MEG BAIRD Issue #32

Dear Companion

By Annie Anderson
Published: June 1st, 2007 | 12:00am

Meg Baird’s record label, Drag City, claims that with her first solo album, Dear Companion, Baird intends to move away from the pastoral mythology and lavish production that defines her band Espers. While the production has been toned down to simple vocal double-tracks and faint tinpan sounds, Baird’s Arcadian impulses spread like ploughshares over every element of these songs, which include three originals, four covers, and three traditional songs. Though she’s from Philadelphia, Baird sounds like an Irish lass troving a bucolic landscape, preaching fables of yore. Her cast of characters includes Willie O’Winsbury, Sweet William, and Fair Ellen, and one of her original songs is named “Maiden in the Moor Lay.”

It’s difficult to let a contemporary singer get away with using a word like “yonder,” but there’s something to be said for this kind of throwback hippie folk. On the John C. Dawson song, “All I Ever Wanted,” Baird comes off as a tinny Melanie who dares you to make a decision: Is this bad Bee Gees or solid neo-folk sincerity? Baird risks our cynicism with Dear Companion, but what she pulls off is a calm, collected group of kin songs — an album you can imagine being created in and relished by a small community. We hear the ghosts of folk’s past hovering here, invoking us to believe in the small worlds music creates.

The album’s standout track, “The Waltz of the Tennis Players,” doesn’t just have the album’s best song title, it also lays claim to the best dramatic structure and the tautest lyricism: “Incense, velvet, simplicity, religion. Where on earth is it leading?” Baird wonders. This excellent love song has the lilty crawl of a lithe somebody getting up seductively from a Papasan and trying their darndest to get you to follow them — out the door, into a back alley, or across the country. The invitational feel Baird creates imbues Dear Companion with a mix of joy, longing, and sorrow — not the sole domain of folk, but something it knows how to articulate quite well.