Listen: Nat Baldwin - "All We Want Is Everything"

photo by Elisabeth Fuschia

 

While most people are probably familiar with Portland, Maine based singer/songwriter Nat Baldwin as a member of Dirty Projectors, it actually wasn't until I had heard "Weights" and sought out his album People Changes that I realized that was the case. And in actually, it was Lands & Peoples and the fact that they had played a show with Baldwin that brought him to my attention. And through the years, Nat Baldwin has continued to deliver after that initial surprise. Though he's released more traditional singer/songwriter records, Baldwin is also a gifted improviser and last year he released a trilogy of records entitled Autonomia wherein he explores more experimental forms of music making. And as if that wasn't enough for Baldwin, this year he announced the release of another collection of songs in the form of the Common Currents EP. 

Nearly eight years after In The Hollows, Baldwin's last songwriting effort, "All We Want Is Everything", the album opener and opening track arrives with something to say as Baldwin transmutes his politics into song. Despite the solitude of recording solo bass in the empty Apohadion Theater in Portland, there is a warmth in Baldwin's delivery that manages to subsume the sparseness of its creation. As Baldwin sings of communal action transforming the present, his mellifluous vocals coax visions of bright futures and slain masters. It's equal parts abstract work-song and protest music: a call to action to both envision the future of your dreams and mold it into being. While not everyone has Baldwin's vocal prowess, it's easily a song you can hum or whistle as you go door to door informing neighbors of the latest propositions in your local elections and I can envision Baldwin doing just that. 

Nat Baldwin's tenth solo album Common Currents is out July 9th on Dear Life Records, you can pre-order the record now. 

Watch: Nat Baldwin - "Weights"

Earlier this week, Nat Baldwin's "Weights" off his reently released album People Changes, got a video. Directed by Willy Berliner, the video follows a horse selling all the belongings of Baldwin, whom he believes to be deceased.  As customers buy Baldwin's possession, the horse has flashbacks to their friendship together before Baldwin disappeared. The video is cute, weird, and a kind of unexpected considering the heavy nature of the song.  But it works and it's fun to watch.

Nat Baldwin - People Changes (2011)

While checking out a enterprising young band (more on them later), I stumbled upon the fact that Nat Baldwin (of Dirty Projectors fame) had released a solo album and was currently on tour supporting it. My immediate thought was: I have to check this out. And yet I was also highly dubious. Because I honestly had no idea what to expect. This was the first time I had ever heard of a double bassists turned singer/songwriter (well besides Esperanza Spalding and Stanley Clarke but they're jazz bassists). After listening to "Weights" and "Lifted", I was absolutely won over. Considering that the album is only 7 songs long and two of the songs were incredible, buying the album for the rest of the tracks didn't seem like too much of a gamble.

Opening with a cover of avant-garde cellist Arthur Russell's "A Little Lost", I was hooked, ready to just sit and let Nat Baldwin delightful multi-tasking take control until the album ended. Each track on the album ups the already seemingly high ante, bringing each song to it's ultimate extreme - culminating in the free-form 2-minute solo jam that is "What Is There". Before that, there's been a sort of break in Nat Baldwin's pastorals filled with saxophone squeaks and squawks, cymbal crashes and abnormal drum beats ("Real Fakes" "Lifted"). These random bursts of activity is what makes those brilliant musical moments of pastoral bliss (like in Kurt Weisman cover "Let My Spirit Rise") all that more hard-won.

People Changes is an album whose rugged experimentalism makes it one of my favorite type of album: Those that bend and defy any concept of genre. The kind of album that you excitedly share with like-minded people of good taste because you can't properly qualify what it sounds like. Nat Baldwin's fourth album, no doubt influenced by his time in the Dirty Projectors and bass training, is marvelous. I will admit it's a bit abrasive for unprepared ears but if you stick with it, it's well worth the initial shock to the system.

Get a taste of Nat Baldwin with a live video of him performing "Weights":