Mary lyn Maiscott

Yesterday was my birthday, which made me think of my song “Middle Child,” released two years ago. It's a live version, recorded at Pianos in NYC during my last pre-pandemic club gig. 

When the lyrics first started to form in…

Sometimes we know people but not really. This was the case for me with the singer Laura Palmer, aka Laura Rebel Angel. We'd both recently been in an online music community and thus become Facebook friends but had never met…

I got the idea for my new song, “Left It on the Stage,” after my husband, the writer Robert Rosen, told me I’d done just that after a gig at the Bronxville Women’s Club—great acoustics!—in Westchester County, N.Y., with…

The iconclastic singer-songwriter Rickie Lee Jones recently released a memoir, Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour—borrowing her own evocative song title. It’s been almost 10 years since I interviewed Rickie for VanityFair.com. I haven’t read the memoir…

Gail Harkins, my cousin on my mother’s side, died last weekend. Her passion was music: With her friend Beth Gosnell, she founded Rock by the Sea, which organizes music events to raise money—almost $800,000 so far—for various charities. And…

…Joan Chew and Graig Janssen—the two musicians I’ve been working with for a few years now, though for many of you they don’t need an introduction. Let’s see, we’ve played: Caffe Vivaldi (sadly, now closed), Bowery Electric, Sidewalk Café (closed)…

Inevitably on Valentine’s Day, either my husband, Robert Rosen, or I bring up our trip to Paris in 1997, when we landed at Charles de Gaulle airport on February 14. I’d chosen our hotel there based on its being called…

Birthdays can be strange. I've always liked mine, just the idea of having a special day, even as I got older and the years went faster. But at times it's brought a stronger sense of mortality and the gravity of…

Yes, you’re a supermoon to me if you’re reading this! And thanks for the listening, streaming, downloading, sharing, or any other way you’ve been lighting up my music life. 

April’s supermoon, along with the quarantine, inspired me to write “I…

My EP Dream: Live Recordings from the Map Room is out Dec. 22! All six songs were performed in a small room at the very cool Bowery Electric in NYC. For a few years now Joan Chew and Graig Janssen…

All I have to do is dream.

What a beautiful line. It could be the thought of an artist, a child looking to the future, a person starting an exciting career, a political visionary.

Or someone in love. Did you…

I wrote “I Can’t Touch You (Supermoon)” early on in the pandemic, inspired by missing people intensely and by April’s supermoon. I did a video of it for NPR's Tiny Desk Contest, and some time later, with going to a…