Let's Call It Love

Life in small town Marion, Arkansas, sounds idyllic in songwriter Bailey Bigger’s telling: a first gig in a diner in 7th grade, working on a farm while in high school, a family history going back generations. But the truth is that that the preternaturally observant twenty-year old – who has a three tattooed on the back of her left arm for three chords and the truth - didn’t quite fit in. That tension of coming of age in small town America while pursuing a larger world marks her debut EP on Big Legal Mess Records. “It was magical in a way,” she reflects, continuing, “We lived in my great-grandfather’s old house. I love the community part of it. You say your name to a stranger and they say, ‘Oh, you’re Eddie’s granddaughter, David’s daughter.’”

Like two of her favourite writers, Mary Oliver and Joan Didion, Bailey often writes about the grace of nature and the outdoor world— and she also shares their commitment to unflinching honesty. The stunner A Lot Like I Do sets the scene, the small-town picket fence in twilight with the departing harvest moon metaphors for her first true love, now lost. Lines like “Even the sunflowers seem to turn from the past,” remind a listener of John Prine, even as they are signposts to her own writing voice emerging.