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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.”

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Robinella’s career began with a sort of luck that rarely comes to most artists within their lifetime. What started out as a simple husband-and-wife duo fresh out of college quickly grew to a full-fledged band that blended Bluegrass, Country and Jazz. The combination of Robinella’s honey-sweet vocals with violin, mandolin, bass, drums and piano captivated audiences, thus creating the ever popular Robinella & the CC Stringband.

They released their first album, self-titled Robinella and The CC Stringband, in 2000, which quickly followed, No Saint, No Prize in 2001. Both were on the independent label Big Gulley Records. With a few simple twists of fate, what followed was a whirlwind of rapid success – Columbia Records liked what they heard and signed Robinella in 2002. The label took seven songs from the band’s two prior albums and released them as the CD Blanket for My Soul and then released a full album in 2003, Robinella and the CC Stringband. This led to a national tour including opening for such artists as Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Earl Scruggs, Nickel Creek, Robert Earl Keen, Kasey Chambers, Del McCoury and Rodney Crowell as well as an appearance on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” and a music video on CMT for their hit single, “Man Over”. She also performed on NPR’s “Mountain Stage,” appeared on the Grand Ole Opry and performed on PBS’s “SoundStage.” In 2006, Robinella was nominated for “Emerging Artist of the Year” at the Americana Music Awards and released her fourth album, “Solace for the Lonely”, on Dualtone Records in Nashville.

But then life, as it has a tendency to do, threw a few curveballs her way. She became a mom and a couple of years later, she and her husband/musical partner split up with a new record almost completed. Exhausted and somewhat disillusioned with the industry and its promises, it was time to regroup, redefine and get back to her roots. So she returned to her home, the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, and got back in touch with what she truly wanted – love, family, friendship, music, art, truth.

With that comes her latest release, “Fly Away Bird”, her most mature work. However, within the melancholy and touches of sadness there is not true despair. For such a voice — that dazzling, warm, bright-as-summer-sunshine soprano — to even communicate it would most likely defy certain laws of emotional physics. No, instead, this album, beneath the disappointments, she is brimming with optimism — with hope. You can feel it, and even more important than that, you believe — because she believes, and because her music is so honest and so genuine and so forthright that you just can’t help but knowing that this is an artist who still finds life to be magical.

Artist’s Statement
“The more things change the more they stay the same.” The longer I live the more I see the truth In this statement. And the truth I see is that as the day to day passes, while the years roll on, our lives are full of repetition — repetition in choices, repetition in words, repetition of body and mind.

As an artist, and a singer and songwriter. I see this repetition in paint, in color, and in song rolling off my lips. I’m from East Tennessee this means a lot of things to different people. To me, it means a big family, a mild climate, an accent, a thank you and your welcome. It means part of an old hymn. “Lord lead me on from day to day I want to walk the holy way though friends forsake me all alone, I ask the Lord to lead me on…”

It means modesty.

It means character.

What can I say about my music but that it is intertwined with my life. The songs I have written, the songs I will write… These words I know because I have either lived them or seen them or felt them over and over, over and over, over and over again. I’ve seen many things. Some people would say I was naive. Maybe naive is a choice. I believe in beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Can you see it?

Want me to try and show you?

I will.

With repetition, with a country song, with a smile, with a jazzy phrase I heard in a movie, with some fancy chords a man showed how to play. With some truth. With some lies.

“Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord you hem me in Behind and Before”-Psalm 139

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Andrew Marlin is a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist based out of Chapel Hill, NC. He’s known for his captivating songwriting, presented both lyrically with his band Watchhouse, in roots group Mighty Poplar, and under his own name. His latest solo record, Phthalo Blue is out now!

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