John P: You guys are a tough interview. I looked online - you don`t like answering questions.
John B: [laughs] I don`t.
John P: So I`m not gonna ask you about the band name.
John B: Yeah
John P: I`m not gonna ask you about the album names.
John B: There`s not much to ask about them [laughs].
John P: And I`m not gonna ask you about your influences. I am, however, gonna ask you how it feels to play a big venue in Massachusetts as opposed to the Elks Lodge or the Museum of Fine Arts.
John B: That... It feels nice.
John P: The museum show was fucking awesome. Really cool to see.
John B: For a space like that, that was about everything you could ask for. I used to live in Providence, from `97 to 2000. I`ve been up here a few times and I`ve seen a whole range of bands. It`s kinda cool.
John P: What were you doing in Providence?
John B: I was going to art school there for a couple of years.
John P: Which explains why you get to do the art. Speaking of which, is it tough juggling that and the band?
John B: It`s very tough. Right now I`ve got basically a portable studio in the van with me. I`ve got some pretty tough deadlines.
John P: Who are you working on?
John B: Right now I`m working for Cursed, the hardcore band from Canada.
John P: Those guys are awesome.
John B: Amazing. One of the first bands we every toured with. Great friends of ours.
John P: They haven`t put anything new out since-
John B: Blackout at Dawn [actually Blackout at Sunrise - Ed]. It`s like an EP. They put out One, Two...
John P: Okay, I have Two. That`s the only one I`ve heard.
John B: I`m also working on Deadbird`s new record for At a Loss.
John P: Finally. That thing`s been in the can since Axl Rose first started Chinese Democracy. But back to you guys and recording. The second EP was all live except for vocals.
John B: Yup. One take.
John P: How long did you have to practice to get it sounding so well?
John B: Actually, the reason that we did it was per a suggestion from Phil Cope, our producer. He`s seen us live and toured with us enough times to know that our sequencing live was the same as our sequencing on record. When we play live there`s no breaks, no in-between song banter, no talking, no nothing. So he said , “Let`s use the way that you tie songs together on stage and see if we can translate that to a recording environment.” For Baroness the thrust has been to match a live atmosphere, that power, to try to kind of harness that in the studio. And it was a nightmare.
I`ll say this. We tracked for 45 minutes. Total. Our initial performance of the second EP was flawless until about 19 minutes out of 21, and then we fucked up. At that point, there was 100% nervous breakdown, hand shaking, white knuckles. And I think Phil came in and saw that and he was thinking in his head, “This may end up taking all night to do this. This may be the worse idea ever.” But he cracked the whip and that second take is one continuous recording. There`s flaws all over it. That`s how we do it live, so that`s how we did it.
John P: How much did that translate to Red Album?
John B: Well, when faced with ten songs of varying lengths and depths, it would`ve been total folly to try to do that again. There`s no way. We didn`t have it physically or mentally for that much material. What we did is we took the same approach where we were trying to get something really live sounding. Whether or not that`s the final result, that`s the mindset we were in when we were there. Musically we were playing off each other, sort of letting things happen. We tried to apply a little bit of that tactic to the recording.
John P: Did you know in advance that the material seemed to be not as immediately heavy as the previous stuff? It kind of seemed like the second song on the Unpersons split, you guys turned a corner.
John B: Honestly, that`s a perspective issue that I think you and a lot of people share. But if you look at numbers and the timeline, we recorded that two and a half years before Red Album, with a different guitar player.
John P: Whom I also not supposed to ask about...
John B: [laughs]. No, you can totally ask about him. Tim`s a great friend of ours. There`s nothing weird there. When we were in the studio for that, he had been out of the band for two weeks. He came in to sort of fulfill his obligations to us and out of friendship and everything like that. When Brian joined the band – actually, I think Brian was in the band while we were recording that – we just set up on the road and found out his method. I`ve said this before, but the way we write is really intuitively based. It`s a reaction to the room. Sort of molding that and shaping that into songs. So no matter what, the record was guaranteed to sound different, because we were incorporating a whole 25% freshness and his personality.
John P: How tough was it putting together the sequencing for a ten song album?
John B: We spent a long time writing it and we wrote it more or less in the order that it`s recorded. Even so far as the tenth song was unwritten.
John P: “Ol` Apalachia”?
John B: No, “Grad.” We wrote that song in Europe, on the road. We started with a riff and we closed with it every night for two months and at the end we had a song that grew from literally a handful of notes. The sequencing of ten tracks, trying to streamline it and keep it under 50 minutes.
John P: For vinyl?
John B: Just for the audience. We`ve been long-winded in the past. Writing a long song for us came with less effort than writing a short one, so we took the advice of some of our influences. And that actually was the challenge for the record, that was the difficult part. That was what kept it interesting for us, distilling a 15 minute song to five and a half minutes.
John P: Is Red Album coming out on vinyl?
John B: It`s being pressed right now. Have you heard about it yet?
John P: No, I haven`t.
John B: Hyperrealist is putting it out. It`s a double 12”. There`s 10” of music on each side, and each border is etched, unique for A, B, C, and D. Gatefold package. However many colors of red vinyl they have.
John P: Sweet. What was the inspiration for the cover art for Red Album?
John B: I had been totally happy with all of the results of all of the artwork we had done in the past, but it was entirely my impetus and my own personal experiences. With this album, which we invested far more of ourselves than we had previously, I asked everybody to come up with something as an icon or a visual metaphor that meant something difficult and personal through the writing process of the album so I could incorporate something from each member into the package. Which I`m sure you can understand, the visual stuff is equally important to me. They kind of go hand in hand. Honestly, some of the visual stuff they brought to the table – I asked them to make it difficult, something that was personal and to not explain it to me. Even myself I don`t understand the individual aspects, but we back it.
John P: Now the Mastodon comparison...
John B: I have my own personal feelings about it.
John P: Which would be?
John B: That`s why they`re personal and they`re mine. [Laughs.] I`m not pretentious. I`m aware of the fact that people need comparisons. I do it myself with bands I`m fond of. I can see where everybody`s coming from. I`m not turning a blind eye to that kind of thing. Do I agree with it 100% of the time? No, but people need reference points in order to gain entry to things that are new to them. If that`s what it takes, the references we get put us in good company. Do I want that stigma to follow us? Do I want that stigma attached to those bands that we`re aligned with? No.
[Harvey Milk starts playing over the PA]
John P: Okay, since the Harvey Milk`s getting louder and louder, we`re going to wrap this up.
John B: One of my favorites.
John P: They`re such an awesome band. With file sharing, mp3s, the future of CDs, how`s that affect an artist, someone who tours, making their scratch selling merch? I mean, you can sell as many t-shirts as you can, but you put a lot of effort and energy into it all.
John B: It`s bumming a lot of people out. Across the board, people are bummed and people are unhappy. I don`t know. It`s a great load on people`s shoulders. I`m not the only one. Everybody out there is sweating a little bit, except those with people with fancy computers and hard drives.
John P: Any way you`d like to see it go?
John B: The way I`d like to see it go is totally unrealistic so it`s not even worth mentioning. There`s an upside to it, and that is that there`s kids all over the world who have access to our music from the touch of a button. It`s a struggle, but there`s something. I`m an artist – I make packages for a living. I`d say probably 50 – 75% of the people that have anything I`ve done, they don`t have the artwork. It`s sad. But there`s nothing like having a piece of vinyl. You can`t download that feeling.
