Claire Donato's 'Stranger Situation' at The Believer

Claire Donato investigates two versions of the song "Baby," Joanna Newsom's "Baby Birch," economic precarity, forms of attachment, and other subjects in her latest essay published at The Believer. It begins with some explanation: "[s]he emails Jack Fleischer, a stranger, to say she is writing an essay about Donnie and Joe Emerson’s song 'Baby.'" From there: 

There are contradictory facts online, and she wants the truth. What specifically happened when Fleischer discovered Dreamin’ Wild at an antique store in Spokane? Did he write about the record online to a following that championed it, via which Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti subsequently discovered “Baby” and covered it? Or did Light in the Attic contract the re-issue before that took place? (“I noticed on your website and AllMusic you’ve written liner notes for them—for an assortment of such wonderfully strange records, no less.”) This story is one of a failed record’s resurrection from the dead, and she is eager to understand the timeline of events.

She first encounters Donnie and Joe Emerson’s “Baby” in a wine shop after watching Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman alone at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “Baby” was recorded in 1979 by the aforementioned brothers, who grew up in rural Fruitland, Washington and whose father provided them with a $100,000 recording studio where records could be self-produced and released. The Emersons took out a second mortgage to subsidize the studio, a fact that strikes her as—extravagant? Irresponsible? Belligerently American? “We spent a lot of money; probably we shouldn’t have,” Donnie and Joe Emerson’s father says. “[But] they practiced all the time. That was their love.”

Read on at The Believer.