Free, legal MP3 from Jessie Baylin (smartly put together singer/songwriter pop)

"Was I On Your Mind" - Jessie Baylin
     "Was I On Your Mind" has the hallmarks of a great pop hit--hooks, craft, canny performance--and yet is unlikely to be anything of the sort here in 2008, just because who the hell knows anymore. The music market is as unhinged as the oil market. History teaches us, however, that craziness is always an aberration in the long run. There is no reason to assume that a song as crisp, well put together, and engagingly sung as this one won't again find favor with the general public, but, alas, it'll probably be too late for Ms. Baylin.
     Fingertips, of course, exists in a sort of alternative universe in which what matters is the song, the spirit, the intelligence, the ineffable spark of human-to-human connection. So as far as I'm concerned this song is already a hit--an incisive example of how it's really really okay to apply polish and know-how to songwriting, at least when such things avoid cliché and are grounded in a voice, both lyrically and musically, that's feels real, solid, true. With her dusky alto and nimble delivery, the New Jersey-born, L.A.-based Baylin sounds to me, fetchingly, like Shawn Colvin doing a Sam Phillips impression; to the insistently upward, yearning melody of the chorus, she adds a textured presence that pretty much melts me. I like too how even in the context of this smartly produced number, little quirks can be found, including how the end note she hits repeatedly on the word "wrong" strikes the ear as unresolved, and how she breaks the songwriter "rule" of making the title the most repeated phrase in the song (which in this case would be "Tell Me I'm Wrong").
     You'll find this one on Baylin's new CD, Firesight, released this week on Verve Forecast. Produced by Roger Moutenot (Yo La Tengo, Sleater-Kinney), this is the 24-year-old's second album; the first, You, was an iTunes-only self-release.