"Every burning night, every buried light could be your home..."
This album starts between midnight and dawn, on a dark street in Berlin in the fall of 2001, days after the death of a close friend and partner in musical crime, seven sheets to the wind, stumbling home, guitar in hand, in the middle of the wrong conversation, when the corner of your eye catches a star coming down like a sign. Of what, who knows? But you stop talking, start walking, head home, and have been trying to figure out what it meant ever since—listening to that star, fighting with it, losing to that star. Nearing your front door a few minutes later, out of breath and out of paper, you find an empty pack of cigarettes on the sidewalk and write, on the only side of the foil that will ever let you write, “Where are you now?” It's half honest and half rhetorical.
In short, this became an album about people you miss, places you’ve been, things that went wrong, and things you did wrong. But it’s also about how powerful memories are, where to look for the good, and how no thing, no place, and nobody that ever mattered to you can ever really be lost.
Collaborators on this record reflect an all-over-the-place life of the last 20 years, between tours, cross-country drives in a beat-down Buick, and the grass always looking greener. New Jersey singer/songwriter Sarah Jean sings on “Light as a Feather,” and drummer Austin Faxon (of New Jersey punk bands The Groucho Marxists and The Stuntcocks) appears on several tracks. In California, Bruce Kaphan (American Music Club, R.E.M., Red House Painters, Love and Rockets, The Black Crowes) contributed his pedal steel to “On Barbwire Fences in Kansas”; John Mescall played cello on a few songs; and bluegrass fiddler Melissa Lynn Lincoln fills out the sound on “The Middle of Nebraska.”
Praise for Geoff's previous releases:
“Great young US singer-songwriter” (Annie Windley - Time Out (London))
“Arresting images...Baker promises much and here delivers it.” (Paul Kerr - Americana UK)
“Baker's music could best be described as folk, but a generic genre description falls short of conveying the music's stylistic nuances...Baker steers away from the sappy, melodramatic shores that many musicians find themselves marooned upon. Instead, he recalls beautifully detailed accounts of past experiences. Funny, haunting and uplifting, the songs convey a sense of loss and the ghostly regret of sacrificing love and location for a life of constant moving.” (Kevin Hagedorn - The Orion (Chico, CA))
A rare combination of effortless fingerpicking, mesmerizing vocals, deep lyrics and beautiful melodies. (Jeff Lisciandrello, Upstage Magazine (NJ))
...a contribution to the good fight...a bright spark in a naughty world... (David Constantine, poet)
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