Latest / HEAVY Music Interviews / Set In Stone With JOHN BAIZLEY From BARONESS

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Set In Stone With JOHN BAIZLEY From BARONESS · HEAVY Music Interviews

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Yeah, hello everybody. My name is John Beasley. I am the singer
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guitar player in Baroness. We have a new record called Stone, which is
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being released worldwide on September fifteenth, followed by extensive worldwide touring for the foreseeable
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future. Very good, thanks for joining us today, John, I'm glad
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to be here as you. Sim and Barness will release your new album starting
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on September fifteen. Like that's not far away at all now, brother,
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how are you feeling about it? I'm feeling very, very very ready to
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release it. We've we've had this record in the bag for a while.
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This is this will this is potentially the first record that we will ever have
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on our label of Bracton, on my label of Breckton Hymns that I will
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have spent the adequate time preparing, preparing and marketing and promoting and distributing.
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For the past couple of records, there's there's always been a little It's either
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been rushed or I've not known what I'm doing well enough to understand timelines and
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schedules. So this time we really decided to take our time and release it
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as well as we could. But it's been excruciating. I just want,
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you know, I just want everybody to hear what hear what you and I
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are talking about when I'm talking about with all these other journals, I just
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want somebody to hear it, you know. So tell us a bit more
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about the album from a musical point of view and what you've gone forward it.
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Yeah, I mean this this was a I think I've gone from hate
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to love on this record, and over the course of the year, the
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nearly three years that it will have been in the works, we in twenty
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twenty, we had we we had just released Golden Gray, our last record,
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and we were planning We've been on tour in Europe through all through late
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twenty nineteen, coming back early twenty twenty. We were excited about putting together
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like the actual tour for that record, which was going to start with a
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trip to Australia, a trip to Japan. We were four days of away
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from flying out of the country when the lockdown occurred, and even up till
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four days before lockdown, I still thought we were going to do it.
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So it was a you know, it was a it was a it was
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a really yeah, it was really like having the rug pulled out from underneath
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you, and you know that what followed were some you know, several months
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of extreme confusion and frustration, and you know, everybody, everybody can identify
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with that. But what we decided to do, you know, late in
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twenty twenty was this mid twenty twenty, was to start writing a new record,
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and we we planned on figuring out how to how to make it.
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As the you know, as the global situation developed, what became apparent to
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us was that we were in for a long haul. So our idea,
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which which incidentally was an idea we've had for for many years and finally felt
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like the right time to do it, was to rent, uh, you
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know, an Airbnb cabin in the woods kind of thing, like you know,
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my rhythm sections in New York. I'm in Philadelphia. So we chose
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a spot that was as distant into the you know, into the wilderness or
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the bush as as we could, but that was equidistant from both Philadelphia and
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New York. So it was roughly two and a half hours up into the
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country and we found a very you know, I say cabin, but it
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was it was like a big house. It had a huge uh, you
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know, huge vaulted ceiling, tons of space, not a ton of walls,
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so it was a you know, it had it had a really great
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sound for tracking, and so we rented the place for a month. We
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took my for fifteen years, I've been craigslisting and classified and eBay buying,
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uh the studio equipment, and we built our own studio in about thirty six
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hours in a house that was not equipped to be a studio, but which
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had all the acoustic pluses that we that we wanted. And it was you
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know, it was big, and it was a good it was a good
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creative space for us. And there was no distractions. There were no businesses
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nearby. There was there was I think the nearest grocery was, you know,
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like an hour away. No bars, no businesses, nothing. I
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mean, we're just out in it. And we we dedicated ourselves for that
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month to write and record a record simultaneously, and in that in the course
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of that month that we recorded in this was in berry Ville, New York,
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And over the course of that month there were only ever four people involved.
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There were we had no assistance, we had no technicians, We had
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only ourselves and our bullshit ingenuity to get us through to get us through that
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the record, and I think because of that, we were able to dive
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into some musical territory which was really exciting and compelling for us, and uh
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something and something that I've always you know, a situation I've always wanted to
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be in a studio recording where it's just we're just always working, always having
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ideas and recording and rehearsing twelve fourteen hours a day, just really developing a
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strong musical bond. And whenever we were whenever we were nearly finished writing,
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we would record to get that sort of early sort of you know, anxious
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fucking energy into the songs where we hadn't like worked everything out. And you
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know, I think that was a We improvised a lot on the record.
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There's there's like a ton of unscripted, unknown things that we just captured on
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tape and you know, ended up turning this song. So yeah, it
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was it was a pretty exciting thing. It was followed by a year and
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a half of lyrical writer's book that I had that was intensely, intensely frustrating,
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so I had so I finished recording vocals for this record, which which
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we started in November twenty twenty. I finished the vocals for it in December
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twenty twenty two, so I guess two years. Yeah. And it was
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a challenge too. It was a challenge for me to have this recorded month
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of time and to try to, you know, two years or a year
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and a half later, try to match the spirit of that recording. And
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I think, you know, Jeana and I recorded all the guitars and vocals
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in my like dirt, my unfinished dirt floor basement, and you know,
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in my you know, various rooms in my home. Oh, and you
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release the singles last Word, Beneath the Roads and Seawan Saifasa, would you
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say, I roll, they're good, Sunday representative. What do you expect
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from the album? Yeah, yeah, definitely, I was. I thought
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it was. I don't. I don't. I hate choosing the songs that
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get pushed, you know, because by the time we're talking about that,
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I've already I've already had my experience with the record, and I think,
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you know, typically when we're before the record comes out, I think all
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of songs are exactly as good as as the rest of them. You know,
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time time always tells me where I'm there but you know, it was
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sort of it was sort of a combination of my three bandmates, Nick,
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Sebastian, and Gina choosing songs that they thought would be good representations, and
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we worked with our management. I mean, we worked with our manager at
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the Fernstein he had, he had, he had a we's kind of stuck
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to what he what he thought would be a good order to release them.
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And I think, you know, I think it was great. I had
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my I had questions about it at first, but the way that that roleout
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happened was really exciting. I think I think our first song gave people like
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a pretty familiar dose of what we do with a few new elements at it.
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In I think this and that was last word when we when when we
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released Beneath the Rows, that song's got some pretty unexpected moments in it,
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and I think I think it's it was like partially like you know, almost
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like a mission statement for the for the record too. You know, the
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way the dynamics happen, the way that you know, there's a loose versus
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tight, there's a complicated versus simple, there's a melody versus harmony versus dissonance.
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Shout versus song, you know kind of thing and versus spoken in that
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song. So I felt like, oh, well, that was a great
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thing to really a second because it gives it it's going to shock people's systems,
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uh, and and ensure that that people continue to expect us to change
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and evolve. And then I think Shine has Problem will be one of the
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strongest hooks of a chorus that we've written. So I thought that was a
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good song to release a third. Yeah, I mean it's been, it's
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it's been a fun experience. We've we have not we have not put we've
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not dedicated ourselves to the idea of like releasing the record properly with this much
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excitement. So yeah, so it's it's been. It's been pretty fun.
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Stay in your face is still excited about it. It's a beautiful thing.
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Yeah, big quiet of the saying that stone is very much baroness, just
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refocused for efficiency and rethought as a consequence of stability to that's the beautiful passage
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of words, right, But can can you elaborate a little bit more?
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And so this what do you mean? Yeah? I mean, okay,
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So I think it's important. I think it's important for our audience to understand
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it. My the way that I approach each record in order that in order
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that in order that growth and that evolution for us is U it is like
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happening in order to get give ourselves like a reason to do it, or
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in the environment in which we can we can continue to grow. All I
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do is it's a simple thing. If I look one record into the past
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and whatever our whatever the former record was, I tried to identify and define
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it's like core feature or the thing that worked best about it, or the
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most obvious sort of sonic or I just I just try to figure out what
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what the what's the defining factor for our former record. In this case,
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it was Golden Gray. Golden Gray, which was an overwhelming sonic annihilation,
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assault warfare. You know, it was let's take complicated music and layer things
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on top of it until it's just monumentally dense. So the so all I
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got to do is or that it's not. You know, we still are
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capable of being dense, but we don't have to concern ourselves with it because
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we did it last record. So with Stone it was more it was more
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the case that rather than rather than go for density and orchestration and layers and
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embellishment. It was more let's try to let's try to write music without talking
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about it too much, you know, without making up rules, or or
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let's like, like, can we write songs and not tell each other what
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chords were playing. It just feels like, you know, when when I
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say, oh, Gina, I'm playing a C sharp minor, then she
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has then her reactions going to be, Okay, I'm gonna everything that I
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do is going to be with respect to a C sharp minor chord, whether
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it's a scale or a compliment or chord or something that This is more like
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we had all these we had demoed, like thirty or forty songs, so
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we had all these little pieces of music and we'd all heard them, but
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none of us that had had played each other's songs, so we were familiar
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with the way it sounded. We came into the studio, we said,
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okay, here today, we're working on these two songs. And we work
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on two songs at a time, and it usually took a few days to
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get through the you know, just rehearsing constantly, and there was very little
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talk about what was happening. It was kind of like you just feel it
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out, you know, this is this band's this lineup of this band has
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been together for you know, with Jina for six with Nick and seb for
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ten years. We have chemistry. We were interested in directing our focus towards
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utilizing that chemistry to write music and write songs. Whereas in some cases what
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we're after is it's something a little bit different than that. You know,
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Sometimes the idea is to let's let's write a simple song and then complicated.
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This was more like, let's see what happens when we sort of each of
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the four us take our hands up to steer our individual steering wheels and just
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like role with it, you know, and let each other musically start a
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sentence so that somebody else can finish it. Or let's let's try to prop
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each other up and give each other space and see what happens when that's when
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that's the idea, and I think that the record is very much the result
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of that process, very much the result of intuition and improvisation. There's you
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know, a handful of songs or big sections of songs that we didn't write.
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We just we were just playing. And this is what happened, so
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it stays on and uh, you know, for instance, there's a song
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on the record called Choir that is one percent improvised. We had no plan
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with it whatsoever. We just knew what the key was, what the tempo
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was, and that's it, and no one knew. No one had a
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clue what everybody else was doing. It was amazing. That was my favorite
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song. When the album must get to ask you about that brilliance. It's
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so different. Yeah, it's it was, and I think we I think
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we we allowed ourselves to be that different because it's the second part. Like
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Beneath the Roads, which comes prior to that, and the Dirge which follows
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that, are part that's a trilogy. So what we did with Choir was
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we took the tempo and the key and at the very beginning, we're playing
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a little that sort of little guitar rhythm astinatos thing, and so the idea
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is, here's the tempo, here's the key. We're going to pick up
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on beat. We're going to pick up on the last beat of the last
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measure of the former song, and then we're just going to see what happens
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when we don't. Haven't we don't have a roadmap. We just you know,
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like I said, you just close your eyes, take your hands off
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the steering wheel, and let it happen. And as a result, there's
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that song like if you if you remove the idea of vocals, because I
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did, I recorded the vocals for it later, and I had to become
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really familiar with that improvisation and fit lyrics in there right, because there's a
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couple of like dynamic moments. But like you know, when you listen to
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the song, if you just listen to music, there's a couple times where
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like chords will happen, like it'll the thumb and when that when that happens,
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Gina and I are not playing the same chord. We're not even playing
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We were so unaware of what each other are doing. We're playing what would
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otherwise be garbage, but it just didn't sound bad. It sounded good.
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So, like you know, laying in laying two different chords over top of
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one another just creates a bigger chord. You know, it's it's not necessarily
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like a beautiful chord, but it's it's we we happen to get all those
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moments right, and you know, there's just like a moment in the song
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where seb just kind of like gets the drums quieter naturally, just like kind
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of walks out, and then the song kind of stops them comes back in.
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It's all it just happened like that. You know. We played I
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think we tried it three times and we kept the first one because it was
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the most like wild. The album opens with the track Embas, which is
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an acoustic and mellow passage of music before getting into the fall on the sault
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of our last words. So what was the thought process behind having that song
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start the album? Well, when when we had written, when we had
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written and recorded the majority of that record, the elect the more electrified version
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of it, you know, where there's drums and bass. As Gina and
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I were tracking those songs, we found ourselves quite frequently overdubbing and layering in
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acoustic guitars, and you know, she and I, she and I play
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acoustically all the time. It's a it's actually a very critical part of you
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know, our songwriting process. But we also like we also really enjoy and
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are very deeply influenced by a handful of pure like folk or acoustic artists,
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and we've been doing we've been doing acoustic tours and we've been doing performances like
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that for the past few years. And after we have the you know,
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the all the heavy stuff recorded, it felt like it wasn't quite the three
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dimensional picture of who we were. And you know, we had because in
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twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two, in twenty nineteen, we've done quite
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a bit of you know, we've done acoustic performances all over the place,
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and you know, our fans were all, we guy, should do an
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acoustic records, do an acoustic record, And I was like, yeah,
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I man, but I don't want to wait. We always, you know,
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we typically have one or two acoustic songs on the record, but I
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thought we we she and I in order to record those songs because we didn't
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have that song. In twenty twenty, we rented a single wide trailer again
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out in the middle of the wilderness, and She and I just lived in
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this cabin for a week with the idea of being that we're going to record
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all the vocals for the record, which we did not do. But we
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wrote. We wrote the song Bloom and when when it came to the stage
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where I was where I was like putting together an overall sequence for the record.
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It became obvious that the track Bloom was going to be the closing track
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on the record. I thought it would be really cool to bookend our album
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with two incredibly gentle versions of the same song, one of you know,
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the opening, which is a little more like menacing and uh like there's a
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little bit of anxiety and there's a little bit of hair on it, you
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know, and then and then Bloom, which is it's more reflective and is
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that it kind of felt like the beginning and an ending. So in order
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to in order to record Embers, I took one of our outtakes. I
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took just a little moment of an outtake of the Bloom session, played some
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piano, and sang a similar kind of chorus refrain in this one, but
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we just presented it a lot differently in order to kind of wrap this piece
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of music up in what I feel like, in a cinematic terms, it's
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like the opening credits and the closing credits, you know, like they're there
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too, because I mean their songs. I think, I think they're cool
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song and I think the beautiful song. But the point of them is to
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sort of set you up for when when you when you listen like from from
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me in my experience listening to it, you know, even as even as
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a songwriter, as I hear that song and I have no idea what's going
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to happen, like it it really it really lays the blanket of like,
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uh, sort of it's kind of disturbing. It's a little it's a little
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teeny bit menacing, but it's also just it's kind of soft. And then
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I thought, well, it's gonna be it's gonna sound like a fucking avalanche
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when the next track comes in starts on a drum fill, because initially we're
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gonna we're gonna potentially start the record with last Word, which is still but
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you know, I thought it'd be cool. All of our songs start with
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guitars, so it was like, oh, maybe this will be different because
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we'll start with a big drum fill. But the impact was cool, it
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just wasn't big enough. And and then when we when we laid embers in
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front of it in terms of sequencing and just kind of let the trails of
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that song begin begin last Word, it was like, oh, yeah,
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yeah, that's what's up, you know, it's it's like a real it's
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a real cool contrast. And you've openly said made that one of your goals
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with every album is not to repeat yourself musically. Look, is that something
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that's easy said than done. Maybe maybe not. I mean it's been,
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it's been, it's always been the goal, So it's always we've always done
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it. It's yeah, it's it's less difficult than it sounds to always to
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never repeat yourself. But the I think the difficult thing is that in doing
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so, you can't lose you can't lose touch with your roots, and you
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can't lose touch with those fundamental, fundamental elements of your sound. So we
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have to the rationale that we have to apply to a song when we've written
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it is doesn't sound like us? The answer has always been yes, you
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know, And because I think we edit out the bad ship really early on
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in the process. It's as soon as a bad idea enters a song,
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but somewhat some one of us just cuts it out because it's clearly not working.
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I mean, it's it's almost an unspoken thing at this point. I
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think that's you know, I think that's why it seems easy to continue to
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I mean, I know we're somewhat repetitive. Every band is. We have
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a sound. You know, you got to repeat your sound. But I
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think you understand what I mean when I mean not repet I don't want to.
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It's it kind of me out when two of our songs sound too similar,
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where like we couldn't play them one after another because they're they've got the
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same tempo or the same kind of swagger. But you know, as as
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simple as it feels, it's the result of decades of playing. So maybe
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it's maybe it's not easy. Maybe it just takes years, years and years
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to develop. Like I don't think. I don't think that we could write
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and record all of our albums in a two year period. You know,
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they all take a long time to We have to we have to live with
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one for a long time before we get to the next one. So yeah,
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easy with respect to like the moment when it's happening, but difficult in
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that we've had to go through a whole lot to get there. Now,
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formulate a go, mate, I've started up three news Spotify playlists for heavy
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based on songs from artists that we speak to you, So you're using your
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own songs, give me a song for a playlist to get the party started,
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a playlist to save your marriage, and a playlistic could potentially end your
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marriage. Oh no, okay, the party started. His last words,
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definitely, it's got a gigantic, ridiculous solo with it that's full on.
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That's that's the party. And you can and the last two and a half
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minutes of that song you can. You can dance too. Yeah, but
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you could. I don't. Just just because you won't doesn't mean you couldn't.
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That the one, the one to end my marriage. There was one
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that my wife thought was she was She was like, yeah, if you're
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not careful, people are gonna think this is about like a breaking up or
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so which one was it? Uh? Anyway, I don't know which one
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that is, but uh, I think, well, which one ends it?
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I think the one? I think the one. I think it's the
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same for both actually, because I think the song that sounds the most bleak
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and is the most sort of difficult to wrap your head around and sounds the
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most pained is choir. You know, it's it's the lyrical content and that
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is I think it seems like it's very apocalyptic it feels like it has the
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sense of something that's ended, something very painful. It's ended, and that's,
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you know, in some ways what the song is about. But but
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in a more literal way, that song is actually like just my love song
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on the record. It's my out and out. It's a it's yeah,
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yeah, it's just it just doesn't have the tone of love. It has
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the feeling and the the devil very the money. Yeah, it's it's got
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kind of a demonic thing. But I think the the reason I say it's
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a love song is it's because it's two the sometimes terrifying power of love,
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you know, the way that the different way that love manifests itself. It
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can sometimes feel like a beast. It can sometimes feel like the you know,
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like like I say, to burn beneath your son, because I feel
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like that love to me is my sunlight. But as anybody, as anybody
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who's been in the sunlight too long understands it, it can also burn you.
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So that you know it's it's it's more like, hey, love is
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complex, and so my love song for you is going to be complicated.
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So yeah, I think I think I got to say that you're inviting him.
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Now, I'm just good at talking, man, I'm an anxious talker.
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What we missed the one to save your marriage? Yeah, to save
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it? Yeah? Uh, probably the song Magnolia. You know, I
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think it's the song is a it's a bit sad, but I I think,
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well, I know it was the one of my wife liked the most
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because I think she I think in that song she sort of heard me the
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most genuinely, and I feel that I think that I think that song,
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while Magnolia is not the most fresh sounding song for us, it has a
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lot of like classic baroness h music to it, you know, the tempos
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and the rhythms and the sort of arrangement of it. It's like very I
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mean, it's a weird song. It's it's also like sevenns long, but
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it's sort of just like it's a great genuine type of song that we like
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to put on all of our records where it's it's it's sort of a ballad,
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but it's not a gentle ballad. It's not an easy ballad. It's
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you know, it swings really hard and it has a lot of it has
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a lot of emotion in it, and I think that my my wife who
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I am married to, you know who I do have the good fortune of
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being married to. She hears something there that speaks to her, so I
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can say with conviction that's probably the one to say. All right, John
27:49
Well, absolutely pleasure spake me today, brother Staring. He's ad on September
27:52
fifty eighth, and I advanced for the fact that it's a fucking good album.
27:56
Brightly well done. Thank you. I really appreciate h