As previously shared on Folk Radio, Meg Baird releases her new album Furling on 27th January. This is her fourth album to be released under her own name. Her last was Don’t Weigh Down the Light (2015). Along the way, she has made some beautiful collaborations – she joined forces with members of Comets on Fire and Assemble Head to form the moody and thunderous Heron Oblivion (2016), to which she leant her drumming and voice while, in the same year, Until You Find Your Green found her reunited with her sister Laura for an album of rustic natural intimacy. Then, in 2018, she collaborated with Mary Lattimore on the mesmerizingly hazy Ghost Forests (2018).
This new offering is described as an album that ‘most irreverently explores the span of her work and musical touchstones. 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.’
‘Ashes, Ashes‘ is her latest single for which Rachael Pony Cassells made the video below; it accentuates the dream-like feel of this moving meditation – a swooning slow jam over which Baird’s mesmerising vocals wordlessly soar. Ashes, Ashes is also our Song of the Day.
Rachael Pony Cassells, who constructed a video for “Ashes, Ashes”, writes “I have been thinking about the relationship of fire to water. Sometimes they resemble one another, it’s hard to tell if we are burning or drowning. Smoke blinks tears to eyes; fire eventually brings the rain. California, Australia, inferno, flood. We came of age in a very different time, when the cycles of fire to water were gentler. They did not frequently destroy the homes of our friends and families. I remember flying into SFO in 2020 the day the morning skies were midnight. Dark and red. I landed to a text message from Meg. Preempting my panic, she assured me that while it looked like the end of the world, and is surely symptomatic of the end of many eras, the fog was pushing up the wildfire smoke allowing us to breathe in the dark.”
According to Drag City, her label, for all its adornments, Furling remains deeply intimate. The entire album was performed by Meg and her longtime collaborator, partner, and Heron Oblivion bandmate Charlie Saufley. While her prior solo work hinted at more expansive horizons, Furling explores the idea of Meg Baird as a band much more freely. Venturing beyond the musical confines of fingerstyle guitar, she plays drums, mellotron, organs, synths, and vibraphone over her piano and guitar foundations. Her distinctive, simultaneously elegiac and uplifting vocals, meanwhile, connect surreal dream montages, graft sunshine sonics to swooning meditations on romantic solidarity in trying times, and weave odes to the simple gestures of friendship and the loss of family and friends.
Pre-Order Furling here: https://ffm.to/furling