Baroness: The Rehabilitating Feeling Of Airing Grievances With Yourself In Public

Pride and humility aren’t often bedmates, but for Baroness ringmaster, John Dyer Baizley, he's unexpected comfortable sandwiched between them. The fact that the singer and rhythm guitarist begins a conversation about Gold & Grey, the US sludge-metal outfit’s fifth studio album, by saying, “It’s a huge accomplishment [but] that shouldn’t matter, you don’t need to know it’s a huge accomplishment for me, you don’t need to know how much I put into it,” speaks volumes.

And indeed, so does the album. The follow-up to 2015’s Purple, this release was marked by two significant changes – a different recording process, and the debut of guitarist Gina Gleason on a Baroness album. Baroness dug deep, challenging themselves, and the end result, though not necessarily one that had any preconceptions about it, is one Baizley has said harboured many firsts. 

You can hear the effort in the music, you can hear the pride of accomplishment in the tone of his voice – Baizley has said that with each album he’s always tried to challenge himself, and to be challenged as a band, and with Gold & Grey, Baroness may have just achieved that. 

“Every time we record a record it’s supposed to be better than the last,” Baizley says frankly. “It’s not within my power to create an even qualitative step forward with each record. It’s up to the whim and mercy of all those crazy indefinable variables that come together to make a record.

“But this record ended up feeling like a big step for us because it felt confusing, chaotic.” 

"This record ended up feeling like a big step for us because it felt confusing, chaotic.”

When Baizley says the power of creation wasn’t in his hands for Gold & Grey, he really means it. Having no conception or conscious thought about what they were creating, Baroness were a little highly strung, and largely unsure in what they were making. “I couldn’t see the wood for the trees, everybody else could see different aspects of what we were doing and all had our own vantage point,” says Baizley. “But because there was this weird anxiety, it kept driving us forward, harder and faster in such a way that when it was all said and done, it was truly a surprise what we had done.”

The depth of the surprise, Baizley says, was an indicator to him that Baroness had accomplished what they had always set out to. “We want to outdo ourselves, we want to push forward,” says Baizley. “You can’t have everything line up for everyone all the time. Sometimes writing and recording is like damage control, keep the least people the least frustrated, or the most people the most happy, but very infrequently do you have [everyone] 100% satisfied with everything – this is the closest we’ve ever gotten to that.

“We did it in a way that was quite serious, and I’m positive we could never replicate the same record. We couldn’t do this twice, it’s riveting, crazy and mysterious.”

Interesting that Baizley should use words like ‘anxiety’ and ‘surprise' to describe the Gold & Grey journey, because of the compelling honesty that courses through the album. With such a truth being laid bare, it’s only natural to assume Baizley would be nervous ahead of its release. “I don’t think I was nervous until you said that!” he laughs, teasing. “The idea that as an artist working in a genuine medium and writing about my personal reality, engaging with that and that alone, it’s not unfamiliar to me.

“I’ve been working toward a greater emotional clarity, a great inner illumination for a long time – I don’t know, it does bother me on occasion that there are people out there who’ve had an intimate experience with our music, and that that may give the impression that we all know each other, when in fact, we don’t.

“I think part of the beauty of music and the music we play, the songs come from a very difficult, but genuine, place for me. And yeah, it terrifies me that I might have to confront that publicly, live on stage, say, but I’ve found there’s something rehabilitating about airing your grievances with yourself in an artistic way, that cannot just help me, but maybe help someone else.”