Songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Rachel Baiman is stepping out of her comfort zone with a new, collaborative A Side/B Side project that Wide Open Country is excited to premiere the first track from — a joint effort with Georgian Pony Bradshaw — today (Feb. 1).
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Out Feb. 2, "Dominoes" is the first of two songs to be released this month co-written with the "Foxfire Wine" singer, with the later being the horse-themed "Equine Elvis" slated for Feb. 23. The release comes on the heels of several other collaborations between the two musicians who first met during an OurVinyl recording session in 2021. Since then, Baiman has gone on to join Bradshaw on the road both as an opening act and as a fiddler in his band (her first show with him was last August at the Ryman Auditorium) in addition to laying down harmonies, fiddle and banjo in the studio for his highly anticipated follow up to 2023's North Georgia Rounder due out later this year.
"It was like a spiral of collaboration," Baiman explains to Wide Open Country. "With this A Side/B Side idea and all the work I've already been doing with Pony this past year he was an obvious choice for the project's first release."
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As for the song itself, "Dominoes" is a gut wrenching tale that catalogs the tension between two people acting on their worst impulses, leading to a domino effect of fallout. According to Baiman, she had been tossing some lyrical ideas on the subject around for a while when Bradshaw hit her with the domino reference.
"He came up with the idea 'dominoes,' but he didn't see the metaphor in it at first," she says. "That's the beauty of these collaborations, you end up with these references and ideas that are more than what you would think of on your own. With Pony's vocal ability and range it was really exciting getting to track that because I had been singing on his record for several weeks leading up to us tracking this. Because I was singing harmonies I was really tuned into the way he does his vocal inflections because I was trying to match everything really closely, which led to a lot more cohesion than if we had come into this cold."
The idea for the A Side/B Side endeavor is one that Baiman opted to act on as something new to try after releasing and touring heavily on three solo records in recent years, the latest being 2023's Common Nation Of Sorrow (that included one of our songs of the year in "Bad Debt").
"I've been wanting a new well of inspiration besides myself," jokes Baiman. "Every time that you work with someone you admire there's a lot of growth that happens from being around their creative process and how they approach a song. It brings a new energy to my own work when I can figure out some new perspective that someone else might have.
So, instead of making a new album of my own this year it's almost like I'm making these mini-albums with a bunch of different people and seeing what happens from those collaborations. That's been my mission statement this year, to be doing more work with people both in the studio and on the road and trying to grow and learn and find new inspiration in that."
Natia Cinco
While this project marks Baiman's biggest venture into the co-writing space, it's far from her first. Much of 2021's Cycles was co-written with co-producer Olivia Holly, although most of it was through finishing touches like adding a bridge rather than top to bottom constructing of lyrics. For this go around she spoke of instead writing for someone else's voice or in relation to their style, which was the case with one of the future releases coming that features Eastern Kentucky native Nicholas Jamerson.
"We wrote a song together that I'm really proud of that is much more about his experiences than my own. It was really cool for me because I was getting to dive into writing for their voice rather than my own."
Another artist to be featured on the compilation will be Caroline Spence, who was the first person Baiman ever co-wrote with back in 2015. Roommates at the time and self-described "baby songwriters," the two wrote the song "Throw Away The Moon" together that Baiman went on to record with her fiddle duo 10 String Symphony on 2018's Generation Frustration. Nearly a decade later, the two are revisiting the tune as completely different artists and people than they were back when it was first born.
"Sometimes songwriting can be really pure, and the intention behind the song from that time still rings true, but we're bringing all this new knowledge about how to approach the recording process and our abilities, especially my singing ability, which has come a long way since then," Baiman admits "It's nice to get a second chance at it."
