Drag City
2007
Dear Companion
About This Album
Meg Baird is the ever-restless lead vocalist from Espers. Dear Companion is her first solo album on Drag City. Full of traditional songs, well-chosen covers, and originals, it stands outside the freak folk scene, and doesn't remind the listener of her primary band, either. Accompanied only by her acoustic guitar, Baird employs humor together with her melancholy, as she does on the title cut that opens the set. Alongside the lyric and instrumental frames, the backdrop at the beginning is also saturated with the spoken word rantings of an outrageously self-obsessed opportunist as Baird sings. She fades from view quickly and Baird digs into the tune full bore, letting her voice express plaintively the weight of the song's lyric. A strummed autoharp in her chosen instrument for a cover of Chris Thompson's "River Song," and she double-tracks her own airy voice to underscore the meaning in the refrain. Her reading of the age-old tragedy "The Cruelty of Barbary Allen" is stellar. Her thin, reedy upper register strips the narrative from the music, which becomes the film stock this tale is told upon. One of the real treasures here is Baird's version of Jimmy Webb's classic "Do What You Gotta Do.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and 8)

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