Review Summary: like a lucky find in the 25-cent vinyl basket
If you argue that good music can exist without pretension in 2020, Tim Baker is an excellent case study. After over a decade of making expansive and earnest anthems with Newfoundland indie rock darlings Hey Rosetta!, Baker’s reputation as a songwriter-of-the-people is etched in the annals of 2010s-Canadiana: his work with his Juno-winning seven-piece indie-rockestra recalled the ambitious bombast of Montreal’s Arcade Fire with the unassuming, every-man candour of Vancouver’s Dan Mangan. But with the folding of Hey Rosetta! in 2017, Baker made a big move: from the windy, isolated St. John’s—a 9 hour drive to the ferry, and then a 9 hour ferry to the mainland—to Toronto, Canada’s largest city and economic centre. The tension between these two wildly different environs is evident in every fabric of Tim Baker’s 2019 solo debut
Forever Overhead. “
I wait here in my bedroom / I bend my bend my hips to the chair / cool my face on the fake wood”, Baker sings on ‘Strange River’—a song that examines the value of human connection in a city of millions. “
We came from the forest / we came from the caves of the coast / that was so long before us / but I think my body still knows.”
Forever Overhead was released one year ago this week, and its message is soundly in touch with the events of today—Baker sings about human contact, community, and desire.
Forever Overhead is, viewed most simply, trademark Tim Baker earnestness—free of pretension. At its most,
Forever Overhead is a charming 70s AM radio throwback replete with dampened snares, palm-muted walking bass lines, and pre-amp saturated harmonies. You hear the sustain pedal creak underneath Baker’s feet on the piano-led opener ‘Dance’. You hear fuzzed out melodic leads performed by Baker’s voice, as if he’d forgotten to book a slide guitarist and opted to perform the kazoo through a pedalboard. Tremolo-picked autoharps surrounded by tambourines and congas give way to playful horn sections and cascading, arrhythmic pizzicato string arrangements. The instrumental performances guide Baker’s warm insightful musings through a thousand in-song key changes and non-fussed, timeless hooks.
Forever Overhead plays like the lucky find in a 25-cent vinyl basket: the kind of record you throw on when the family’s over for dinner. It isn’t abrasive or ambitious. It has nothing to prove beyond that Tim Baker is the only person who writes quite like Tim Baker does.
Baker is already proven in his lyrics and songwriting, and
Forever Overhead features some of his most poignant, affecting pieces to date. Two stunning standouts: ‘The Eighteenth Hole’ and ‘Two Mirrors’, songs that appear back-to-back in the centre of the track listing. ‘The Eighteenth Hole’—a loosely-true story of attending a wedding of an ex-lover—is a careful, plodding journey that succeeds both because of its staggering vocal performance (Baker’s emotive tenor has always been spellbinding) and its precise, detail-oriented approach to storytelling: “
your so-called friends, they never understand / they want you to ‘chill out, man’ — something you never can”. In ‘Two Mirrors’, the emotion takes centre stage in a song mourning the loss of a close friend—the delivery of the lines “
saying ‘*** you’ to the dark / saying ‘*** you’ to the deep / saying ‘*** off, cancer!’, / saying, ‘*** 2017!’” is so perfectly simple, cathartic, and damning all at once. The song bounces around like a Jackson Browne epic, but is buoyed by—and I’ll say it again, one last time—Baker’s unshakeable earnestness.
You could argue that it takes a lot of happy accidents for a record like
Forever Overhead to exist. You could argue it takes a person who grew up singing celtic classics in Newfoundland’s famous “kitchen-parties” to write with this level of uncomplicated authenticity. You could argue it takes that same person moving from his incredibly distinct homeland to an unfamiliar metropolis to capture this brand of existential tension. I would personally suggest
Forever Overhead is the sound of Tim Baker not making any arguments at all—no lofty expectations, just well-treated musings on being Tim Baker in a world post-Hey Rosetta!
Forever Overhead is the opposite of a demanding listen, but it provides a world of nuance and humanity on repeated listens—whether you’re listening dedicatedly or casually,
Forever Overhead is a pleasing, uncomplicated experience. That in itself is worth celebrating.
“
Our team wins / no matter what you ***ers want / the sweet black, earth / all of us will be there soon.”
