Let’s Call It Love – Memphis Flyer

Bailey Bigger is on solid footing now, and that’s a good thing. While some music fans hope their favorite artist will never get too comfortable, feeling that great art comes only from suffering, Bigger is here to show that the opposite is true. Her new album on Madjack, Coyote Red, is an object lesson in being secure enough to open up in one’s art and, thus, reveal something truer than ever.

We last spoke with her upon the release of her 2020 EP, Let’s Call It Love (Big Legal Mess), and it was no accident that we characterized those songs as “confronting trauma.” Even then, her strong alto, evoking a classic era of strong female singers like Joan Baez, was in full effect, as was her ability to turn a phrase and a melody. Now, with the imminent release of her first full-length album, those qualities are more apparent than ever, with the added bonus of “blood harmonies” — that almost inseparable harmony some singing siblings share — with her brother, Wyly Bigger, who also contributes piano. She recently touched base with the Flyer to fill us in on what’s changed.

Memphis Flyer: It feels like a lot has changed since your last release.Bailey Bigger: That was released in December of 2020, and I guess we all have gone through a transformation since then. I think Let’s Call It Love was more centered on that first breakthrough, of saying enough is enough with certain aspects of your life and deciding you want to change the way it’s going. With this record, I don’t think I’ve written anything that has felt more like me. I feel like I settled into myself in these last two years, more than I ever have, and that reflects in this album.

It’s a little more of an honest look into who I am, without all of these ordeals and setbacks fogging my mind and my heart. I’ve found myself again, but in a new form, where I can still bring back those parts of my innocence and my childhood. I’m settling into my own shoes and finding that inner joy again. I think everyone around me was feeling that simultaneously.

“Everyone” meaning the band and producer Mark Edgar Stuart?
Yeah. Mark and I have become really good friends, and I think him taking the reins really set the tone for it immediately. We had the same vision. And all the musicians he got to play on it, and Kevin Houston engineering, just set the energy for the record immediately and kind of made it this little paradise of friends. That sounds so cheesy, but it was just so fun and real and raw. I think the experience we had is captured in the music because it was really emotional, and everyone who was there experienced the same thing, which was pretty powerful.

What was Mark’s approach as a producer?
He was very hands-off. And I think we equally trusted each other. We both knew we had the same vision. So we trusted each other’s calls. He wanted it to come off as personal, as these songs of mine are, so he stepped back in all the right places. But he helped me pick out the songs, and he actually supported a lot of songs that I was down on. That gave me confidence to create what this is. I don’t think I would have chosen half the songs on the album if it wasn’t for his encouragement. He brought that outsider’s perspective.

There’s a song called “Wyly,” which is about my brother, obviously. It was a song I wrote for him in 10 minutes one night, when I was really emotional. I was kind of down on it, because I thought, “It’s one of those songs that I just spit out, that’s not refined enough.” Mark was the one who said, “No, no, no, this is the gold right here. You can’t recreate something that’s that raw.” He said, “I think this record’s about you showing who you are, in a genuine, down-to-earth way.”
Bailey Bigger and band will play a free record release show on Friday, April 1st, at Hernando’s Hide-A-Way, 8 p.m.

What a difference a year makes. Last October, Bailey Bigger released her debut EP, Between the Pages, on Blue Tom Records (the label run by the University of Memphis), and certainly her skills as a songwriter and vocalist were obvious. Her unaffected alto, reminiscent of Buffy Sainte-Marie, was the perfect vehicle for her simple, deft turns of phrase. But now, as she is poised to release Let’s Call It Love, her first EP for Big Legal Mess Records, those songs seem a world away. It’s hard to believe she’s made such a journey with only 20 years under her belt.

Her trademark qualities are still on full display, but are now complemented with an even more refined band, assembled at Delta-Sonic Sound by producer Bruce Watson.

“Bruce brought a little bit of soul into my music,” she says. “He brought in the organ and the electric guitars and things like that that I never would’ve thought to do on my own. It’s Americana but Memphis.” She speaks the truth: With players like Mark Edgar Stuart (her mentor of sorts), Joe Restivo, Will Sexton, Al Gamble, George Sluppick, and Jana Meisner, the record represents the state-of-the-art Bluff City sound.

Adrian Berryhill

Bailey Bigger — she’s a keeper of the fire.

And yet Watson’s first pivotal move in making this record was simply rejecting her first batch of songs, forcing Bigger to come up with her best material yet. To compose the new songs, she dug deep into the turmoil she’d recently faced due to an unpleasant breakup, her grandmother’s death, and her feelings of alienation in moving from Marion, Arkansas, to the big city across the river. Now that she’s happily relocated to a farm near Marion, she’s gained some perspective on those earlier struggles.

Memphis Flyer: Was it emotionally difficult to delve into your personal backstory to create the songs on the new EP?

Bailey Bigger: Well, in my poetry-writing class, we were talking about trauma in poetry and how it’s really hard to write about traumatic experiences. You have to put yourself in that headspace again and relive it, in a way, to get those truths out on paper or in songs. And a lot of times that’s easier to just avoid. But I live for that stuff, in a way, because I think it’s one of the most important parts of the human experience, to be open and talk about things that people are afraid to talk about.

That makes for better songs, don’t you think? But is it tough to sing those songs once you’ve written them?

I think it becomes like muscle memory, in a way, performing these things live. If I were to really dig in and relive those moments every time I played it live, I don’t think I’d make it through the performances. When I was recording “Let’s Call It Love,” we cut several vocal tracks and we were like, “Yeah, that’s fine. Pitch is good.” But I was thinking, “I’m not singing this how I felt it.” And that’s one of the worst things ever, where your voice isn’t delivering what you felt. I hate that. So I said, “Okay, just one more time.” And I remember how I channeled the take that I wanted to keep. It wasn’t by thinking of the person the song’s about. I did not want to picture that person at all. I thought to myself, “Sing to the girl who is in the same place as you are. Sing to that person that it hasn’t happened to yet. She still has a chance to get out. Sing to that person that you were a year and a half ago when you didn’t see it.” So that’s what really got me to perform it the way I wanted to.

I also get that feeling from the bonus track, “A Lot Like I Do” — “I remember a girl who looks a lot like you do” — as if you’re looking back at yourself.

That was probably the hardest one for me to perform. That one still evokes strong emotions in me every time I play it live. It’s probably the most personal song I’ve ever written in my life. It doesn’t even say anything specific about what happened to me, but I think it tells it perfectly at the same time. I can’t rely on muscle memory with that. That’s a rough one. All three songs are about this transformative time in my life. But the person I was at the beginning of all those traumas is not who I am now.