Rachel Baiman
If it feels like you can never get ahead, you’re not alone. Nashville’s Rachel Baiman embraced her frustrations with debt and capitalism — and wrote a whole album about it. Common Nation of Sorrow is a richly textured folk album with subtle rock underpinnings that faces the problems of our age with clear eyes and stout resolve. It’s not a protest album so much as a statement of solidarity. The album will be out via Signature Sounds on Friday, and Baiman will bring her message to The Basement East on Wednesday.
The album kicks off with “Some Strange Notion.” The song is imbued with Baiman’s trademark confidence, yet it was born from feeling uninspired by President Biden’s acceptance speech. At first, Baiman had no plans to include it on the album — “I try to steer clear of lecture songs,” she explains.
Still, she felt that the song’s hypnotic chorus ultimately carried it through, and eventually its message — channeling her focus on generational activism and her insistence that change will happen eventually — would come to frame the rest of the LP. Other highlights include the rollicking banjo-driven “Self Made Man,” which looks at what lies underneath the myth of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps, and “Bad Debt,” a direct indictment of economic systems that perpetuate cycles of poverty. Even as many of the gains made by progressives in recent years have been viciously stripped away by the right, Baiman wants everyone to remember to work for the long haul.
“Progress is going to take longer than you want — forever and ever,” she says with a rueful chuckle.
Rachel Baiman
The long view is a large part of Baiman’s upbringing. Her father belonged to a then-marginal group known as the Democratic Socialists of America in Oak Park, Ill., which Baiman describes as a “latte liberal” suburb of Chicago. Now that Baiman understands her father’s viewpoint, she embodies how activism must pass through generations, just as it has from her father to her.
Baiman is a co-founder of Folk Fights Back, a now-dormant group organized in reaction to Trump-era policies that endangered immigrants, women, the LGBTQ community and others. Folk Fights Back held fundraisers for various community groups, and there was an overwhelming response to the concert series, but the support brought more responsibility and contingencies than Baiman anticipated. The group did not have a founding structure or bylaws, but as the energy behind the movement and the group’s funds grew, it became clear that these organizing needs did not play to Baiman’s strengths as an artist.
“It gave me a lot of respect for people who do that,” she says. “But I will do better supporting one of these organizations directly than trying to make my own separate organization.”
Baiman also incorporates this work into her songwriting workshops. She asks students to write a song from a viewpoint that opposes their own. The exercise is not intended to endorse all political views — rather it’s meant to help the songwriters themselves have a stronger argument.
“If you can’t get to the emotional piece of why someone believes something,” Baiman says, “then there’s absolutely no progress that can be made.”
Wednesday night, Baiman headlines The Basement East for the first time, following many visits as a fan to the East Side venue and its older sibling on Eighth Avenue South. As a Vanderbilt alumna who stayed in town after she graduated, she’s thrilled at the opportunity. Her band includes drummer Lauren Horbal, who played on half of Common Nation, along with Jacob Groopman on guitar and Steve Haan on bass; expect other special guests as well. Her aim for both the album and the shows is to unify her audience.
“If you feel like you’re the only one being pressed, it feels like there’s no path forward. But the minute someone says, ‘I’m dealing with that too,’ you can start to find a way to fight back through it. I’m hoping that the album exudes that kind of spirit that inspires people to find a place to move forward from, instead of just feeling like they’re at a dead end.”
