Margaret Becker

    Margaret Becker

    Nashville, Tennessee6 reviews across 6 releases

    adult contemporaryccmdance poppop
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    Margaret Becker is a singer-songwriter from Bay Shore, Long Island, who moved to Nashville in 1985 and signed with Sparrow Records as a songwriter before beginning her solo career. Her early work drew on gritty rock, but the sound had shifted toward polished R&B and pop by Soul, with sequencers, drum machines, layered keyboards, strings and even a brief rap performance. Grace kept that direction while using a more subdued, reflective approach, centering its lyrics on grace and spiritual longing. She returned to guitar on Falling Forward, playing electric or acoustic guitar on nearly every song; the record combined calm textures with rock, jazz-tinged passages and journal-like writing about doubt, dependence and surrender. Her work remained explicitly devotional, but its arrangements moved steadily away from the harder-edged sound of her beginnings.

    After Grace in 1995, Becker took a three-year sabbatical from recording and wrote With New Eyes while contributing editorials to Campus Life. She resumed with Falling Forward in 1998, then released What Kind of Love in 1999, a relaxed soul-pop record that reviewers found coherent but less adventurous. Becker left Sparrow in 2002 and continued independently, including work with Maire Brennan and Joanne Hogg on the New Irish Hymns series. She later co-wrote and recorded Faithfully Yours: Psalms with David Edwards, an acoustic, scripture-based song cycle released in 2005. Becker also wrote books, produced for other singers and taught seminars. Her album Air followed in 2007, and she continued working as a musician, author and mentor.

    6 releases reviewed