Great to have Meg Baird back at OTO again after a beautiful sold out concert here last December alongside Cambridge based post-takoma guitarist C Joynes.

MEG BAIRD

There’s a rare intimacy in Meg Baird’s music. She shares secrets, she breaks your heart, she tells you how to fix it. Her second album Seasons On Earth is a beautiful, moody masterpiece of understatement—part wanderer, part flower, part assassin—moving stealthily from light to shadow and back again.

Long-based in Philadelphia, Meg became involved in a vibrant music community forged by outfits such as Siltbreeze Records, Bardo Pond and a network of low-to-the-ground artist collaboratives. In the early years of the last decade—along with Greg Weeks and Brooke Sietinsons – Meg help found the band Espers. The group—one of the most cryptic, inventive and adored bands among an eclectic peer group, released four records to widespread critical acclaim. Meg Baird’s ethereal vocals, guitar arrangements, and songwriting contributions were cornerstones of the Espers’ cooperative sound.



Meg Baird’s influences run deep and wide, and a unique style was revealed in the astonishing 2007 solo debut, Dear Companion. The melancholy and nuanced acoustic LP found Meg compared to folk icons like Sandy Denny and Pentangle’s Jacqui McShee. And in creating a project that nearly played as a love letter to record collectors, she re-interpreted songs by Chris Thompson , Fraser & Debolt and Jimmy Webb among others. The covers were sparse and hauntingly heartfelt, but the album’s original compositions were as strong as any from the 1970s singer-songwriter era. Dear Companion was a complex look at love, betrayal, and isolation. And the work garnered the attention of folk heavyweights and contemporaries alike—she opened for Bert Jansch and Michael Chapman, and contributed to recordings by Will Oldham (Ask Forgiveness, 2007), Sharon Van Etten (Epic, 2010) and Kurt Vile (Smoke Ring for My Halo, 2011).

Meg Baird from Gianmarco Del Re on Vimeo.

Meg Baird photo by Aaron Igler



C JOYNES

“An inheritor to Davy Graham: a lone operator prone to unexpected collaborations, a repertoire that crosses continents and timezones with consummate ease, and dashed off with a phenomenal, yet lightly applied technique.” Rob Young, The Wire

“His epigrammatic re-castings and re-readings of widely-travelled folk melodies and rhythms from a variety of traditions suggest shared memories that might be intensely universal while seeming strangely out of reach.” Kevin McNeill, Dusted Magazine

“As much Conlon Nancarrow and Ali Farka Toure as Blind Lemon Jefferson, the compositional mind at work here can take apparently disparate threads of modernism and ethnic tradition and treat them as though they were all archaic blues styles learnt from dusty 78s.” Bruce Russell, The Wire





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