Baroness (John Dyer Baizley) YouTube Interview 2017
By christina · On January 13, 2017John Dyer Baizley of Baroness chats to Christina Rowatt about the Purple record, pedestal guitar players like “open heart” John Frusciante, listening to a new album every day, his artwork, his origins, Grammy Awards and Bad Brains in the Hall of Fame, reference points with no connectivity like DJ Shadow’s The Private Press, discovering the joy of playing through adversity, bummer music vs. disco, melody and musicals, and more. Filmed backstage at The Metro in Sydney, Australia. Watch above, or watch on YouTube. Listen to the extended podcast version below, or subscribe via iTunes here.
John Dyer Baizley on the Purple record:
Christina: Did you want to make it cinematic?
John: I want to make all of our records cinematic. For a very long time I didn’t really understand the idea of a good time record. It wasn’t something that registered with me. I like bummer music. Music that has very little happiness and positivity to it.
Christina: It can feel false.
John: It can, but there’s certainly people who love disco … I’ve spread my wings a lot over the course of my life and I understand that music now and I’m a bit more accepting and I can vibe out on it. At the core I always preferred down music, because I think that … if I’m going to be a little philosophical, I think that the language of music is most easily put out there and understood by a mass of people when it deals with difficult subjects … sorrow, pain, frustration, angst. Turmoil. Because everyone knows that.
Watch: Baroness (John Baizley) Interview on YouTube
Christina: I think that’s what’s great about this album. I think there’s this joyous violence about it. It’s like being at the end of the world. Everything’s f**ked and everyone’s dead, but we’re on this pirate ship and it’s sick … we’re going to start a new frontier.
John: The fortunate thing for me, because my tendency is just to go straight up depressing (because that’s where music comes from for me), I don’t have a band full of people who feel that way. The rest of the group, especially when we were writing this record, didn’t want to get stuck in this depressive, very melancholic place … they wanted to keep it high energy, because we’ve always been a very high energy band.
So I think that the more celebratory the music sounded, the more triumphant the music was, and the rhythms were, that it became a very interesting and open place for me to just be very straightforward with some of the things that I was going through, none of which were particularly pleasant.
I never have and I probably never will have the luxury of trying to step into somebody else’s shoes and write a song about a character who’s going through something. Unfortunately, things have just been happening to me and probably everyone else. It seemed like an interesting juxtaposition. If the music is uptempo, and its got all this triumph and celebration, then I can get very direct and focused on the things I wanted to talk about and couldn’t help but talk about. To me its very honest, the music is very pure and its fun in a way that it can be fun to tell the truth. The hard truth.
Watch: Baroness (John Baizley) Interview on YouTube
Christina: I kind of think when you talk to people who have created a character or a concept album, there’s something a bit removed about that. There’s something a bit almost egotistical in some ways, and almost stepping outside the quantum field.
John: Anyone who willingly steps up onto a stage and enjoys it, it takes a healthy ego. But I think the interesting thing is that there is a way to do that where you want to be onstage. You believe in yourself that you have a message to transmit to an audience that is worth listening to.
Christina: Then you’re a conduit more than an ego. You’re almost like a channel.
John: The ego is still there. There’s a line where some people think their message is more important than other messages. Whereas I tend to think that if you have a genuine message, if you’re speaking honestly, and your songs are good, people will find you.
When we were punks or when we were young, or when there wasn’t a whole lot at stake – we did it for the love of the game. Like purely. Its about the infinite stream and history of music that we jump into and become a part of, for just a short part of time.
A very big moment for me that probably was catalysed by the accident, and everything that I went through, was that I learned in the moments where I thought potentially I will never be able to play music again. I may never be able to use my limbs in a realistic way. In those moments, it became obvious to me that I really enjoy being on a stage and having that kind of communication … also, I can say I like performing, and its not in a purely entertaining way. I’m not trying to entertain people. I’m doing what I love doing. I’m doing what I would do otherwise … I’m just lucky, there are people who enjoy what we do.
John Dyer Baizley on his favourite modern guitarists:
John: My guitar idols are pretty loose players. I don’t know that I have a favourite. In modern guitar players, I think John Frusciante is incredible, I think Johnny Greenwood (Radiohead) is great … Frusciante is just an open heart. There are videos that exist online, when the Chili Peppers were touring and he was in the band, they would give him a song every night, and they’d stop playing. We were watching this [and going], “he is the magic.” He is a magical player. You can try and try and try but you can’t be that.
John Frusciante – “How Deep is Your Love“
Christina: Blood Sugar Sex Magick is still one of the greatest albums ever.
John: Especially if you isolate what he does on it … if you listen to his backups they like make the record. When I was young I didn’t really understand how hard it was to be that strong of a back up singer. But the back up vocals in “Breaking The Girl” and in “Under The Bridge” … I thought they were women for a while.
Christina: You guys do really interesting harmonies.
I’ve always been really big on melody and harmonies. I’m not really sure why, I’m not a trained player, I’ve just been doing it for a long, long time. We were talking about this recently. Because there are some very particular things that I tend to do … I think its because my mother, when I was young, took me to see so many musicals. In truth, this was what my mum was listening to. I absorbed it in a way that wasn’t conscious. I wasn’t making a distinction between what was good or bad music, it was just what I was listening to. So I didn’t really realised but this kind of Baroque grandiose melody/harmony thing … I don’t know if it’s a good thing I know this now. But it is a thing.