Baroness Already Have 30 Songs Written for Next Album
In advance of the band’s livestream concert last week, at which they performed their most recent album, Gold & Grey, in full, Baroness frontman John Baizley spoke to The MetalSucks Quarantinecast about all the anxieties, difficulties, safety precautions and tremendous planning efforts that went into the production of the event, and he also told us about the new material the band has been working on over the past few months.
When we asked John how he’d been spending his time while on quarantine, he answered:
“We started doing Zoom meetings every Monday night, and mostly that’s because we’ve been writing since March or April. We’re talking about new stuff we’re doing, which is all file sharing, all trading elements of songs, and [we’re] hoping when we get together that they congeal.”
“It seems really obvious to us that if we had all our eggs in the tour basket then we’d just remove them from that basket and put them into producing and creating new music. So at this moment I think we’ve written just under 30 songs, we have just under 30 songs started, and well over three hours worth of music to go through and refine and work on as a band now that we’ve individually all kinda done our things with it. It’s been really surprising and exciting.
“I don’t know if its a well-kept secret, but we work slow! We’re glacial. Everybody I’ve worked with in the past knows how long it takes for us to get everything together ’cause we do it in this ridiculously complex, layered and embellished way. It takes time. So when all we had was time, initially I was afraid it was just going to be this sort of vicious cycle of having too much time, not knowing what to do with it and making the time it takes us to write twice as long, three times as long. But in fact we put some rules on it and made a routine out of it.
“We’re writing music, better music, faster than we ever have in the past, so that’s been encouraging. At the same time, its also good to feel some encouragement about what we’re doing and to feel inspired. So [we’re] really putting our noses to the grindstone this year and keeping a low profile and just dedicating ourselves to writing something new and something great and something that feels genuine and unforced. The fact that we’ve gotten so far into that process feels really great to me. I don’t know how viable it is to just write music, record music and release music [without touring], but there’s definitely no other way to start whatever it’s going to be like for musicians and artists in the future. It seems like a very safe bet to say if we have content, if we have new music, if we’re constantly in the cycle of writing and we take some of the energy that we [usually] spend on tour — which is a ton of it, it was supposed to be eight months this year — if we just take that energy and put it towards music production and creating new things, that’s the only place we can start from. Certainly doesn’t make sense to try to make up for lost tour time any other way.
“It’s strange how narrow the focus gets and how that feels like it’s going to be a limitation and then, in fact, for Baroness, it just put us on a track thats been great for us. Otherwise I think we would have four tours under our belt since the pandemic started, all over the place: Japan, Australia, Europe, another U.S. tour. So those things have already come and gone, but in the interim we have made so much new stuff that the prospect of the future is exciting for us because we’ve made it this far, we haven’t had to shutter the HQ, we haven’t had to call it quits yet.”
You can listen to our full chat with John below or right here.
