Artist: Meg Baird
Title Of Album: Seasons On Earth
Year Of Release: 2011
Label: Drag City
Genre: Folk, Singer-Songwriter
Format: mp3
Quality: 320 Kbps
Total Time: 51:04
Total Size: 120.9 Mb

Artist: Meg Baird
Title Of Album: Seasons On Earth
Year Of Release: 2011
Label: Drag City
Genre: Folk, Singer-Songwriter
Format: mp3
Quality: 320 Kbps
Total Time: 51:04
Total Size: 120.9 Mb

Tracklist:
01 Babyon
02 Stars Climb Up The Vine
03 Share
04 Even Rain
05 Friends
06 Beatles and the Stones
07 The Finder
08 The Land Turned Over
09 Stream
10 Song For Next Summer

Since Espers‘ Meg Baird released her debut solo offering,
Dear Companion, in 2007 she’s worked at transforming herself
into a songwriter of distinction. Dear Companion was a collection
of well-chosen covers that contained but two originals. Seasons on
Earth is the mirror image of that recording. Baird contributes
eight of her own tunes here, and includes two lovely — if
unusual — cover choices. At the heart of the record is the
sound of her acoustic guitar. It’s as present in the mix as
her vocals, as if it were a voice of its own. For Baird, whose
voice is airy and lithe, the songs on Seasons on Earth are part and
parcel of the instrument’s qualities of tone, sonority, and
the intimacy that the six-string communicates, even when
illustrated further by other instruments, whether it be spare
electric guitars by friends Chris Forsyth or Steve Gunn, a harp
played by Mary Lattimore, or the even more prevalent pedal steels
and dobros contributed by Marc Orleans. Check the gorgeous,
deliberate, and nearly raga-like instrumentation that underscores
her poignant vocal on “Stars Climb Up the Vine.” The
adroit fingerpicking on “Even Rain,” with its rhythmic
underpinning on the bass strings — perhaps a conscious
tribute to the late Jack Rose, to whose memory the album is
dedicated — glides in tandem with Baird’s voice,
anchoring it in the grain of the lyric. The centerpieces of the
album are the covers: her gorgeous reading of the Jon Mark’s
nugget “Friends,” from Mark-Almond’s second
album, relies on the tenets of British folk, while leaving the
original’s acoustic jazz underpinnings a whisper in the
refrain. Those traits are also heard in her cover of House of
Love‘s “Beatles and the Stones” that follows it;
with its deft steel-string playing, it delves into the
songwriter’s folk traits at the heart of the melody, leaving
its pop overtones in the shadows. “The Finder,” while a
modern song, would have been right at home in the Laurel Canyon
scene of the early ’70s, while “Stream,” with its
lilting, whining, pedal steel, crosses various lines: from West
Coast post-psychedelia, Sandy Denny’s less traditional
offerings (complete with enthusiastically strummed 12-strings), and
intimate singer/songwriter fare а la Judee Sill, seamlessly.
Seasons on Earth is a poetic, thoroughly engaging set from a
now-mature songwriter, whose confidence in her musical language is
as poetic as it is authoritative.