Baroness is an interesting band that does things the exact way they mean to. From going on tour where the setlist is determined by the fans and lasts up to 3 hours, to creating an album from the ground up inside a secluded house in the middle of nowhere. Baroness has always sounded just like Baroness and that’s a fascinating thought. There are plenty of riffs, harmonies and textures to occupy the most diverse of listens. And that’s exactly what John and I talked about. He had this to say about the capturing of the audio and trying to harness it’s raw potential.
‘This is what we as mature musicians have become very interested in…which is can we capture the energy that mutual energy that sort of unfinished energy, but can we do that in a convincing way with sophisticated material that has layers and dimensions and depth…We started off like a sculptor, like Rodin, you have basic structures and basic ideas in your head and you’re just chiseling away all the excess and the fat until you’ve got something solid and stable that has life and has meaning and purpose… and then on end of that we added vocals.’
I had to ask a weird question because I used to live in the Northwoods of Minnesota and I remember the nature would have an impact on how I would feel or what I would want to do, and I compared that to now living in the Fox Cities where there is significantly less nature and thusly has impacted the way I think of things. I had to know if leaving the big cities of Philadelphia and New York and living in a cabin in the woods had any impact on the recording, which unsurprisingly it did but not in the way I had thought.
‘Every environmental aspect of any recording environment has an effect of the recorded output. The isolation gave us freedom, the physical environment gave us an atmosphere to work in and around that we didn’t have to facilitate a natural sounding environment in a controlled studio environment…When you listen to a song like Magnolia the beginning two minutes of that song there’s an acoustic guitar…that Gina plays and you’ll hear environmental sounds, you’ll hear the trees swaying you’ll hear the wind you’ll hear birds chirping and dogs barking across the course of the record, that’s in the guitar track…We were very excited anytime something environmental became something a part of the sonic tapestry of the album…To me not only does it exhibit physical characteristics of the environment that we created this in but to me it also has a kind of atmospheres of the season it was recorded. There are moments…that feel somewhat cold…when Gina recorded that I think it was like 26 degrees, so in her playing you can hear the fact that if she has to do this take multiple times her fingers are going to start seizing up so it really has this kind of immeadiacy that’s entirely due to physical temperature…things like that, they may not be outward, might not hit you over the head as a cold song or a warm song or and indoor or outdoor song, those things to me a very much are very obvious with a deeper listening…’
Diving deeper into the way this album was recorded unlocked a little extra headiness that went into the creation of Stone and what John and the rest of the band, as well as their fans, believe to be the crux of Baroness.
We saw… this as an opportunity to do it ourselves to really, really let that aspect of recording become audible, and become a distinct part of the music…Some people will say…it’s organic…or southern or whatever we have all these descriptors that are somewhat inadequate in describing…I believe this big part of our relatability…has to do with this organic quality, this pulse, this heartbeat, this rhythm and this organic attitude that emotional openness and honesty that I think that the listener responds to that and I think whole scheme…of rock music there’s hallmarks of production that tells the listener something…there’s something special about the sound of certain records that really becomes as important to the listener as the record itself…’
This interview might be the most in depth chat I have had with an artist about making the sound of a record and how all of that impacts the meaning. Check it out below.
