Meg Baird is the ever-restless lead vocalist from Espers. Dear Companion is her first solo album on Drag City. Full of traditional songs, well-chosen covers, and originals, it stands outside the freak folk scene, and doesn't remind the listener of her primary band, either. Accompanied only by her acoustic guitar, Baird employs humor together with her melancholy, as she does on the title cut that opens the set. Alongside the lyric and instrumental frames, the backdrop at the beginning is also saturated with the spoken word rantings of an outrageously self-obsessed opportunist as Baird sings. She fades from view quickly and Baird digs into the tune full bore, letting her voice express plaintively the weight of the song's lyric. A strummed autoharp in her chosen instrument for a cover of Chris Thompson's River Song, and she double-tracks her own airy voice to underscore the meaning in the refrain. Her reading of the age-old tragedy The Cruelty of Barbary Allen is stellar. Her thin, reedy upper register strips the narrative from the music, which becomes the film stock this tale is told upon. One of the real treasures here is Baird's version of Jimmy Webb's classic Do What You Gotta Do. She gets the depth of the loss, the acceptance in its refrain: "It's my own fault/What happens to my heart." And she means it -- with a lilting harmony vocal a half step behind in places, she offers freedom and empathy, as all the while the protagonist's heart is busted wide. She sings: "I had my eyes wide open/From the very start/You never, never lied to me...." This is the actual price of love, to allow the Other whatever is necessary for his or her own good. Baird's version tops Webb's more orchestrated one.

1		Dear Companion
2		River Song
3		The Cruelty of Barbary Allen
4		Do What You Gotta Do
5		Riverhouse in Tinicum
6		The Waltze of the Tennis Players
7		Maiden in the Moor Lay
8		Sweet William and Fair Ellen
9		All I Ever Wanted
10		Willie O' Winsbury
11		[Untitled Hidden Track]