Maud's Dog - Maine To LA

​Maud's Dog

Maine To LA
self-released; 2025

By Jamie Funk

Maud’s Dog—the songwriting partnership of Mark Fisher and Jackie Pryce—operate out of Basingstoke, UK, but on “Maine To LA,” their gaze is fixed firmly westward. Inspired by The Ride of Her Life, Elizabeth Letts’ account of 63-year-old Annie Wilkins’ improbable cross-country ride from Maine to Los Angeles in 1954, the track seeks to bottle the quiet defiance of someone who’d lost everything and chose the open road anyway. It’s a story stitched from solitude and stubbornness, and Maud’s Dog lean into that mood with a kind of windswept nostalgia.

The track opens with gentle acoustic fingerpicking and sparse piano, establishing a contemplative pace that never quite settles into comfort. Pryce’s vocal delivery—part dramatic monologue, part soft lament—feels faintly reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac at their most emotionally ragged.

​As the song progresses, the guitars shift from careful picking to more emphatic strumming, adding a sense of momentum without ever exploding into full-blown crescendo. This isn’t a climb toward catharsis; it’s a looping path, full of dips and swells, more akin to tracing the shape of uncertainty than triumph.

“Maine To LA” feels like it wandered out of a 1970s folk record crate—warm, a little worn, and heavy with lived-in detail. But rather than feeling like pastiche, it carries an emotional clarity that’s less about genre and more about tone: modest, poetic, and quietly resonant. There’s a weather-beaten patience to the arrangement, like the song itself is pausing to take in the long view. Maud’s Dog aren’t just telling Wilkins’ story—they’re breathing in the same dust and letting it settle into every note.

maudsdog.com

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