YESTERDAY’S LIVES a new release coming Dec. 31, 2025
In the late summer of 2025 I started recording YESTERDAY’S LIVES. My dear friend, Michael Beasley, and executive producer on 5 previous albums, asked if I was ready to do one more album project. He is the spark that lit the flame! I couldn’t have done this one without his complete financial support.
Recording YESTERDAY’S LIVES has been particularly inspiring and exciting for me. Working with musicians I love, admire and have known through the years in Hawaii feels like a culmination of the islands being my home for 50 years. Starting with Dean Taba, bassist, who has been my gig partner for the past decade, the album is comprised of many songs that we have performed “live” together over the years, and we have made them our own. Other local players I have been working with through the years include multi instrumentalist, Abe Lagrimas-drums and ukulele, Reggie Padilla-sax, Paul Lindbergh-flute, Duane Padilla-strings, Matt Spenser-bass, and most recently, Christina Sochor-piano, Sara Surprenant-vocalist, and Kris Fuchigami-ukulele. And for the title track, I went outside of Hawaii and asked Mark Kibble of Take 6, to do the vocal harmony arrangement.
YESTERDAY’S LIVES was recorded in a remote part of the Big Island at Mana Music and Media, with Michael Surprenant, engineer and videographer. His skill and knowledge along with his inherent talent for capturing the music, mixing and mastering, has been invaluable.
Since the start of the pandemic, it had been a deeply emotional few years with the passing of my daughter, Dawn, and simultaneously very engaging with the recording of my album, “My Story In Song”, released February. 7, 2023.
My grandson, Koa, had come to live with me in Hawaii during that time for his high school years. Every day was busy with school drop offs and pickups, volleyball and swim team, shopping for groceries, cooking meals, cleaning house, laundry, and the dynamic of grand-mere and a teenage boy daily navigating together through life. We were living in a very small house overlooking the ocean, and Koa always encouraged me to play piano as much as I wanted. The piano was very close to his sleeping alcove. Halfway through Koa’s high school years I started performing again every weekend. That gave me an extra boost for my creative sensibility. Once again I was in the thick of interpreting classic standards and writing more.
I started writing instrumental piano pieces and revisiting poems from Dawn that I had archived. Yesterday’s Lives was in a rough draft state. It felt timely to finish and record it.
Yesterday’s Lives, the album, is comprised of 3 original instrumental pieces called, Happiness, Hopefulness and Longing, 6 cover songs and Yesterday’s Lives, the title track.
The musicians performing on this album have inspired me as an artist. They each approached the music with a deep level of skill, excitement and sincerity that’s reflected in the songs. I am especially excited to have recorded Mercedes Benz with a young woman who moved to the islands a few years ago. I had been listening her online and one day spontaneously contacted Christina (Sochor) to ask if she would accompany me on a song for the album. She did a roundtrip journey from Honolulu into Hilo to spend a few hours in the studio with me and it was a blast!
Another spontaneous decision was contacting Kris Fuchigami, who lives on the Big Island, and someone I have have long admired as a musician. He brings an added level of celebration to Here Comes The Sun.
YESTERDAY’S LIVES: 1.Yesterday’s Lives 2. Here Comes The Sun 3.Singing In The Rain 4. Happiness 5. Mercedes Benz 6. These Are The Days 7.Hopefulness 8. I Love Being Here With You 9. The Twelfth Of Never 10.Longing
More about Maggie:
My Story In Song is the winner of the 2024 Nā Hōkū Hanohano Award for Jazz Album Of The Year, and the BIMA award for Contemporary Acoustic album.
Maggie Herron’s 2020 album release , YOUR REFRAIN, is the winner of the 2021 Nā Hōkū Hanohano Award for Jazz Album Of The Year. The album is a dedication to her daughter and writing partner, Dawn Herron, who tragically passed away April 5, 2020. YOUR REFRAIN features 7 of the mother/daughter’s collaborations with the title track nominated for the 2021 Nā Hōkū Hanohano Song Of The Year Award.
RENDITIONS, Maggie’s 2019 album, is the winner of the 2020 Nā Hōkū Hanohano Award, for Jazz Album Of The Year.
Maggie won her third Nā Hōkū Hanohano Award for Jazz Album Of The Year for her 2018 album, A TON OF TROUBLE. The album includes 10 original songs. And Maggie’s remake of ‘In My Life’ from the album was nominated for the 2019 Nā Hōkū Hanohano Award for Single of the Year.
In 2017 Maggie’s album Between the Music and the Moon, won the Nā Hōkū Hanohano Jazz Album of the Year Award while Maggie was also nominated for Female Vocalist of the Year. The album of 12 original songs includes 5 co-written with her lyricist/daughter, Dawn Herron.
In 2015 Maggie won the Nā Hōkū Hanohano Award for Jazz Album of the Year for her album ‘Good Thing”.
Maggie Herron was born in Muskegon, Mi. into a family of 11 children. She began taking piano lessons as a little girl and was the church organist by the age of 10. At 14, she performed Beethoven’s 2nd Piano Concerto with the Muskegon Symphony Orchestra and was awarded a scholarship to Interlochen Center for the Arts, placing in the top 5 finalists in the piano concerto competition.
At 18, with the late ’60’s idealism at her back, she was inspired up and out of her family home. She hitch-hiked across the U.S. landing in the Olympic National Rainforest in Washington State. There, in an off-the-grid cabin with only an old upright piano at her disposal, she started exploring pop and folk music, writing songs and weaving the new sounds with her classical training. Maggie began performing in Seattle, playing at the top of the Camlin Hotel, the Sorrento Hotel and appearing as a guest performer at Jazz Alley. Life took an unexpected turn, when Maggie traveled to Hawaii where she found herself feeling at home ever since.
Maggie has been living, writing, recording and performing on Oahu, Lanai, and Hawaii’s “Big Island” since 1976. Her first Hawaii music award was in the ’70’s for best song in the Hawaii Home Grown contest.
Maggie can be seen every Friday and Saturday nights performing with bassist, Dean Taba at Lewers Lounge in Waikiki.
