RELEASES
RACHEL BAIMAN
UPCOMING SHOWS
With her 2017 debut “Shame”, Americana songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Rachel Baiman emerged as a fearless voice of the American female experience. “Shame” was featured on NPR’s “Songs We Love”, called a “Rootsy Wake-up Call” by Folk Alley, and described by Vice’s “Noisey” as “flipping off authority one song at a time.” On her new full-length album Cycles, Baiman has found a grittier musical medium, employing a majority-female team to create hard-hitting songs, trading in pretty for penetrating. Cycles is a collection of songs encompassing the many ways that we destroy and rebuild as people, as families, and as a country. Songs about the cycle of life inspired by the birth of a nephew and the loss of a grandmother, songs about the internal mental cycles of ambition and self-doubt that we all experience, the cycle of progress and regression in our country’s political journey, and the cycles of growth and reinvention that relationships take on. At times heartbreaking, at times celebratory, the album is a reflection of a lot of life experienced in a relatively short amount of time, a desire to hold fast to the people we love in the wake of so much uncertainty, and an exploration of the immense and unique strength of women in the face of adversity.
Originally from Chicago, Baiman moved to Nashville at eighteen, and has spent the last decade working as a musician in a wide variety of roles, from session musician (Molly Tuttle, Kelsey Waldon, Caroline Spence), to hired gun (Kacey Musgraves, Amy Ray), to bandmate and producer. Fiddle music was her first love, and she is known in the bluegrass and old time world for her work with progressive acoustic duo 10 String Symphony with fiddle player Christian Sedelmyer. Her first solo album Shame, was produced by Andrew Marlin of Mandolin Orange, and established her role as part of a new generation of political songwriters. Since 2017, Baiman toured internationally with appearances at the Kilkenny Roots Festival in Ireland, the Mullum Music Festival in Australia, and the Kennedy Center Millenium Stage in Washington, DC. She has released a variety of small scale projects; her 2018 Free Dirt EP Thanksgiving, which read as a sort of epilogue to Shame, a duet project with singer Mike Wheeler, which is a more stripped down nod to her acoustic roots, and a set of 2020 singles Wrong Way Round and Rust Belt Fields, which show more sonic experimentation and hint at the indie-inspired Cycles.
Cycles was co-produced by Baiman and Melbourne-based musician Olivia Hally, lead singer of indie-pop band Oh Pep!. “Liv and I have been friends for years, and we decided to try a co-write one afternoon while she was spending some time in Nashville”, explains Baiman. “I told her the story of my sister-in-law almost losing a child for the second time when her water broke after five months of pregnancy. She was bed rest for two months, fighting to keep her son alive, which she miraculously did. through what seemed to me to be sheer willpower.” The song demonstrates the repetitive nature of the family life cycle through one line that can be sung from many perspectives, “My heart goes out to you / everything is coming soon / I’ll wizen as you bloom / but I see myself in everything you do”. “We imagined this line being sung from mother to new baby, but also from mother to pregnant daughter, knowing what is to come'' explains Baiman. The outro of the song sets the scene for the many stories that follow on the album, with the anthemic repeated lines ``These cycles shed our sins / I would die to be born again / we made a brand new skin / handed down to be worn again”.
The immediate artistic chemistry which resulted in ‘Cycles” led Baiman to ask Hally about co-producing a full length album. “In addition to Liv’s incredible musical instincts, I think that the experiences we’ve shared as women allowed her to understand the album material seamlessly, and shape a few of the songs, including “Colorado” in a fundamental way. It’s a song about my little sister, and the way that you can love someone so much that you wish you could shield them from ever feeling pain”, explains Baiman. In the chorus, Baiman and Hally harmonize the lines “If you’re gonna run up the mountain and back to the bottom, you don’t have to do it alone/ I remember every ugly feeling that you’ve ever gotten / 15 hours to Colorado”.
The album hits a somber note on “No Good Time For Dying”, a track which rings especially relevant in light of the Covid Pandemic. Baiman wrote the song after watching the deterioration of her
feisty Grandmother, who wanted nothing more than to never get old. “Well the people that you love / they’ll always disappoint you / when what you need is not to need at all”, sings Baiman, “You wanna see that sunset/ you wanna see that golden arc / but you better leave, you better leave, before it gets too dark”. “Watching my grandmother become less and less independent led me to wonder if there is some kind of sweet spot for death. She passed away just before the coronavirus hit. I am so grateful that she didn’t have to experience the isolation of it, and I feel for so many people who have lost loved ones in that difficult way.”
Inspired by the burgeoning grunge rock scene in Melbourne, Cycles was recorded in Australia in the glorified storage unit known as Purple Wayne Studios (Big Smoke) with engineer Alex O’Gorman (Angie McMahon). In addition to Hally on bass, piano and guitar, and Baiman on guitar, strings and banjo, other musicians include Melbourne drummer Bree Hartley, guitar players Cy Winstanley (Brandy Clarke) and Josh Oliver (Mandolin Orange), and guest vocalists Dan Parsons, Dan Watkins and Maggie Rigby (The Maes). The album was mixed by GRAMMY winning engineer Shani Gandhi, who is based in Nashville but originally from Australia as well. “It would be hard for me to overstate how much Shani did for this album”, says Baiman. “She is a true artist when it comes to mixing, and I think the combination of her time in Australia and Nashville meant that she completely understood the sound that I was going for.”