Road Tripping Music: introducing Lee Baggett with ‘Simmer Down’, the great enigma of the West Coast underground
Americans make better driving music, it’s because their roads and cars are cooler. That being said, Lee Baggett isn’t American. He’s from the Philippines. He’s merely been wandering on the West Coast for years, delving into its underground scene for occasional shade but otherwise sunning it up on his travels, lassoing tunes from the surf, stumbling towards recording equipment once in a while.
Mostly, you’ll catch him in Washington State, a spot where he’s been seasoning himself with Unknown Origin and Fever Tree, but Baggett is a man you can’t tie down for too long. He’s been wandering his way towards his own voice for some time now, and it is typified by the melodic beauty of the rather dogeared ‘Simmer Down’.
The clunky humbleness of this staggeringly beautiful tune, keys wheezing with glee like the homemade hue of Daniel Johnston’s old Bontempi, typifies Baggett’s boon. “I come up with a lot of songs while driving out to the cold northwest surf,” he tells me, “that’s how this one came around. I was hearing the do-do-do melody as a ‘60s kazoo thing, which got a wee watered down in the end, c’est la vie.”
And c’est la vie sounds like his motto for life. He’s an arborist by day, standing high up in tree canopies, “connection with nature”, a task that he says seeps into his music. But any potential hippie pretence behind that is eradicated by the wholesomeness of ‘Simmer Down’, a song that a breeze seems to come off of.
The track was recorded spontaneously during Fleet Week in San Francisco, a festival that sees fighter jets whizz through the air in formation. Upon their roaring approach, Baggett and his pal Zeb Zaitz perched themselves behind mini pianos and quickly rattled off the kazoo melody that came to him on the drive down.
The track is cut from his latest record, Echo Me On, released by Perpetual Doom, and it sounds exactly like the story above, right down the vignette form and missing chapters, as Baggett pieces his life into a sunny little tapestry, one that unfurls with prettiness and ruggedness, not unlike the West Coast scenes where most of it has been spent.
For Fans Of: “Sitting on park benches listening to records, smiling at dogs like they’re old colleagues, and having a sketchy tax history.”
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