Sitting down with Baroness mastermind John Baizley following the release of the groups highly touted fifth studio album Gold & Grey – the final in their chromatic series – was anything but conventional.
The interview, or meeting of minds, resembled the unboxing of a dissertation more than a back and forth on metalhead tropes or the copy and paste list of media blitz questionnaires. A deep dive into an album rarely lives up to the name.
Simply put, John Baizley is an artist, an auteur of the highest quality. That's true of his art, the paintings he pours his guts and soul into that provide the vivid, beautiful and sometimes terrifying backdrop for each and every Baroness album, and of the music and the band that he – alongside the amazingly talented group of Nick Jost, Sebastian Thomson and Gina Gleason – take deadly seriously.
The album, released on June 14th, has been acclaimed by critics and fans alike (read Cody's review of the album here). Live, the group are firing on all cylinders, touring tirelessly throughout 2019, with an epic tour with Deafhaven and Zeal & Ardor already in the books, with a summer headline run and Euro trek with Volbeat on deck.
There are no words that can put into context just what Gold & Grey, in scope and emotion, mean to John Baizley. It's better to let the artist tell it, which is exactly what we did.
Here is Gold & Grey, in the words of John Baizley.
On his thoughts Post-Album Release:
By the time the release is close whether or not I'm right or I'm wrong, I feel I have already made up my mind on how I see things. Whether or not I feel confident or nervous or if I think it's going to be antagonistic or if it's going to be well received. So I think before the record came out I had an inkling of an idea … due to some of the the very articulate reality of the way the record is composed and sounds and was laid out, I knew that there would be at least some positive reviews. It seemed to offer some of those positives easter eggs that I have found in my history as a recording artist that journalists enjoy writing about or listening to. I understand however well or confident that I feel about that, the thing that no one really understands is how a series of positive reviews might translate to an audience because it's a different thing. And then furthermore what happens when those songs have to become alive on stage. That's really the the most mysterious part of the process.
Personally speaking, from the time we were walking in to Dave Fridmann's studio on the first day of a three brief sessions of recording with him, I was already convinced that we had the material that had the potential to be the best record, personally for me. As the process went on, my enthusiasm and my creative flexibility never seemed to diminish. It only seemed to increase in momentum and variety and strength. I felt like something special was happening the whole time.
I believed in this record a lot. It was by far and away the most difficult complex, byzantine thing that I've had to work with and as a band that we've had to try to find the proverbial forest through the trees with. But the forest itself was always there for me. I knew that it wasn't a matter of creating something compelling or something cool. It was the extent to which we were going to be able to do it. Something in the water or something amongst the four of us and really the five of us, because I do credit Dave with a lot of help on his record, but I think we all had this kind of interesting mixture… and I don't have the right word for it. Maybe confusion is the word. It was chaos. There's a lot of stuff, just a tremendous amount of ideas, thoughts and a sonic 'to do' list and experiments. There was a great deal of variety within the material that we had, everything from composed, written, technically challenging things to loose open ended ideas that we intended on investigating. I am thrilled and was very surprised that nobody stopped me from taking every single one of these ideas to the most extreme, most realized conclusion that I was capable of taking it to. And sometimes at the cost of time and energy, but sometimes patience.
I think we all pushed each other in the way that we trusted one another. I credit Nick and Sebastian and Gina a lot for trusting that some of the more time consuming, seemingly crazy or oftentimes very contradictory things that I was working on with these songs, I credit them for trusting me to see it through. And I think the resulting album, each of the songs and the way that they're woven together is an example of what happens when Baroness, when we are able to take everything to that final conclusion without hesitation. And that takes confidence, that takes trust, that takes inter-personal respect and it takes patience. It takes a whole list of variables that are difficult to achieve and difficult to get in the first place and then to stress them all at once if you can. We were in a position where we could. To stress all of those things nearly to the breaking point was a really incredible experience that yielded some really startling results for me. So much so that if every single piece of feedback that I got on the record from fans, from the press, from everybody else out there was negative I would still defend it to my dying breath. This was something that felt very important to do.
On 'The End' of the Chromatic Series:
Nothing has ever felt like the end of anything. It seems more to me, or my impression has always been, and I'm uniquely positioned to be able to feel something like this, but nothing ever feels like the end of anything. Chapters… possibly. And I think that's what records are. They are chapters in time for the lifetime of a musical recording artist. But more importantly the inverse of that, each record feels like it's a platform on which we can continue to expand.
For me there are bands that are linear and you can trace the arc and trajectory of their output in a linear way. Whether they're refining a sound that works extremely well for them or whether they're growing and becoming bigger, stronger, faster with each successive record. Then there's bands that I feel that sort of energy is spent more in a radiant way where there's a center point and that's typically something that's some sort of sonic hallmark or a sound or a voicing or something indefinable that makes you say I recognize this on some fundamental level as being XYZ artist. I've always considered Baroness as one of those things. So that being said the only thing that really has to apply to each song and each record that we write is it has to sound like us. Nothing else. It doesn't have to be an improvement on this. It doesn't have to be a refinement of that.
I feel as though I'm sitting at the center of something and the greater the quality of spurs leading up from the center the better. And I think with each record we are creating a more diverse set of tangents that we can move in moving forward, but always with that cornerstone being intact and in place. And that's what's really exciting to me. I mean that's partially by design, but I have to think the design is there because that kind of suits my mentality and the way that I am. I realize that in this point in my life that I do things in a particular way. And I feel fortunate beyond words to have found three incredibly talented musicians who have integrated themselves and become such critical members of this band, but who are able to follow those movements along with me. I have to admit sort of sheepishly that I wouldn't necessarily be able do that with their material. I'm not like a super flexible artist. It's sort of like what moves me in a particular way and I'm grateful for those musicians that over the years have chosen to think that those directions that I had are good ones. It just feels like we're family. It feels like everybody's working towards a similar goal and we all have something similar in mind. But we also recognize that each one of us is a vastly different person with vastly different motivations. So it's really amazing the amount of synchronicity that we feel while still exhibiting such unique characteristics as individual musicians.
On the Baroness Lineup in 2019:
This very amazing thing happened after 2012 and the accident and everything. Up until that point we had been through quite a few lineup changes and I was fortunate at that point I was able to draw from this weird little group of friends that I had growing up. But at a certain point with enough lineup changes I ran out of musician friends from my childhood. When Sebastian, Nick and Gina joined the band…it was weird, because all three of them are such powerhouses. I didn't ever necessarily feel like I deserved to be in a band with people who can play like that.
When Gina joined she brought with her a technical capability that's impressive and that's important but not the most important thing. You know she's got a huge toolkit of technique. Also she understands the important aspects of composition and songwriting, how sound enforces ideas and how instruments express our feelings. With her technical capabilities she's also got access to a soul. While a lot of musicians are that technically competent that can be kind of a stumbling block a lot of times, because you can dazzle people so much that you forget. I've seen, at least in my experience, musicians who are so technically dazzling the more important part of music doesn't really exist, but that's not really the case with her. She's able to balance both of those. She also understood the particulars of our music enough and has that rare quality that I think the four of us all have which is a self-editing quality where you don't put out bad ideas, you put out maybe a set of good ideas, none of which would be contradictory to Baroness sound. Then you get to choose between the good ones rather than showing up with something that would just be way too out of character and wouldn't really support the kind of music we write. She's got a fantastic voice of course and that adds a different shade, the different textures and colours to our music. Most importantly, she and I have a musical chemistry and all the other stuff, if we had no chemistry she wouldn't have been a good fit for the band. Conversely, if she had a diminished technical capacity but still that same chemistry she still would have been a good fit.
At the end of the day it's about expression and whatever works. It just so happens that she and Nick both operate at a musical level that I will never have access to and they're very genuine. Seb and I are a little scrappy and kind of gutsy I guess. But there it is. Then there's this weird balance, a beautiful balance between those of us in the band that really can play just about anything and those of us constantly playing just above and beyond our technical capability. The energy that I've got, I'm trying to keep up, force myself to do impossible things. Gina is a little more confident and fluid with what she does and I think the balance of those things makes it interesting. Smilar to the interplay between Nick and Sebastian rhythmically. That's not to say that Seb is bad, he's an incredible drummer, it's just to say that we have these varying types of energy and fluidity that blend together in a way that to me sometimes the songs feel kind of punky but we're also playing extremely complex rhythms, dense chord voicings but we're playing them in a real scrappy kind of way. I think that's something that we've discovered in recent years that has really been great for the band that has led us to diversify the styles and types of music that we play to a huge extent. That's why this record to me from the standpoint of songwriting feels like not just a step forward, but like a giant leap.
