“When I started writing the song ‘Magnolia,’ the tree in my front yard was blooming,” he says via phone from a tour stop in Santa Ana, CA. Baroness performs on Friday, Nov. 24, at the Agora Theatre. “Nearly a year later, when the tree was blooming again, we recorded the guitars for that song. And then, a year beyond that is when we were rolling out the album. [The tree’s life cycle] ties into the amount of time it took to make the record.”
At the start of the recording process with only a vague idea of what songs the band would include on the album, the group retreated to the border town of Barryville, NY and holed up in a vacation rental that became an impromptu recording space. Its vaulted ceilings, hardwood floors and brick/glass walls perfectly suited the band’s expansive sound.
After the group finished tracking drums, guitars, and bass in Barryville, it took everything back to Baizley’s basement studio to record vocals before handing the album to Joe Barresi (Kyuss, Tool) and Bob Ludwig (Led Zeppelin, Nirvana), who handled mixing and mastering respectively.
“For some bands, it’s fine to have a clear goal and sound and intent,” says Baizley. “For us, the more rewarding experience tends to be that we have a very loose idea of where the songs will go. I think that’s what we do. That’s kind of the gold standard. We didn’t really try to write anything in particular. What you hear is what we did write.”
The difference this time around is that the band lineup didn’t change after the recording of its last studio album, 2019’s Gold & Grey, and Baizley says the band’s chemistry contributed to recording an incredibly cohesive album.
“Stone is, from my perspective, the sound of Baroness writing an entire record based on our interpersonal bandmate chemistry,” he says. “It’s something I always wanted to do but for better or worse has not been the reality. There has always been the absence of an old member or addition of a new member. In fairness, even though I’ve been the only constant for 20 years, we all contribute to the songwriting. It’s not the John Baizley Show. The power of the music intensifies the more we cooperate. Stone is the most cooperative and intuitive and reactive record we’ve made. We spent very little time in between takes talking about what we were doing. The music itself was intuitively felt and directed using the chemistry that’s accrued from hundreds of shows.”
The band’s DIY attitude extends to the making of the music videos that accompany the release. Though Nick Jost is credited as the director of the music video for “Last Word,” Baroness was heavily involved in the making of the video. The stop-motion animation perfectly suits the intense song’s stuttering guitars and soaring vocals.
“We edited and did the filming,” says Baizley when asked about the video. “We feel that we are at a stage where we advocate for ourselves. Even if it potentially sacrifices some fidelity, the loss in hi-fi won’t be noticeable when contrasted against the improvement we’re making. The process is rewarding. It’s different from having just been a composer or performer. When you’ve been the engineer and producer, you stand behind it in a different way that I think offers a greater sense of accomplishment to the artist.”
The music video for “Beneath the Rose,” a song that commences with sporadic drum fills and menacing guitars, is equally compelling.
“With each one of the music videos, we were referencing cinema and everything from Conan the Barbarian and Dino De Laurentiis movies and classic horror,” says Baizley. “‘Beneath the Rose’ is a nod to Children of the Corn. If you watch the beginning, which is about 45 seconds, it’s as close as Nick [Jost] could make as a shot-by-shot remake of Children of the Corn. The song is angular lyrically, and the inspiration for some of the initial lyrics come from the George Eliot poem, ‘The Choir Invisible,’ which is mentioned in the first lines of the song. The rest of the song becomes a stream-of-consciousness thing that I was going through.”
As much as the videos provide appropriate visuals for the band’s music, Baizley says the current tour is a “lean and mean” with minimal production.
“All of these songs came into being accidentally or intuitively,” he says. “I believe that’s what this record is about for us. As a result, the live show is a little more roots-y and sweatier and attached to reality. We don’t operate in a fantastic world but one that is super-real. Given the emotional thrust and weight, when we put too much into production, it takes away from the impact of the music. I wish bigger productions came more naturally to us, but it just feels like it would be disingenuous.”
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This article appears in Nov 8-21, 2023.
