RACHEL BAIMAN
Common Nation of Sorrow, Baiman’s 2023 LP, was called one of “The Best Albums of the Year (So Far) by The Boston Globe, awarded 4 stars from American Songwriter, and deemed a “Tremendously and remarkable record” by The Amp. On the heels of an album release year that saw her play more than 130 shows across the globe, Baiman in making 2024 her “Year of collaboration” with a series of A Side/B Side mini release projects featuring some of her favorite songwriters including Pony Bradshaw, Caroline Spence, and Nicholas Jamerson. If Common Nation of Sorrow was a novel, this year’s releases feel more like short stories, just long enough to make you want more.
Raised in Chicago, Baiman made her way to Nashville at 18 with the dream of being a professional fiddle player and has since released three solo records and an EP, alongside session and side-person work with Kacey Musgraves, Kevin Morby, and Molly Tuttle among many others. As a songwriter, she has garnered a reputation for her specific brand of political and personal lyricism, which Vice’s Noisey described as ‘Flipping off Authority one note at a time”.
In contrast with her previous work, (Watchouse’s Andrew Marlin produced her debut album, Shame), Baiman was the sole producer of Common Nation of Sorrow. After recording for twelve days in Nashville with Grammy-Award-winning engineer Sean Sullivan, Baiman traveled to Portland, OR, where she spent two weeks mixing the record with famed engineer and producer Tucker Martine (My Morning Jacket/The Decemberists/First Aid Kit). For her new collaborative singles, she turned to friend and indie-pop writer and producer Clare Reynolds, known professionally as Lollies. “One thing I learned from producing my own record is that I love producing, as long as it’s not my own parts”, she laughs. “I thought it would be great to have another kind of collaboration included in these new songs, on the production side.
The first In Collaboration single release, “Dominoes”, with Pony Bradshaw, was the result of months of musical collaboration. “I’d been playing and singing in Bradshaw’s band some, and on his upcoming record, and we’d always talked about writing something together. So this felt like a natural progression.” The song hit 100,000 streams on Spotify in it’s first month, and Wide Open Country called it “a gut wrenching tale that catalogs the tension between two people acting on their worst impulses, leading to a domino effect of fallout.”
"I've been looking for a new well of inspiration, something outside of myself," Rachel Baiman told Wide Open Country in early 2024. "Every time that you work with someone you admire, there's a lot of growth that happens from being around their creative process and seeing how they approach a song. It brings a new energy and perspective to my own work.”
RELEASES
