Meg Baird has made a name as a masterful guitarist, but it’s a piano that ties together her songs on Furling. In a recent interview with Aquarium Drunkard, she spoke about how working at the piano grounded her in a sense of home. Notes fall in aqueous clusters in the starkly beautiful “Wreathing Days,” and a mellow timbre undergirds the melodies of “Ship Captains” and “Ashes, Ashes.” The instrument’s felt-padded hammers land with the ease of falling back into a beloved armchair.
Baird’s willowy voice, along with the acoustic focus of her earlier records, have sometimes earned her the “folk” label, a misnomer that fails to account for her range. With her 2000s group Espers, she pressed forward on hypnotic, far-out psychedelia-tinged abstractions; at the trap kit for Watery Love and Heron Oblivion, she lands each beat like she’s trying to pound through the earth’s crust. With Furling, Baird both expands her palette and distills her multitudes into some of her richest work. She co-produced and recorded the LP with Charlie Saufley, her partner and her bandmate in Heron Oblivion. (The pair completed much of the recording process before March 2020, crediting its belated release to production delays.)
In contrast to her alternately thunderous and delicate work, Furling smolders like an incense cone as Baird works her way through serpentine arrangements. A wistful mood reigns. Splitting the difference between weariness and a restful exhale, Baird contemplates loss and savors fleeting comforts on “Twelve Saints,” leaning into a languorous atmosphere. Her romantic reassurances fold into the soft mandolin sweep of “Star Hill Song.” “I love you even when we can’t deal,” she sings, drifting alongside a wandering guitar line and loose percussion.
In a solo catalog full of satisfyingly sparse compositions, the gentle touches Baird brings to Furling stand apart. One such adornment arrives at the hands of harpist Mary Lattimore, with whom Baird released a 2018 duo LP, Ghost Forests. She adds a shimmery flourish to Baird’s melody on “The Saddest Verses,” where acoustic guitar strums float over a pliant electric guitar line. Baird tempers her softer material with moodier streaks in the overcast roll of “Unnamed Drives” and “Will You Follow Me Home?,” which drifts along with the ease of a purposefully purposeless stroll. “I’d like to know you’re hazy/I’d like to try and catch you maybe,” Baird sings. The songs’ winding instrumental threads lend each one a unique sheen, accumulating into a heady and mesmerizing whole.
Furling is not quite a departure for Baird: For every ominous turn like the instrumental opener “Ashes, Ashes,” there is a return to the warmth of her more characteristic solo material, like the rolling fingerpicking of “Cross Bay.” As a whole, these songs collect the charms of her past work and expand upon them. While her previous solo album, Don’t Weigh Down the Light, arrived in 2015, she’s been relatively easy to find since—lending her guitar and voice to friends like Steve Gunn and Will Oldham. It speaks to Baird’s ever-expanding ethos that, after 20 years of eager, in-depth collaboration, she’s managed to sound more like herself than ever.
