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QuickTake:
Meredith Adelaide sees parallels between her earlier baking career and getting her first solo album, "To Believe I'm the Sun," out of the oven. Like making a croissant, it was a process that took some time.
The process of baking croissants isn’t unlike putting an album together. Laminating dough with layers of butter is combining music and lyrics in the writing phase. Cutting the dough and shaping it is recording, paring it into solid units. Proofing the dough, letting it puff up before it bakes, is ordering the track list just so.
Meredith Adelaide, who at 37 has logged years in Eugene pastry kitchens before making a run at a music and acting career, may be in the small population of people who can appreciate the comparisons. But for her, the longest phase was preparing to bake at all.
“Mixing the dough has been 10-plus years of processing who I am and what I needed to learn,” said Adelaide, who played at Eugene’s Art House earlier this month to preview her debut solo album, “To Believe I’m the Sun.”
Her journey has spanned more than 10 years as a pastry chef, model, actress and musician. She appeared in a sketch in “Portlandia,” as a waitress at a raw vegan restaurant with a designated “fart patio.” She was half of an acoustic duo, with an ex, that got radio play and a South by Southwest slot before fizzling out.
Now, “To Believe I’m the Sun,” which has a release date scheduled for Nov. 21, is almost ready to come out of the oven.
Eugene origins
Adelaide first moved to Eugene in 2001, when she was 13 years old. She graduated from South Eugene High School and then dual-enrolled at Lane Community College and the University of Oregon, primarily doing the culinary program at LCC.
If you ate a croissant at a Eugene restaurant in the 2000s, there’s a chance Adelaide baked it. She worked at bakeries across Eugene, including the now-closed Napoli Restaurant & Bakery, Provisions Market Hall, and The Brown Betty Cafe, a bakery offshoot of the beloved and now-closed Whiteaker neighborhood restaurant Papa’s Soul Food Kitchen.
Her passion for music also started in Eugene. She sang in the concert choir at South Eugene High and performed in the Shedd’s Oregon Festival of American Music. But pastries came first, an excuse to give gifts to friends and a kind of meditative act, she said.
While working in pastry, she wanted to break into acting and modeling and was auditioning for gigs in Portland (hence the “Portlandia” moment). There, she met Josh Schroeder, and in 2010 they formed the duo Josh and Mer and started dating. That band played in Portland’s Crystal Ballroom and at South by Southwest, but ended around 2013 when the two broke up.
She moved to New York after that and was connected with music producers, which wasn’t fruitful. “It’s this classic story of like these guys who don’t listen, who just kind of take my ideas and then turn it into what’s palatable for the market, instead of trying to help uncover what I’m trying to do,” she said.
Then, she pivoted to photography for work for years. She was living in Los Angeles, feeling defeated in her music career, when 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Isolated amid the pandemic, she said something clicked in her brain: She was the only one in charge of her. She picked up a guitar, filled with doomsday-style worries of a future without electricity where she wanted to be able to perform with just an instrument and her voice, and started learning.
“Let’s make sure I’m writing good songs,” she said of her thought process at the time. “Let’s make sure I’m telling the truth, because what else am I going to do?”
Believing she is the sun
The album opens with “Big Songs,” a mission statement of sorts for the album: “I wanna sing all the big songs on a big stage for a big crowd / But what I got are these two cold feet and these great big dreams that I don’t talk about.”
But the first song was “Guard Dog,” which Adelaide said she wrote before she realized she was writing a whole album. “Guard Dog,” like the majority of the acoustic album, relies on spare instrumentation to center Adelaide’s almost changeling voice. As she sings, she weaves echoing, graceful layers with an isolated, knowing edge.
She joined a music collective in L.A., where she performed “Guard Dog,” shaking in her boots and rusty when it came to playing live music, in 2022. But the Grammy-nominated British producer and musician Kalim Patel, better known as Khushi, was listening.
Patel, who works with the singer James Blake, told Adelaide he wanted to record the song. It took a year for her to accept the recording of “Guard Dog,” and then another year to agree to recording a whole album. He agreed to record the album for no money upfront, and a share of the publishing proceeds the album makes.
“To Believe I’m the Sun” is a reintroduction to her work, more than a decade after her last major musical career moment. But she sees an important distinction: Josh and Mer, she said, felt like something where she was just along for the ride, while this album sees her finding what feels right to her. That came in part thanks to lessons from her earlier pastry career and culinary education.
Whisking a pint of mayonnaise by hand for 20 minutes taught her the importance of understanding how things come together. Baking in front of a chef who would bark, “What are you doing?” even when she was using proper technique taught her to not question herself.
As she prepares for the release of “To Believe I’m the Sun,” she hopes the album shows she’s willing to wait for the right time. It’s another lesson she knows well.
“I’m not here to rush,” she said. “I still appreciate watching croissants rise in an oven. I still enjoy making those 88 layers of dough, butter, dough, butter, dough. Things take time, and it’s OK to have your own timing.”
