Meredith Edgar

Meredith Edgar is trying to break your heart. Born and based in San Francisco, Edgar writes songs that wrap elements of modern Americana in smoky tendrils of 1930s jazz chanteuse darkness. Her voice is supple and expressive, rendering delicate details and subtle shifts of light as masterfully as bold swaths of color. Her lyrics make the personal poetic, and vice versa. Together, it’s a siren song that lures the listener from the sunny shallows into deeper waters, glimmering and mysterious, mesmerizing and chill-inducing…oh, and fair warning: it’s likely to make you cry. With Melancholy Baby, her third full-length album, Edgar wades fearlessly into everything it means to be human – the loves and losses, hopes and regrets, and all the complicated, messy wonder of being alive. Songs like “I Hope You Haunt Me” (written for her beloved dog Django), “Lie to Yourself” and “You’re Not Careful With Things” are so honest and vulnerable, so achingly beautiful, they seem to tap into a shared well of emotion. “Washed Up” tells the story of love’s demise with the dark swagger of a murder ballad, and “Blue” and the title track, “Melancholy Baby,” paint a portrait of an artist who both struggles with and embraces life in the minor key. Not to leave you entirely adrift, the album’s closing track, “Octopus Heart,” voices hope that even a shattered heart can be mended, kintsugi-style, each gilded scar making it all the more beautiful.