Baird, Meg

***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. 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.