Songfacts®:

• Maia Sharp didn't learn to bake bread during the COVID-19 pandemic, but she did write plenty of songs. One of them was "Gone Cryin'," a ballad about all the methods people use to cope with stress, like going fishing or stargazing or drinking. "But have you ever gone cryin' to get right?" she asks.
  
  Sharp and her co-writer, Elizabeth Elkins (of the alt-country duo Granville Automatic), wrote the song at the beginning of lockdown in 2020 shortly after the iconic folk singer John Prine died of complications from the virus.
  
  "Elizabeth Elkins and I were trying to keep the wheels turning somehow by writing on Zoom," Sharp told Songfacts in a 2023 track-by-track interview.
  
  "We started talking about the overachieving lock downers learning languages, starting gardens and baking bread and we decided to give ourselves and each other license to just be sad and scared and stuck some days. I had the title 'Gone Cryin'' picturing a wooden sign in a window like 'Gone Fishin'' and Elkins agreed it was good timing for this one. Musically we definitely had John Prine in mind and when it came time to produce it, I kept it simple and all about the story."
• Sharp moved from her home state of California to Nashville shortly before the pandemic started. Most of her 2021 album, Mercy Rising, was written during that time, but a couple pandemic-related tunes like this one made it onto the Reckless Thoughts album.
• Sharp was writing for Nashville artists long before relocating to Music City, with the likes of Trisha Yearwood ("Standing Out In A Crowd") and The Chicks ("A Home") cutting her tunes.