Landscapes and Soundscapes: An Interview with Meg Baird

Meg Baird’s most recent solo album Don’t Weigh Down The Light was released in 2015. She also plays drums, sings, and writes lyrics for the band Heron Oblivion who released their debut in 2016. Meg collaborated with harpist Mary Lattimore on Ghost Forests released in 2018. Meg Baird’s music has been acclaimed as “celestial” (NPR), “sacred and touching” (Mojo), “sublime… with shades of the greats – Denny… McShee…” (Record Collector), and “goosebump-inducing, in-the-moment naked spaciousness” (Tiny Mix Tapes).

Do you find your songwriting process more influenced by your guitar playing or your lyrics? Or is your songwriting equally influenced by both? When you start creating a song – do the chords come first or the words?

I’m much more influenced by the instrument and the chords. I usually get a sort of abstract idea lyrically pretty early, maybe just a mood or a subject I might want to tackle, but it’s really vague. So I usually wait until the last minute to actually write those lyrics. They kind of fly around as ideas or sounds or word sounds. It’s not a big, deep decision. It’s more about feeling and sound. I find the form through the guitar chords. Then I place the words there to resonate emotionally and with an idea I had. I create the phrasing through the playing. So the phrasing is the form and then I write to the fingerpicking, to the instrumental phrasing.

Your solo album Don’t Weigh Down The Light contained a press release by Drag City stating “songs of memory and forgetting.” This was your first album recorded after moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco. Does “memory and forgetting” mainly refer to this move or are there other layers of meaning? What does the album’s title signify?

It’s not just about the move, but when you do a big move like that at a point in your life where you’ve lived somewhere for such a long time and have all those attachments, it makes you take stock of a lot of things. There’s also an environmental message in the record, not heavy-handed, just where the planet was at that moment in time. There was a bad drought. I was working as an admin for the Sierra Club, spending eight hours a day on that issue. It was inescapable. When you move to a place that’s not your home climate, it illuminates different things. There’s a turning point right now about climate change. This isn’t just any year, it’s one more year that the clock is ticking.

I feel like “don’t weigh down the light” is a gentle warning to someone (you know how depression is) that you can’t hold things back, you can’t hold back the dawn. It will cause a great deal of pain and suffering if you do that. It’s better if it’s something that’s welcomed. Things are probably not that healthy if you’re lamenting the dawn. I thought it would be negative to call it “weigh down the light”. I wanted to emphasize “don’t” so it came out as supportive and positive, not as berating someone or shaking my finger. It was complex. Yet the only conscious decision is that I didn’t want it to sound critical or negative.

Charlie Saufley’s guitar playing on “I Don’t Mind”, “Past Houses”, “Good Directions”, and “Even the Walls Don’t Want You to Go” (as well as your piano playing on “Past Houses”) appears influenced by pianist Florian Fricke and guitarist Daniel Fichelscher of Popol Vuh (also guitarist Conny Veit who played on Popol Vuh’s Hosianna Mantra and Gila’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee). What was it about this music that spoke to you?

Absolutely. Always has and still does. It’s so ingrained in our ears. It made sense to honor that band and that influence. It wasn’t a design. It’s just sort of what happened.

It’s definitely very much your own style, I feel. I had a similar experience of (like you said) when you make a move (I moved to New Mexico this past year), when I drove to and from Missouri to New Mexico, especially when you get into the parts of New Mexico that are very barren and you can see the dust and the wind and I felt Don’t Weigh Down The Light really fits this scenery and terrain. I feel it’s a melding of Americana, country, folk melded with the mystical, psychedelic Popol Vuh sound. It’s almost a perfect marriage of those two. I thought it was beautiful what the two of you achieved on this record.

The beautiful, golden “Good Directions” and the rustic “Mosquito Hawks” have spring/summer vibes. Was it a conscious decision to release the album in late June?

It wasn’t a conscious decision, it wasn’t by design, it kind of lined up that way. Yet it does feel like a summer solstice record. It was actually recorded in a basement during a long, rainy winter in San Francisco (November – December 2014). I would work at my office job downtown, finish up work, walk to the studio, and then work on the record all night. That’s the way it was created. I was tired. I was definitely burning the candle. Mosquito hawks aren’t really scary. They’re wispy, otherworldly.

“Leaving Song” and “Even the Walls Don’t Want You to Go” feature spiritual soundscapes. (“Leaving Song” is a cappella and wordless.) Do you still sometimes find yourself creating songs only out of your vocals (apart from any guitar or lyrics)?

Sometimes I get ideas vocally, but they often don’t wind up going anywhere. It came from an open-tuned guitar piece. You get those big, open resonant chords. It came from that sort of space–droning, resonant. If you’re translating that into a more literal sense of a room, that does turn into a big open space that you would sing out into like a stone church or the side of a cliff. Those open, strumming chords create that tonally. And deep. You get lower tones than you get on a standard tuned piece.

The Heron Oblivion debut is so intense and powerful because it is so dynamic. The lyrics are ancient and elemental: “green fields…white flowers”, “columns turn to dust”, “tender, swollen rivers running”, “I wish I were a wolf upon the hill”. Did most of the songs spark from jam sessions or were some of them written outside the studio? How did playing the drums affect how you created and sang the tracks? Where did the band’s name originate?

Everything came from the jam space. Drums are more physical so it certainly affects how you play. You’re singing differently, more loudly. Other parts of my ear and my body are doing different things. It’s way more electrified and amped up. It makes sense sonically for the mood. The name Heron Oblivion came from one of those embarrassing sessions where the band all has to sit down and hammer out a name. The bassist Ethan Miller gravitated towards that name. He said it sounded like a fake Thomas Pynchon character.

I feel it perfectly describes the band’s sound – the heron tiptoeing through the swamps is the pastoral folk side (present at the beginning of the record’s first song, “Beneath Fields”) and oblivion sounds like heavy metal, the abyss is present in all of these tracks.

Why did the band choose for Bob Marshall to play Wurlitzer on “Seventeen Landscapes”? Was it to add to the atmosphere? Wurlitzer always seems to be used to create storm clouds in the studio.

I can’t remember exactly why Bob Marshall played on that track. Someone in the band might have thought it would be a genius idea for him to play Wurlitzer. Wurlitzer is really charged in that way – that rain effect.

“Seventeen Landscapes” is my favorite song of this past decade- cinematic, epic, haunting, mysterious, shadowy, stormy, trippy. Ethan Miller’s ominous bass, Charlie Saufley’s and Noel von Harmonson’s suspenseful, slowly building, explosive guitars, and your poetic lyrics “Voiceless thunder rock; seventeen landscapes out on the horizon…Hexagon Pavilion…” Can you share the inspiration for this song?

Charlie and I were workshopping it at the studio. I needed some quiet time at home for my vocal performance. It was night. You could hear the sounds of the streets. Lyrically I was inspired by a long form article about how the tsunami in Japan changed the landscapes sonically – how they had been altered. There was some kind of boulder formation that had a cultural significance that changed. Bell ringing crickets that also had cultural significance had changed. I was trying to relate to the atmosphere of the Pacific Ocean. This article asked people to think about this tsunami in our lives and work. “Hexagon Pavilion” is a reference from the article.

“Seventeen Landscapes” was the only song where I worked on the lyrics and vocals alone at home. The name of the song sounds both apocalyptic and beautiful, stunning but threatening.

You collaborated with harpist Mary Lattimore on an album. The songs contain abstract atmospheres. The album’s name Ghost Forests feels fitting for the album’s environmental themes expressed in the titles of the tracks (“Between Two Worlds”, “Damaged Sunset”, “In Cedars”, “Blue Burning”). I read that Mary Lattimore said you composed the words in 15 minutes. Was this the most improvised music project you’ve ever participated in? (I noticed, in addition to your acoustic guitar, you also played electric guitar and synthesizer.)

Initially we envisioned it as more of an instrumental record. But Mary urged me to sing. I found a little space and some lyrics. We were lucky that the inspiration was flowing so fast. It felt so immersive, like an artist residency. We’re friends and we were excited to see and work with each other. It was a comfortable home studio, seven cats, nooks you could disappear into. It wasn’t meant to be a heavy-handed message (that hard work is done by scientists), but Mary had just recently moved to California and when she made that move she became aware (as I did when I moved) of the different environment.

Mary and I went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibition. There’s a beautiful, large-scale painting of a sunset, apocalyptic lovers on the beach. The light in Los Angeles depicted in the painting is crazy. The ozone pollution caused by the smog created crazy skies in L.A. during the 1960s and 1970s prior to the regulations. Our song “Damaged Sunset” was inspired by this.

I felt like I could branch out to electric guitar and synthesizer and express myself comfortably on these instruments with Mary. I need time to experiment and let it get under my skin.

How has the coronavirus affected your creativity and life? What new music can we expect to hear from you in the future?

I am completing a new solo record. It started back at the beginning of the year (January – February). Everything has been written along the way. It makes it easier to navigate because it has been written beforehand rather than having to do it all in the moment. I live in a tiny apartment so there’s neighbor etiquette. Because I’m working with Charlie (and he plays electric guitar and feels held back by the lack of volume), there are currently limitations on our audio experimentation. Before things went crazy, we were in the jam space so we do have those sessions to build upon.

Is there anything else you want to share with the readers?

One of the last conversations I had with my father was about the Ghost Forests in the eastern U.S. There are some on the west coast, too, of Sitka spruce. Mary Lattimore’s harp is made of Sitka spruce. Our album is named after that phenomenon that happens after a disaster (natural or man-made).

Thank You so much for the interview, Meg!

Interview by Mark Lager – July 2020

Buy and listen to Meg Baird’s music here:
https://megbaird.bandcamp.com/

https://heronoblivion.bandcamp.com

/https://threelobed.bandcamp.com/album/ghost-forests