard has taken on a symphonic fabric that underlies and elevates the drive of each song. The second track, “Where You Been” begins simply with acoustic guitar and lap steel and builds to an incredible sweep of orchestra with the violins and cellos driving into parts that chop at the urgency of the chorus’ pleading question. This is a record that takes on a layer of new meaning in this specific time in our history. Also new to Hubbard’s sound is the addition of Juan Solorzano’s lap steel, which is undoubtedly the supporting actor to Hubbard’s soft understated vocals. Adding a ghostly atmosphere underneath the constant rhythm of skin on strings, the lap steel lifts each song to the stars, hanging over the listener as a comforting voice of unity and communion, asking each of us to question our place in the universe. Hubbard’s art, whether as a solo songwriter or as a producer has always done that: reached to join parts to a greater whole. Authenticity is an overused word, but Hubbard embodies this in all of his art. In 2019, Hubbard produced the Grammy nominated Rifles and Rosary Beads by Mary Gauthier. He has always been a deft director of sound. Hubbard’s production specializes in staying true to the song and he chooses a small ensemble of players that are as spontaneous and loyal to beauty and space as he is. Recently moving into photography and film, Hubbard directed the documentary and produced the soundtrack of The Orphan Brigade: Soundtrack to a Ghost Story which won a number of awards and birthed the band The Orphan Brigade (Hubbard, Joshua Britt and Ben Glover). With Joshua Britt, through their company Neighborhoods Apart, he directs and produces music videos and has worked with John Prine, Jason Isbell, Lucinda Williams and The Blind Boys of Alabama as well as a host of artists without household names. And as a songwriter, his work has been featured in Grey’s Anatomy, One Tree Hill and Private Practice as well as several films. And his photography captures the stark and gorgeous reality of each subject, unadorned and genuine. One of Hubbard’s greatest gifts in his songs and his vocal delivery is the simple humility which he employs like a whisper. In an era of flaunt and flourish, Hubbard stays simple and true. The song, “The End of the Road,” is an instant classic, a Tom Waits promise “They’ll tear it out when we’re gone “Does any of this really matter,” he asks in “Our DNA” a song to his young son. Digging Up The Scars is a passing down of all that Neilson Hubbard believes in -fierce allegiance to honor.