Body of article by Jason Lee. Listening guide by Nora Baier. Cover photo by Anthony Vassallo.
True to its title, Nora Baier gets right down to business on her debut full-length i’ll find a way to pay my fare, making sure we get our money’s worth (you pay artists for their music, no?) on the album-opening track alone, “arms wide open” which in half the time it takes to boil an egg spans an impressive gamut of emotions as it cycles between guitar-picking pensiveness and sugary power-chord headrushes on a song that’s at once intimate and cinematic as her voice weaves seamlessly from breathy to twangy, full of subtle little swoops and hiccups like on the lines “could you make it worth my while / maybe I could stay awhile?” as her voice audibly sighs all but breathless by its final syllable which truly puts the “vent” in “ventilation” ammirite (?!) or as Nora herself puts it “I hear whispers in the wind“…
…with the song emerging haltingly like it’s crawling out from under some long-carried weight as hinted at by its opening lines (“it grows heavy all the time”) audibly flowering as it builds up layer by layer like the first shoots of spring emerging after a snowbound winter which is not a randomly chosen metaphor (editor note: technically, more like a simile) with the most chills-inducing moment for us coming at 0:55 when the bass suddenly enters for the first time alongside an added layer of chiming electric guitar like suddenly going from standard aspect ratio to widescreen on the sonic spectrum…
…all leading up to the chorus’s rush of grungy guitar distortion and soaring melodies like pollen bursting from its newly opened blooms that’ll have you pogo-ing around the room like Debbie Harry on public access TV then laying down for a long nap if you’re anything like us—perfectly capturing the bipolar nature of peak grunge’s loud-quiet-loud dynamics but grounded in Nora’s indie-folk, singer-songwriter roots (composing most of her songs w/only acoustic guitar and voice)…
Photo 1 by Mike Vassallo; Photo 2 & 3 by @6anti
…which is fitting to the lyrics of “arms wide open” and to many of the other songs that’re seemingly all about going on a journey, the act of pulling up stakes and looking for a “better place” (or refusing to, like on the song about a “sickly doll” kept upon the highest shelf…just out of reach) whilst staying firmly rooted in a stable sense of home and belonging (like on the song simply titled “home”) as Nora wonders aloud “if you take me from this place / would you still recognize my face?”, the restless swirl of the music holding a mirror up to the vulnerability and nostalgia, the desire for escape and catharsis, depicted in its lyrics as one may reasonably expect to feel when making a major life transition or entering a new phase just as (spoiler alert!) Nora did semi-recently in moving from the bright, sunny climes of Phoenix, Arizona to NYC…
but if I find that my feet no longer touch the ground
or if I’m lost from your grasp without a sound
would you still be there waiting for me
with your arms wide open?
…and before moving on we must address the yarling elephant in the room cuz if you’re of a certain age or a certain disposition (btw The Deli just turned 21; at last we can buy unlimited supplies of Bud Light Lime and Fireball whisky minis at our local bodega!) there’s a good chance that just hearing the phrase “[with] arms wide open” will bring up mental images of Creed’s Scott Stapp striking a Jesus Christ pose on a mountaintop (despite the two songs sounding nothing alike we hasten to mention!) or levitating above an audience in a freshly-laundered wifebeater with head thrown back and palms outstretched which is certainly one way to interpret the phrase but not for Ms. Baier who’d never even heard Creed’s “With Arms Wide Open” a.k.a. “With Awwwms Wahhhd O-pawwwn” when she wrote “arms wide open” as she kindly informed us recently…
…thus taking the phrase in a totally new, non-yarling direction with arms thrown wide open less in self-exultation than in seeking an embrace, openness and receptivity to new experiences, not to mention the comfort derived from being not only held but held down (in the good, DJ Khaled sense!) which just to be clear there’s no throwing of shade intended here towards Creed (too easy!) who at the least deserve credit for writing a handful of post-grunge generational anthems (retrospectively dubbed “divorced dad rock”!) more latterly taken up by a contingent of Gen Zers, nor Stapp himself who seems to be a perfectly nice guy these days who’s genuinely repentant for the latex slacks, the sex tape with Kid Rock, and the adenoidal braying (we keed! we keed!) but alas we digress…
…with track two “bruised knees” serving as an even more unequivocally “held down” type song (“my father told me / can’t wait on a change / I try to stand but / my bruised knees start to shake”) with Nora held down by her shaky legs but equally “held down” by family and friends on an acoustically based number that wouldn’t sound out of place on Neko Case’s Fox Confessor Brings the Flood or as the next collab between Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen with the LP continuing apace with plenty of musical and thematic variety to be sure…
…but with a thru-line of agony and ecstasy throughout arising from being held down in both senses, all while feeling a restless drive to light out for the territory just like good ol’ Huck Finn, and the complicated swirl of contradictory emotions and psychological impulses which result (present all the back to Baier’s 2021 debut single “Dirt” in which she expresses the desire “to escape my own skin” haunted by “a parasite, a poison in my brain,” and by sound of the song’s epic whisper-to-a-scream dynamic sweep she just about does, with Nora explaining that “I live with bipolar disorder, which inspired [the song]. While it can be difficult, I have created meaningful art from those experiences”…
photos above and below by Anita Himani (AZ), styled by May Luna (AZ)
…with the full-length i’ll find a way to pay my fare extending these dramatic ebbs and flows and loud-quiet-loud dynamics from single songs to unfolding over the flow of the entire album which after the hushed dynamics of “bruised knees” once again raises the temperature on the waltz-time “alone” (shades of Mazzy Star in the mellower parts) with some striking falsetto rhapsodizing followed by the again more-attenuated “sickly doll” (“so delicate and small”) but here with more of a broken music-box lullaby kinda vibe (“she keeps herself upon the highest shelf / she likes to be just out of reach”) that’d make an excellent closing-credits song for a doll-themed horror movie…
photos shot and edited by Anita Himani (AZ), styled by May Luna (AZ)
…followed by the likewise acoustic-y title song (“i’ll find a way / to pay my fair / and give you yr share / so you can drift on”) with some nice ghostly ambience towards the end followed by “buddy & delilah” who sound like a real nice, regular Jack & Diane type couple of kids transformed into the family pet and then “home” (another recurring theme on the album, cuz to take a journey you must first leave home, and to feel the joy of homecoming you must first go on the journey) and then “gilding the lily” cuz what better title for an album’s penultimate track (“you’ll never make it out / holding on to me / you’ll never figure out / how you swallowed me”) at last concluding with “Unchained” (a good place to end up for a narrator who struggles with being tethered and tied up elsewhere) which to our admittedly ‘90s-biased ears could be an outtake from Hole’s Celebrity Skin…
…and in closing, color us grateful that Nora saw fit to pull up stakes from her native Southwestern oasis and lay down stakes in another kind of oasis if not outright mirage—a city where yr more likely to be held down by oppressive, constraining factors but likewise “held down” by a self-made family of fellow aspiring freaks than almost anywhere on Earth–with Ms. Baier joining the ranks of the bi-polar, bi-coastal elite (welcome!) which ok ok Phoenix is hardly “coastal” but it’s west of the Mississippi so it counts in our book (!) with both friends and family of Nora’s traveling cross-country all the way from the Valley of the Sun to Brooklyn’s modest-yet-charming Pete’s Candy Store just to attend her LP debut show (see video at bottom) but don’t fret if ya missed it cuz TONIGHT (Saturday 4.4) Nora rides again as part of a stacked lineup at an actual real-life bowling alley alongside Skeeter De Milo (Deli-exclusive music video debut coming soon!), T!lt, and Pipe…
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And now, with no further ado, here’s some exclusive song-by-song liner notes telling you what the songs are actually, really about provided by none other than Nora Baier to usher you on yr journey…
arms wide open
arms wide open is a question. it asks will you still be willing to love me and be there once you see how ugly it can really get.
bruised knees
bruised knees is about being in love when the world is crumbling around you. alone i wrote alone in 5 minutes after a really rough phone call with a loved one. it was kind of stream of consciousness but the anger and hurt are very tangible to me.
sickly doll
sickly doll is like when you’ve been alone for too long and your knick knacks start talking to you. it’s about loneliness, isolation, and keeping people at a distance.
i’ll find a way to pay my fare
i chose to name my album after i’ll find a way to pay my fare because the uncertainty in myself is what lingers beneath every song on the album. it’s feeling like you always have some kind of debt to pay, like you owe everyone something.
buddy & delilah
i missed my childhood dogs buddy & delilah terribly one night and started to think about growing up much too fast and i wrote this song. my producer cole rosenthal did the backup vocals.
home
i wrote this song after visiting my best friend May in Tucson a handful of years ago. I was living in northern Arizona and drove all the way down south to Tucson, driving from the top to the bottom of the state on the I-10 less than 5 hours each way. The song is the reflection on the drive back, and the bittersweetness when it’s time to go home.
gilding the lily
the term gilding the lily means to add adornments to something already perfect. it’s bout the fear of bringing down people close to you, and that my own issues or whatever will rub off somehow (“you’ll never figure out/how you swallowed me”).
unchained
unchained is about the anger you feel toward yourself that you take out on the people you love. it’s slightly self-pitying but it’s honest.
“i’ll find a way to pay my fare” the album
released February 21, 2026
mixed, engineered, and produced by Cole Rosenthal
all music and lyrics written by Nora Baier
all songs performed and sung by Nora Baier alongside Ryan Shea on drums, Ayla Huguenot on bass, and lead guitar by Dave Carroll, Jacob East, and the multi-talented Ryan Shea