Songfacts®:

• At 5' 11" tall, Maia Sharp is used to standing out in a crowd, so the California-born country singer was overjoyed to meet Sarah Majors, a fellow female songwriter who also loomed large at 6' 1". "We met and immediately started sharing stories of what we perceived to be our freakish height in junior high school. It led to a fast friendship and, of course, a song about feeling different and left out," Sharp explained in a 2012 Songfacts interview.
  
  The song was "Standing Out In A Crowd," but while it ended up on Sharp's fourth studio album, Eve And The Red Delicious (2006), she wasn't the first to record it. A year earlier, Trisha Yearwood released it on her Jasper County album.
• Sharp no longer feels embarrassed by her statuesque height, and she credits Majors' positive attitude for helping her see a blessing where she once saw a curse. "Sarah is a happy ending kind of person and on this one I couldn't deny that what once felt like a curse was now a blessing," she told Songfacts.
  
  "I dig being tall and I enjoy being on stage even though at first I was the painfully shy songwriter making myself go up there to get my songs heard. It took a while but now being the tallest woman in the photograph or the person on the stage is a comfortable place. Everyone has something about them, real or perceived, that made them feel a little left out at some point along the way. I'm especially proud of the universal appeal of that one."
• Sharp re-recorded this for her 2012 album, Change The Ending. She waited years to revisit the song on record because she wanted some distance from Yearwood's rendition. "Her version of the song is fabulous, so I stayed out of its way for a while," she told Performing Songwriter. "But I was looking for an opportunity to put it out on a record and maybe change it up a little bit, make it a little darker. Give it a few more clouds in the verse so there are more of them to part in the chorus. This album seemed like the perfect time to do this."
• Change The Ending marked Sharp's debut as her own producer, which proved to be a difficult but worthwhile challenge.
  
  "It just felt right," she told Performing Songwriter, "like all the pistons were firing, and it was time to bring all the experiences together. But it was a challenge too. When I walked out of the vocal booth, which was most often at my home studio, there was nobody there to either applaud and say 'That was great' or say 'Yeah, I don't think we have it yet.' I had to get outside of myself and make that call on my own. There couldn't be any ego involved. It couldn't be just because I sang it. It had to be, what does it really sound like? Is this really the best I can do?"