Meg Baird - "Do What You Gotta Do". Meg Baird, who plays with Espers, has released a solo album called Dear Companion. There's a tenderness I like just in that title. One day I hope we will all write such a letter - one that can begin Dear companion, and end with Yours sincerely. Or perhaps, if we're feeling feisty, with Love. Baird's record is a little bit of two things: British trad-folk, sung longingly, and agile, clear-eyed songs that strongly recall Joni Mitchell. And nothing on Dear Companion is Blue-er than "Do What You Gotta Do". Once they became familiar, the opening chords gained a power that stop me silent. I listen in a kind of trance. I hang on. Baird harmonising with herself, sadly singing, and overhead just endless white sky, a cool steady thing that will never push free from over the high-rises.

"Come on back and see me when you can": it's sung so sweet that for a moment you can almost imagine it happening.

[out Monday!]

Bowerbirds - "Olive Hearts". A party song wrought in bass-drum, acoustic guitar and accordion. A song of hygge, that Danish word which means good times, close friends, hot fires, cold beer. A song that begins in stillness, loneliness, and with friendship & nostalgia & persistence & browns, blues, golds, brilliant viridian greens, moves thumping to the moment when glasses clink, when hearts pound big, when "our plastic swords stab our olive hearts". "Cheers to the wives of the drunks. Cheers to the husbands that tag along for good luck. Cheers to the months it took to get here."

[order the very fine debut LP by Bowerbirds, whose Danger at Sea was the best EP of last year]

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Silence is Not (Always) a Good Medicine is an exhibition of drawings by Erik Jerezano and gramo-friend Kit Malo, open now at Montreal's Sharon Ramsay Gallery and continuing through May 26th. I visited yesterday and it was really great: brave creatures that hide, fold, dream, long, change. I'm leaving town this evening but if you're around tonight (may 18), check out the the big Opening from 5 pm on.

an early happy birthday, robin.