B-Side Guys

In “Baby Blues,” Melissa Lingo (performing as meka) doesn’t merely inhabit the folk tradition—she resurrects its most profound purpose: making communal ritual of personal grief. The track emerges like a prayer from Nevada City’s hillside cemetery, where Lingo and her poetry-bearing friend would commune with the departed.

The song’s fingerpicked guitar pattern creates a meditative circuit, cycling like the “moons in our heads” that “wax and they wane” in her lyrics. When she sings “I remember a spring/Before I ever heard you sing/Before I saw the threads connecting dread to everything,” Lingo establishes time’s nonlinearity—a hallmark of folk’s oral tradition where past and present converse.

What distinguishes “Baby Blues” from her earlier work is the deliberate sparseness. Where past releases showcased multi-instrumental arrangements, here Lingo strips everything back to emphasize the intimacy of storytelling. The production captures the acoustic resonance of open air, as though recorded among the tombstones themselves.

Lingo’s vocal performance carries the accumulated wisdom of Joan Baez and Vashti Bunyan while remaining distinctly her own. When she reaches the devastating image of “that tree where we read/Prose for the dead,” her voice carries both the warmth of remembrance and the chill of loss. This duality pervades the entire track, which serves as perfect introduction to her forthcoming album “The Rabbit.”

By preserving specific geographical and emotional coordinates—”Nevada City, California, at the cemetery on the top of the hill”—Lingo creates folk music in its truest sense: songs that bind community through shared experience, even when that experience is grief. “Baby Blues” isn’t just a song; it’s a commemorative act for both the unnamed infant’s grave and the living friendship that brought poetry to the dead.