Rachel Baiman

“When I was a kid, my dad was in this tiny fringe political group called the Democratic Socialists of America” explains songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Rachel Baiman. “That was considered extreme, something I didn’t tell my friends about. Now my generation has had to wake up to the intensity of our own economic oppression. We sit around talking about how anyone affords to buy a house, and how we can get rich people to pay for our albums”, she laughs

Baiman finds hope in this shared experience as a mechanism for activism. On Common Nation of Sorrow, Baiman’s third LP, she tells stories of American capitalism, and the individual and communal devastation it manifests. “The reality is that the vastmajority of us are being taken advantage of by the same brutal economic and political systems. Maybe that shared oppression is a place in which we can meet and fightback”, she explains.