***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) on an album that garnered praise from the New York Times and made Mojo’s Top Ten Albums of 2016 list. 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). Yet Furling is the album that most irreverently explores the span of her work and musical touch- stones. It showcases her natural tether to ’60s English folk traditions....
CD $13.75
01/27/2023
LP $24.25
01/27/2023
***AVAILABLE AGAIN!!! A beautiful new album of traditional folk from MEG BAIRD of ESPERS. Ten tracks of both traditional and original folk (plus a few choice covers), beautifully performed with Meg playing guitar, dulcimer and singing. Beautiful.
LP $21.95
07/28/2015
CD $13.75
05/22/2007
***CHECK STOCK!!! Received a 7.1 rating from Pitchfork. MEG BAIRD is back! Don’t Weigh Down the Light is her first album since 2011’s Seasons On Earth, and it arrives alive with mystery and color—buoyed by a voice that’s a warm, mesmerizing call across time. Meg Baird’s last decade would be remarkable by any artist’s standards. She co-founded and recorded three albums with ESPERS—one of the most distinctive and hypnotic bands of the century’s first decade. She recorded two solo LPs for Drag City: Dear Companion and Seasons on Earth. She also collaborated with Will Oldham, Kurt Vile, Sharon Van Etten, and Steve Gunn and toured with the legendary Bert Jansch. And while it’s been four years since her last release, the days since have been anything but restful. She played drums and recorded with Philadelphia cave punks Watery Love, and toured with Michael Chapman, Michael Hurley, Vile, Cass McCombs, Hiss Golden Messenger, and Lambchop. And after more than a decade as a fixture in Philadelphia’s boiling-over musical scene, Meg moved west to San Francisco where she joined forces (as drummer and lead vocalist) with members of Comets on Fire and Assemble Head to form the moody and thunderous HERON OBLIVION. She also wrote and recorded this LP—Don’t Weigh Down the Light. Like Meg’s previous LPs (and much of Espers output,) the foundation of Don’t Weigh Down the Light is her lyrical, precise, and propulsive fingerstyle guitar work and a voice that moves from soaring and tender to soothing and spellbinding....
LP $19.75
06/23/2015
CD $13.75
06/23/2015
***AVAILABLE AGAIN!!! MEG BAIRD (ESPERS) returns 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. (STREET DATE - 9/20/2011)
LP $21.50
09/20/2011
CD $13.75
09/20/2011