Meg Baird’s ‘Furling’ is unlike anything she has done before. Impressively, she and Charlie Saufley recorded every instrument and the intimacy of their musical connection is plain to see. Baird has mastered the balancing act between maturity and eclecticism perfectly, and the results are spellbinding.
Meg Baird’s status as one of the high priestesses of freak folk has long been assured. As a singer in Espers, she helped to invent, perfect and in many ways define the sound of New Weird America, fusing Appalachian influences with an admirable commitment to the more lysergic end of early 1970s British folk-rock. Her post-Espers work has been just as vital and even more eclectic. An incomplete list of her more recent projects includes stints with Heron Oblivion as a vocalist and Watery Love as a drummer, a collaboration with harpist Mary Lattimore and three albums with her sister Laura. She has also appeared on albums by Sharon Van Etten, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and Kurt Vile.
On top of all this, she has found the time to make a string of solo records for Drag City. Furling is the fourth, and the first since 2015’s Don’t Weigh Down the Light. While from its first moments, it exists very clearly on Baird’s own idiosyncratic continuum, it’s also not quite like anything she’s done before. Baird’s songwriting – loose, genial – plays off against arrangements that, for all their richness and density, always seem to be floating just off the ground. The result is less freaky but more dreamy than some of her early recordings. Elements of Slowdive or Portishead have sneaked in alongside the Trees and Fairport Convention influences. There are also nods to classic songwriters from Neil Young to Stevie Nicks.
Opener Ashes, Ashes kicks things off with six minutes of deliberate percussion, brooding keys and a wordless vocal that glides above its elegiac setting. It’s a song that doesn’t really go anywhere in the traditional sense of narrative or musical progression, but that’s the point. Here Baird’s experimentation is of a different kind: her song is tethered to nature and grows naturally, finding its own space and filling it like water. As an opening track, it’s quietly audacious, in a similar vein to Dylan’s wonderful All The Tired Horses, the first track on his unfairly-maligned Self Portrait.
From here, the album breaks free from any perceived bonds as Baird indulges her broad songwriting talents. Star Hill Song is a Neil Young-meets-Cowboy Junkies strum that unfolds into gorgeous Sandy Denny-esque balladry and weeping guitars. The airy chord changes on Ship Captains give Baird’s famously haunting voice free rein before a sweetly melodic chorus anchors things in calmer seas, while Cross Bay showcases her deft fingerpicking, which, when set against the song’s drifting arrangement, calls to mind Jimmy Page’s folkiest experiments along with the likes of Bridget St. John or Shelagh McDonald.
While Furling isn’t necessarily an album that gives up its charms easily, it does have its moments of immediacy: Unnamed Drives tempers its eerie detachment with the sweetest of melodies, and Will You Follow Me Home charges out of the blocks with an uncharacteristic directness, all clipped guitars and probing percussion. There’s a radio-friendly 70s rock feel to it, even as Baird’s impressionistic singing elevates it beyond its influences. Wreathing Days, which closes the album, is both its most experimental and its most moving song. Over a repeated piano motif that owes as much to modernist composition as to folk or rock, she lays down one of the most stunning vocal performances of her career.
What makes Furling all the more impressive is the manner in which it was recorded: Baird and her Heron Oblivion bandmate Charlie Saufley recorded every instrument between them, and the intimacy of their musical connection is plain to see. The wealth of ideas and the depth and breadth of the sound seem to imply a much larger ensemble. Furling’s songs reach in many directions, sometimes simultaneously, but there is never anything strained about them. Baird has mastered the balancing act between maturity and eclecticism perfectly, and the results are spellbinding.
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