Interview: Baroness' John Baizley discusses the "unexpected" tone of their third album

Metal demigods Baroness are so prepared for their third album—which they’re recording with producer John Congleton, who helmed 2009’s Blue Record—that frontman John Baizley knew exactly in what direction the band were going months ago. In fact, they tracked bass and drums for the album last November in Hoboken, New Jersey, right before Baizley gave AP the scoop on what to expect from their new full-length.

Why did you guys decide to go back and work with John Congleton again?
Doing the last record [with him], we [developed] an awesome personal relationship. He and I keep in touch. I pretty much love the sound of every record he does; he’s a wonderful engineer and producer. I think of him is as someone who doesn’t really pay any attention whatsoever to the order-of-the-day production techniques—he’s the guy who’s just trying to put out records that sound good regardless of the time period. What we’re trying to do is work with somebody who’s not going to make our record sound dated in 10 years. He’s a good friend, got a great ear, and he’s worked with the band before, so I think one of the most important things with this session is that we didn’t have to meet anybody to get tracking. We just showed up at the studio and it was like we hadn’t skipped a beat since we saw him last two years ago. We got straight down to business.

That’s so nice. I’ve talked to bands before where the producer tryout process is rough.
Yeah, there are guys that are heavy handed, guys that trust the band implicitly; there’s all sorts of studio m.o.’s that the producers have. John just works with us. We basically show up with records written, he engineers them, we assess the music, and he weighs in on important, over-arching things and gets involved in some of the composition. But, really, I think he’s got a fairly unique sound—one that works really well with our band.

The thing I love about his records is there’s not one of them that sound like anybody else’s record. He’s definitely got this sonic imprint that doesn’t color the music the music you’ve written. It doesn’t change the way we play or the way we write or record—he just sort of harnesses the energy we’ve got. It doesn’t do that contemporary hard rock/metal thing that I, frankly, hate. He definitely was being inventive during recording, mixing, post-production—all that stuff. For a band like us, adrift in an ocean of “heavy” bands, the thing any band is looking for is something to set them apart so you’ve got your own voice speaking. He helps bring that out.

How would you describe the material you’ve been working on? How does it fit in with the rest of your catalog?
I demoed all the songs [last] year when I was writing them. I can say with complete confidence that the record is different. I think it’s been part of our process since day one that we buck repetition in our songwriting and in everything else—that we’re constantly giving ourselves some work to do, lest we fall back and sit on whatever laurels we’ve earned at this point.

What we did at the very beginning was talk about what we wanted to do. It was an absolutely unanimous decision within the band to push our sound outwards a little bit. The record’s going to be really reactive—whether it’s positive or negative, [anybody who hears it is] definitely going to have a reaction to it. We tried to do different things. We tried to improve and clarify some of our songwriting.

The result is that, on the whole, the record’s got a much broader palette of songs. There are some moments where we’re sticking to some of the foundations we’ve laid down and others where it’s a brand new type of song for us. Doing something like that is kind of a risk, especially when you’re so closely associated with a grouping of bands or style or label. That just isn’t something we care about. I feel just internally between the members of the band, we’ve taken some real risks and some risks that were absolutely worth taking for us and bore some interesting truths musically for us. It’s kind of cliché to say “expect the unexpected,” but when I listen to some of the stuff we’ve written, for my ears, it’s unexpected.

I’m very pleasantly surprised with what we were able to do in terms of making the record. There’s more material, but everything is a little bit more direct. I think with the last record we had maxed out on this kind of songwriting that we had been accustomed to, with these kind of dramatic shifts within each song. It was sort of like, don’t look back, and just keep pushing through the song. We had twists and turns and all sorts of things going on.

In the past couple years of touring, I started to become more and more impressed by songwriters who were able to really catch one direction with a single song and keep it orthodox and pure. You’ve got some set intent with one song, and you just don’t deviate from that line until the song is over. As many things as we used to say in one song, now I think we’re spreading out into the course of two or three songs.

It’s a little hookier. I’ve sort of adopted the stance that I wanted to write some songs that were more malleable so you could play them in other styles or tempos—or you could arrange them in different ways, but you still have a similar song. You have more of a choice as to where you take it, so structurally it is simple on a song-by-song basis, but much more rich over the course of a record.

It sounds like it’s given you guys a lot more flexibility. I totally understand what you mean where some people expect bands to stay the same and write the same record five times over again. It’s so limiting, and I imagine for a musician it must be such drudgery. It’s almost like you need to push yourself forward.
You make this bed that you’ve got to lay in. When you’re a young band, you don’t think “Well what’s it going to be like to play these songs three years from now and hundreds of times later?” It’s not that the material becomes boring, but if you’re working in a box too much, you become hyper-sensitive to it. If we’re still playing shows in five years—and we’re still going to be playing these songs and they all sort of feel the same to me—I’d like to have a better selection of ammunition so we can tell a better story. If you’re only going to say one thing, why say it over and over again? As a listener and music fan, I’m not always enthralled by bands that have a formula and adhere to it ad infinitum.

The one thing lamentable with contemporary music is that there’s an implicit fan base response that you need to come out fully formed as a band. There’s no patience for the progressive bell curve. Some of my favorite bands, when you listen back to their body of work, you are able to see this course developing and you can see a band really honing in on what it is that makes them unique in the whole wide world of the music business.

When the book closes on us, I hope people are able to say, “Look, there was constant growth. There was constant challenge.” That’s interesting for me as the person in the band, and I hope it’s interesting for the listeners. But again, that’s the ultimate risk. At some point, you run out of dark alleys to run down. And then the fear is you start grasping at straws and you starting writing this ridiculous music. I don’t think we’re there yet, but I want to be challenged and I want to present a challenge. I don’t want it to stay the same—I want things to become different, even at the risk of making mistakes.

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What are the biggest curveballs on the record so far?
It’s easy for me to say that, and it’s hard for me to say that, because I don’t want to say, like, “Oh you aren’t going to like this.” That’s not what I’m going for. We need to do different things, so you’re going to hopefully notice a heightened sense of melody and a more developed and focused type of song for us. I’m totally over writing hard music to perform. It’s fun in that it pushes you to the boundaries of your technical ability, but more recently, the challenge has been pushing out the boundaries of our songwriting ability. We had to say, “Sometimes a simpler song is a better song,” because you pay more attention to the song.

There’s less of an aggressive edge on the record as a whole—nobody’s going to miss that when they listen to it. It is less aggressive than our former music. That is almost definitely a result of us getting older and our interests broadening, but that’s always going to happen. That’s not to say at some point we won’t go, “Okay, now that we’ve softened up a bit, we need to get harder.” It’s just, whatever we said on the last record has been said so recently, we need to do something different.

And that makes sense. Many people forget that when you’re young, aggressive music often really speaks to you. As you get older, that changes.
Let me put it this way: I don’t think you let go of that anger. You just consider it in a different way. With age comes experience comes disapproval of things. The anger is more nuanced, and you have to deal with it in a different way. If this past year I had just been raging aggressively, hatefully angry, I would have written an aggressive and hateful record—that’s not the case. It was a bit more of a reflective year, so the music took a turn to be slightly more reflective—everything sort of falls into line after that.

We really try to pay attention to writing songs that mean something to us as we’re writing them. You can sit down and go, “Okay, there’s not enough of this that we’ve written, so let’s write something that’s mellow or heavy” or whatever, but it’s another thing to say, “This song feels right, right now. Let’s move forward with this.” On the whole, that’s what we do.

And I think that’s so much more authentic, too, when bands do that.
Authenticity is kind of double edged. Sometimes when you’re aware of the goal being authentic—when you have to put your mind towards being genuine, just by nature of that fact you’re becoming disingenuous. That’s the tricky bit for a band in our position. We’ve put out a couple records, we’ve toured—I can’t even remember a time in my life when I wasn’t touring. So when something sort of strikes me, when the creativity sort of starts happening, you just have to—and this sounds a little overly romantic—let it guide you. That’s the only way I can stomach writing music, because it really is all just a handful of notes, and it’s up to you how you put them together. If it feels right, we’ll write it. And this record feels really right to us. It’s going to be shockingly different—I can’t say anything less than that.

What are you guys reflecting on? What’s really been guiding you lyrically?
It’s sort of the same old thing. What I do lyrically is I write whatever is happening and whatever is on my mind. I think that’s a pretty typical thing. The past 10 years of my life, since we started this band, have been a series of ups and down, like everybody else’s life. So I want to try to capture that. What I definitely have been trying to do more recently is to distill down these things that I come back to over and over again and make them as relatable as possible without showing all my cards. That’s the challenge for all lyricists—communicating an idea in such a way that it just seems right. I’m writing about personal things, and I hope they’re relatable. I don’t go through different things than other people go through, so what I’ve always tried to do is present them in a way that’s interesting and engaging and can hint at the universal things that drive us in one way or the other. Thematically, there are no in-depth, over-arching concepts other than, just, “Here’s a handful of human thoughts. Let’s think about them.”

It doesn’t really get much simpler than that, but simpler in a really meaningful way.
I think that’s what everybody does, in some way or other. It’s just communication, that’s just what music is. It’s communicating an idea that would be not quite as interesting if just communicated verbally—we’ve got sound at our disposal. We’re trying to use that to get further into the subject or to create an atmosphere that’s right for reflection or whatever it is. It really is pretty simple to me—we are musicians who are just trying to create a type of art that says something the way we want to say it. The band has a unique voice, and we are just trying to say things in that voice. alt