Carley Baer

With a honey-sweet voice and a razor-sharp wit, Carley Baer has spent her career exploring the little corners that make life interesting. After making a name for herself in the Milwaukee music scene in the early 2000s, Carley moved to Portland, OR... then Boston, MA... then back to Portland, with some cross-country and European travels in between.

In 2010, she released You Can't Control The Weather, a full-band album that recounts stories of leaving home, losing love, and finding peace through it all. Five years later she created The Paris Project, billed as a "musical tourism" experience where subscribers enjoyed weekly postcards, photos, and songs delivered to their inboxes; this was followed up by The Budapest Project in 2016. Together those songs form the main body of Travelogue, another full-band effort that is awaiting release. 2016 also saw the release of Life Goes On After All, a collection of home recordings mixed and mastered by Steve Hamilton (Makin' Sausage Music), which the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel likened to "Aimee Mann's marvelous work on the 'Magnolia' soundtrack...[and] 'I'm Your Man'-era Lenoard Cohen."

Her 10+-year participation in annual songwriting events like Steel Bridge Songfest, its sister festivals Dark Songs and Love On Holiday (Sturgeon Bay, WI), and February Album Writing Month (www.fawm.org), gave her an excuse to examine songwriting not just as a creative pursuit, but also as a way of developing interpersonal relationships and strengthening individual creativity. The lessons she took from these experiences carried directly over into her decision to return to school to pursue a Bachelor of Music in Music Education, as well as a Master of Education, from Portland State University.

The thesis work she did as part of the University Honors College became a published paper on how to circumvent writer's block, and prompted her thesis advisor to describe her in a letter as "ridiculously creative." The paper and its findings led to the creation of Bad Song Club, a weekly challenge that invites participants to attempt to write a song in 30 minutes, despite sometimes-fierce protestations from their inner critics.

In addition to maintaining Bad Song Club, Carley stokes her love of collaborative, time-based songwriting through participation in retreats hosted by the Goffin & King Foundation, where she has written songs with Louise Goffin and Victoria Williams, among many others. She has co-writing credits on albums by Victoria Vox, Kate Vargas, and James Hall, as well as decades of compilations released by the Holiday Music Motel. She continues to write and record prodigiously in her home studio, dubbed Problem Cat City.