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CD
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DC 782CD
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"Meg Baird's songs are rarely made up of tidy stories. In fact, for Meg, mystery itself is often the medium. With Furling, Meg's fourth album under her own name, she explores the breadth of her musical fascinations and the environments around them -- the edges of memory, daydreams spanning years, loose ends, loss, divergent paths, and secret conversations under stars. Furling moves through these varied spaces with the slippery, misty cohesiveness of a dream -- guided by an ageless, stirring voice that remains singular and unmistakable. Since co-founding the beguiling and beautiful Espers in the mid-aughts amid Philadelphia's fertile underground music community, Meg's solo recordings have constituted just a fraction of her work. Her first solo LP, the disarmingly out-of-time Dear Companion (2007), saw her carve a quiet, sunlit space away from the flickering swirl of Espers. Since her last solo releases, Seasons on Earth (2011) and Don't Weigh Down the Light (2015) Meg has lent thunderous drumming, lead vocal, and poetry to Heron Oblivion (Sub Pop) . . . She collaborated with harpist Mary Lattimore on the mesmerizingly hazy Ghost Forests (2018). She's played drums with Philadelphia scuzz-punks Watery Love (In The Red, Richie Records) and explored her deep familial folk roots in the Baird Sisters (Grapefruit Records). She also contributed her vocal arrangements to albums from Sharon Van Etten, Kurt Vile, Will Oldham, and Steve Gunn, and toured with Angel Olson, Dinosaur Jr., Bill Callahan, Thurston Moore, and Bert Jansch, among others. Yet Furling is the album that most irreverently explores the span of her work and musical touchstones. It showcases her natural tether to '60s English folk traditions. But it also reveals her deep love for soul balladry, the dubby Bristol atmospherics of Flying Saucer Attack, the solitary musings of Neil Young shackled to his piano deep in the foggy pre-dawn, the melancholy memory collage of DJ Shadow's Endtroducing, and the delicious, Saturday-night promise of St. Etienne. Furling was primarily recorded at Louder Studios by Tim Green (Bikini Kill, Nation of Ulysses, Melvins, Wooden Shjips). Additional piano and vocal recording were captured at Panoramic Studios in Stinson Beach, CA with Jason Quever (Papercuts). It was mastered in Brooklyn by Heba Kadry, who mixed Bjork's Utopia and mastered LPs for Slowdive, Cass McCombs, and Beach House. For all its adornments, Furling remains deeply intimate. The entire album was performed by Meg and her longtime collaborator, partner, and Heron Oblivion bandmate Charlie Saufley. While her prior solo work hinted at more expansive horizons, Furling explores the idea of Meg Baird as a band much more freely. Venturing beyond the musical confines of fingerstyle guitar, she plays drums, mellotron, organs, synths, and vibraphone over her piano and guitar foundations. Her distinctive, simultaneously elegiac and uplifting vocals, meanwhile, connect surreal dream montages, graft sunshine sonics to swooning meditations on romantic solidarity in trying times, and weave odes to the simple gestures of friendship -- and the loss of family and friends..."
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LP
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DC 782LP
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2023 repress; LP version. "Meg Baird's songs are rarely made up of tidy stories. In fact, for Meg, mystery itself is often the medium. With Furling, Meg's fourth album under her own name, she explores the breadth of her musical fascinations and the environments around them -- the edges of memory, daydreams spanning years, loose ends, loss, divergent paths, and secret conversations under stars. Furling moves through these varied spaces with the slippery, misty cohesiveness of a dream -- guided by an ageless, stirring voice that remains singular and unmistakable. Since co-founding the beguiling and beautiful Espers in the mid-aughts amid Philadelphia's fertile underground music community, Meg's solo recordings have constituted just a fraction of her work. Her first solo LP, the disarmingly out-of-time Dear Companion (2007), saw her carve a quiet, sunlit space away from the flickering swirl of Espers. Since her last solo releases, Seasons on Earth (2011) and Don't Weigh Down the Light (2015) Meg has lent thunderous drumming, lead vocal, and poetry to Heron Oblivion (Sub Pop) . . . She collaborated with harpist Mary Lattimore on the mesmerizingly hazy Ghost Forests (2018). She's played drums with Philadelphia scuzz-punks Watery Love (In The Red, Richie Records) and explored her deep familial folk roots in the Baird Sisters (Grapefruit Records). She also contributed her vocal arrangements to albums from Sharon Van Etten, Kurt Vile, Will Oldham, and Steve Gunn, and toured with Angel Olson, Dinosaur Jr., Bill Callahan, Thurston Moore, and Bert Jansch, among others. Yet Furling is the album that most irreverently explores the span of her work and musical touchstones. It showcases her natural tether to '60s English folk traditions. But it also reveals her deep love for soul balladry, the dubby Bristol atmospherics of Flying Saucer Attack, the solitary musings of Neil Young shackled to his piano deep in the foggy pre-dawn, the melancholy memory collage of DJ Shadow's Endtroducing, and the delicious, Saturday-night promise of St. Etienne. Furling was primarily recorded at Louder Studios by Tim Green (Bikini Kill, Nation of Ulysses, Melvins, Wooden Shjips). Additional piano and vocal recording were captured at Panoramic Studios in Stinson Beach, CA with Jason Quever (Papercuts). It was mastered in Brooklyn by Heba Kadry, who mixed Bjork's Utopia and mastered LPs for Slowdive, Cass McCombs, and Beach House. For all its adornments, Furling remains deeply intimate. The entire album was performed by Meg and her longtime collaborator, partner, and Heron Oblivion bandmate Charlie Saufley. While her prior solo work hinted at more expansive horizons, Furling explores the idea of Meg Baird as a band much more freely. Venturing beyond the musical confines of fingerstyle guitar, she plays drums, mellotron, organs, synths, and vibraphone over her piano and guitar foundations. Her distinctive, simultaneously elegiac and uplifting vocals, meanwhile, connect surreal dream montages, graft sunshine sonics to swooning meditations on romantic solidarity in trying times, and weave odes to the simple gestures of friendship -- and the loss of family and friends..."
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CD
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DC 470CD
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"Why if it ain't young Maggie Baird! Wandering down the lane in distraction, yet forward and with purpose, our Miss Meg is back among us with her first new record in four years. Seasons on Earth reflects on at least a dozen or so of the things we call 'seasons.' Their passing has clearly left her the stronger for it. Meg is a thoughtful, spiritual, scientific and skeptical young woman who hears from and speaks back to the world in music. The pristine quality of her voice is the face whose placidity conceals a tangle of thoughts and sensations, and the guitar behind it conveys those complexities with tenacity and clear articulation. Her 2007 solo debut, Dear Companion, was in some ways a record about records, and those who hear and collect them. For that album, Meg sang eight songs by other singers, adding two of her own. Seasons on Earth places itself within the community of singers, songwriters and players; resilient, even rebellious in selfhood, assured of a place to go when the music's over. Here there is a feeling to be tapped, songs to be written -- so Meg has written them, saving room for a couple old favorites that fit well with her new work. This is a vision of Meg's music that moves beyond the boundaries of Dear Companion, encompassing production, group playing and Meg's world view to make a more social record, an album that revels with friends and neighbors while observing with a fresh and free sense of itself."
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DC 470LP
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CD
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DC 340CD
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"There was a time when traditional music was just folk -- a time when folk wasn't hyphened up with words like psych and rock and pop. It was just there on its lonesome, like a lone girl and guitar. That's what you hear on Meg Baird's Dear Companion. Her lyrical singing and songwriting imbues the sound of the psych-folk group (see, there we go again) Espers, but this is Meg's solo debut. Traditional songs are of such great age that it is not known where they began. They are lost to time, for a world to pick on and interpret. With songs like 'The Cruelty of Barbary Allen,' 'Willie O' Winsbury,' and the title track, Meg interprets the old airs with voice and fingerstyle picking. Mixing traditional songs with her original compositions lends the album its variety. She further mixes it up by reaching for some deep cuts from a few records most of us haven't yet heard. Sure, there's a Jimmy Webb song, we're good with that -- but we've got Meg to thank for all our future listens to Fraser & DeBolt (whose delightful 'The Waltze Of the Tennis Players' is covered) and Chris Thompson. And her cover of The New Riders of the Purple Sage song 'All I Ever Wanted' will make your heart explode in a way the NRPS version never did -- gently."
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LP
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DC 340LP
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2024 repress. "There was a time when traditional music was just folk -- a time when folk wasn't hyphened up with words like psych and rock and pop. It was just there on its lonesome, like a lone girl and guitar. That's what you hear on Meg Baird's Dear Companion. Her lyrical singing and songwriting imbues the sound of the psych-folk group Espers, but this is Meg's solo debut. Traditional songs are of such great age that it is not known where they began. They are lost to time, for a world to pick on and interpret. With songs like 'The Cruelty of Barbary Allen,' 'Willie O' Winsbury,' and the title track, Meg interprets the old airs with voice and fingerstyle picking. Mixing traditional songs with her original compositions lends the album its variety. She further mixes it up by reaching for some deep cuts from a few records most listeners haven't yet heard. Sure, there's a Jimmy Webb song -- but there's Meg to thank for all future listens to Fraser & DeBolt (whose delightful 'The Waltze Of the Tennis Players' is covered) and Chris Thompson. And her cover of The New Riders of the Purple Sage song 'All I Ever Wanted' will make your heart explode in a way the NRPS version never did -- gently. Dear Companion has such a completion that just as the album is finishing and your mind is thinking 'Great record, I wish she'd sing one a cappella,' the moment comes when Meg does just that, as if a mind were being read somewhere. Whether you're a listener of hyphenated folk music or not, Dear Companion is a musical companion that will show you a bit of the traditional sandstone that folk is built upon and the simultaneous empathy and entertainment it can provide."
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