I funneled years of childhood piano lessons and a musical family upbringing into self-taught guitar playing and singing. I have been playing music with my sister Laura for as long as I can remember. By the time I was high school aged, she had a four track recorder, multi-instruments, an effects processor and Fender Broadcaster she let me fall in love with playing (sorry, this guitar is long gone, I hope whoever has it really loves it). We became named “the Baird Sisters” by way of needing identification on a show poster, for some reason this name has stuck well with us. We hope to enjoy a period of playing and recording later this year, in addition to 50 or more years from now. We became introduced to a lot of traditional material via Smithsonian Archives LP’s, so we must have been relatively primed for and had a natural gravitational attraction to a lot of this if we were interested in writing to agencies associated with the Federal Government. I am one of founding members and primary songwriters in Espers. I was suggested to, then recruited by Brooke based on the Baird Sisters work, and for a general reputation for being “folky” (not really a compliment from the peers who connected us). It isn’t untrue that once together we spent a great deal of time in candlelight over wooden floors listening for breaks from city noise to hit record again. A very interesting part of our collaboration is writing and producing these songs that sound detached from individualistic songwriting. They came also from innate and personal understanding of scales and modes we didn’t know the names and theory of, of feeling confident enough to rely on the strength of “wavelength” “mutual reference points” and “feeling.” We have some of our most fun in the studio when everyone gets to feel a bit like painters or filmmakers, or projectionists. We all have pretty fantastic imaginations which was a good way around some of the verbal illiteracy, not knowing the names of things and finding them anyone can feel like magic. I always learn a great deal with these guys.