Rachel Baiman & Lillie Mae

“When I was a kid, my dad was in this tiny fringe political group called Democratic Socialists of America” explains songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Rachel Baiman. “That was considered really extreme, and something I didn’t tell my friends about. Now my generation has had to wake up to the intensity of our own economic oppression. We sit around talking about how anyone affords to buy a house, and how we can get rich people to pay for our albums”, she laughs. Baiman finds hope in this shared experience as a mechanism for activism. On Common Nation of Sorrow, Baiman’s third LP, she tells stories of American capitalism, and the individual and communal devastation it manifests.

Raised in Chicago, Baiman made her way to Nashville at 18 with the dream of being a professional fiddle player and has since released two 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, Baiman is 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).

On “Common Nation of Sorrow”, Baiman has found a production style to match her straightforward writing. Baiman displays a certain self-awareness and comfort with the inability to be all things, while simultaneously pushing to new heights with her message, and delivering a heartbreaking, albeit beautiful, assessment of her country.
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Music has always been a major part of singer/songwriter/guitarist/fiddle player Lillie Mae’s life. At the age of 3, Mae started performing and playing with her family band at churches, fairs, festivals and theme parks. The family moved to Nashville when she was 8, expanding their profile —and her own experience. They were soon playing at bluegrass festivals and at Dolly Parton’s dinner theater show in Myrtle Beach. Traveling and performing became the norm. The family would work with Cowboy Jack Clement, in addition to recording and touring consistently.

By the time she was a teen, Lillie Mae and her siblings were tearing it up. They formed Jypsi and were signed to Arista Records when she was 14. The group experienced success with two Top 40 singles on the Hot Country Songs charts.

However, that success didn’t last. The fickleness of the major label system caused Jypsi’s album to be shelved. But Lillie Mae would go on to success as a studio musician, performing with many top musicians, including Dwight Yoakam, the Grammy-nominated Michael Kiwanuka, Dean Fertitta and Jack White.