Your single Woman Looking Back at Me is based on an uptempo beat carrying modern interrogations and sophisticated awareness. Do you expect this cognitive dissonance to amplify your message?

Lesley Barth: I’ve always been a fan of contrast between the lyrics of a song and the production of a song – sad songs that sound happy, for example – so I do think it was a tool I used with some awareness in this song, though it was never an expressed intention. The message is very much one of the power of meditation/ mindfulness and becoming aware of our thoughts, but I didn’t want it to be pretentious or sound “expected”. I think the power of contrast is a really effective dramatic and sonic tool, and I’m glad that contrast was apparent!

Lyrics put aside, the instruments used and the arrangements written on Big Time Baby do not really seem to be revolutionizing the genre. Is this an assumed choice? Or prove us wrong?

I didn’t have any aims to revolutionize the genre – I wanted the productions to always be in service of the message behind the songs. It’s a very personal album about the things I’ve learned over the past few years – quitting my corporate tech job and rebuilding my life, and the themes just felt very front and center. I think it will likely be different on the next album, but I’ll just have to see what the songs require.

In terms of music production, your voice is on the forefront. Was this choice made for purely aesthetic reasons? Do messages need to be acoustically loud to be really heard?

I think the songs on this album are very theatrical – almost like little monologues, and that drove the production choice to have the vocals front and center. There is power in being loud, sure, but I definitely don’t think messages need to be acoustically loud to be heard. It just felt right for these songs.

Few artists seem to be prolonging the americana/country/folk scene with sincere motives like yours. What seduced you in the idea of marrying this genre and scene, and to do it for the right reasons?

I genuinely don’t think a great deal about genre/ market/ scene how I can take advantage of those things to reach broader audiences. I really challenge myself to write honest songs, and from there, production decisions just seemed to flow for this record. I think the combination of the folk and the slightly theatrical/ earnest/ sincere is something that comes to me honestly – my mom was an actress and my father was an opera singer, so theater and musicals were a huge part of my upbringing, and I got pulled into folk via Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan in high school and never looked back.