Nat Baldwin (Dirty Projectors) on his basketball origins, Englert residency and top music picks

Nat Baldwin at Prairie Lights — Baldwin puts on a striking performance at Prairie Lights Bookstore. — *photo by Zak Neumann*

Bassist Nat Baldwin is best known as the bassist for Dirty Projectors, but listening to his solo work, one can hear an inversion of sorts, where his bass playing moves from background to the foreground.

As the first participant in the Englert Theater’s Artist in Residence program, Baldwin used his week in Iowa City to compose new music and connect with the artistic community in eastern Iowa. In addition to blocks of time reserved for working on music, Baldwin visited Tate High School to talk about songwriting with a creative writing class, and toured Cedar Rapids arts landmarks CSPS and Brucemore Mansion. His visit culminated with a performance with Irish poet Martin Dyar in the cafe at Prairie Lights Bookstore.

I spoke with Baldwin before the Prairie Lights performance, where he shared his story of becoming a musician:

“I’d always been around music because my dad is a musician. But I’d always been a basketball player. That was just always my passion and then something just clicked or switched in high school. I went to a school to play basketball and wasn’t much interested in academics, and then I had a really inspiring English teacher that just hit me at the right time; I was really impressionable, responsive to new ideas. I started getting into poetry and lyrically driven music like Bob Dylan, and then worlds just opened up from there.

I realized that music was something that I could do forever … I got good enough where I would have played (basketball) in college, and that was my goal. I wasn’t delusional that I was going to play in the NBA but I had always wanted to get a scholarship for college. I was getting recruited, and I was close to achieving that goal. But that was the moment where I realized I would be basing my decision on something I could do for four more years.”

It was not an easy transition, but transition to me made sense because I found so many parallels between sports and preparing for music. I’d always been attracted to the bass, I guess… the low sound and the driving force of it, and the idea that it was never necessarily in the spotlight but was always essential. I was really into jazz when I started, and I still am but I haven’t played it in a long time. I didn’t start writing songs until years after I started playing the bass.”

Of the songwriting class at Tate High School, Baldwin said, “It was the highlight of the week and the thing I was most terrified by initially, just because I had no idea what to expect. I’d never done anything like that before. I had doubts in myself that I could keep kids attention for that long. But the kids were so responsive and they asked really smart questions, which helped me to have things to talk about, and it flowed from there. They were really great kids.”

I asked him about the way he structures his songs, which to my ears owe as much to composers like Steve Reich and Meredith Monk as they do the Beatles.

“[When] I approach [song-writing], I think of it as if I am writing … I don’t have any rules if it seems like elaborating on [a part] or taking certain things away that might make things off kilter on the surface,” Baldwin said. “I don’t rule that out. My song structures are still structured but not necessarily within the super-traditional framework.”

His performance at Prairie Lights was accomplished just with his voice and upright bass. His cover of Arthur Russell’s “A Little Lost,” the first track on his album People Changes, underlines an artistic debt owed to Oskaloosa-born Russell; Russell also used to perform accompanying himself with his cello. Like Russell, Baldwin extracts great tonal variety out of his instrument with ‘wrong’ playing techniques, like bowing with the edge of the hair to bring out higher-frequency harmonics, and plucking and bowing at the same time.

Above all, Baldwin’s original writing and unique vocal style held the small audience rapt, and made the loud music leaking through the walls from the bar next door vanish. He sings with a wide dynamic range, sliding into and out of falsetto and trailing off into a whisper. His song “Weights” seems to rush breathlessly between emotional states, with his bass providing an insistent rhythmic propulsion.

He finished the performance with “In The Hollows,” which will be the title track of his forthcoming album, Baldwin revealed. This song requires a virtuoso vocal performance, which is a mean feat considering the athleticism that simultaneously playing the bass entails.

http://youtu.be/fVg5Q3DCHKE

Nat Baldwin’s music recommendations

As our conversation wrapped up I asked Baldwin what musicians he would recommend. Here are his recommendations along with a few of his comments:

Angel Olsen — “Angel Olsen is from Chicago, she has a new record coming out on Jag Jagwar.”
Spenking — “He’s a reclusive songwriter — doesn’t tour and hasn’t recorded much. He’s just one of my favorite songwriters … finger-picking guitar and really unique vocals … sings kinda high, elastic, with beautiful, really weird, kind of cryptic lyrics. He has an album coming out in April on a Drag City subsidiary.”
Buke and Gase — “They make their own instruments .. the ‘Buke’ — a baritone ukulele — and the Gase is a guitar bass hybrid, and they play really minimal but driving percussion with their feet… but there’s so much sound that comes out just the two of them.”

http://youtu.be/-wQv60dxAUU

Joanna Newsom — “One of my favorite shows I saw last year was Joanna Newsom… she has a new album loosely planned for this year. Her songs from a distance are simple, there’s verses and choruses and a few chords, but there’s so much intricacy with the little details within the seemingly simple structures.”