Bailey Bliss has been writing songs for longer than most people have known her name.
Growing up in Florida, Bailey first found her way onto a stage as the singer and bass player with The Strikeouts, the independent teenage band she played in while still at school. The songs were loud, immediate and usually concerned with whatever felt important at seventeen: relationships, arguments, wounded pride, bad decisions and the occasional desire to tell somebody exactly where they could go.
She never really stopped writing.
As her baseball career took her from Tampa Bay to Cleveland, music remained the other constant in Bailey’s life. Guitars, bass, piano and keyboards became tools for writing and demoing, but the center of it all has always been the same: the song and the voice telling it.
Her debut album, The Last Great Dance In The City Of Ash, brought that private songwriting life into public view. The songs were written by Bailey, working with producer and writer Cam Forge to turn them into finished recordings. The album moves through pop, dance and disco without staying obediently inside any of them, with big hooks sitting beside stranger corners, humor beside melancholy, and songs made for crowded rooms alongside ones that sound considerably different after midnight.
Since then, Bailey’s music has increasingly become a collaborative affair with the musicians around her. George K., Naomi West, Amanda Reid, Chris Blake and Doctor A have grown from the band behind the songs into an essential part of how those songs take shape onstage and in the studio.
Bailey remains a songwriter and vocalist first. She can play several instruments and will happily use whichever one helps get an idea out of her head, but she has no particular interest in proving she can do everything herself. If somebody else can play the part better, she would rather let them.
Her musical world is broad by design. Alternative rock, pop, disco, ballads, country, orchestration and the occasional thing that refuses to fit anywhere neatly are all fair game. The only real rule is that the song has to feel like hers.
Baseball may have made Bailey Bliss famous.
Music is what she keeps coming back to.
Compostition
Maton EM325C
Boheme Blisscaster
Gretsch Country Gentleman
Ibanez Black Eagle Bass
Fender Mustang Bass
Yamaha Grand Piano
Neumann U 67 — principal lead-vocal microphone
Telefunken ELA M 251E — alternative for the more open, polished pop songs
Shure SM7B — aggressive, intimate, or deliberately dry vocals
Neumann U 87 Ai — backing vocals and vocal doubles
AKG C414 XLII — group vocals and layered harmonies