John Dyer Baizley of Baroness on creating 'Stone' album, artwork and glockenspiel

For a band that’s been around for 20 years, Baroness is finally experiencing some lineup stability.

Their latest release “Stone,” which came out in September, is the first time in the metal band’s history that the same four members created a second album together. That chemistry allowed the band to evolve, relying more on instinct than over-analysis, according to singer/guitarist John Dyer Baizley.

Baroness hope to show off that growth on their Sweet Oblivion tour, which hits the area Nov. 25 at the Roxian Theatre in McKees Rocks, with Soul Glo and Spotlights opening.

Baizley, also an accomplished artist, was born at Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh and lived in Sewickley until his family moved when he was 2 years old.

In a wide-ranging interview from Seattle, Baizley touched on how the band created “Stone,” deeper experiences in music, needing multiple listens to understand an album, creating the actual cover artwork … and the band’s use of glockenspiel.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Was there anything in particular that you were trying to achieve with (the new album)?

No, I mean you’ve just got to keep in mind we’ve been a band for a really long time. So I think it’s important to us when we’re putting out a new record that we don’t, it’s almost like we try not to put out a new record as a band that’s got five or six records behind their belt. Our idea or our goal — it’s kind of an unsaid goal — but it’s to try to move through this industry as musicians in this world as creative, artistic people but never to lose the sort of joyous excitement that we had when we were young artists and musicians, to try to hold on to some element of that in a constructive and creative way whereby our evolution, progression, adaptation over the years doesn’t forsake that special spark that we had in the early days.

So, in essence, as we were writing “Stone,” we were simply trying to maintain that level of enthusiasm but to deal with the parameters and realities and being an independent in 2023 as opposed to 2003. And where lineup’s change, I think the important thing for the listener, for the dedicated listener like our fans, to understand is that this is the first time we’ve ever made a record with a serial lineup.

The way that we, as a four-piece, communicate with one another through our instruments is the thing that most definitely evolves, that most definitely progresses and adapts to new time periods and as a result of different experiences.

So what I think we really used to the fullest extent that we were capable of with “Stone” was the sort of unspoken language of music that we used to write and create this record, which was, again, it wasn’t as much about explaining to one another what was happening in the music or what we intended with the music. There wasn’t a whole lot of intention-speak. There wasn’t a whole lot of theoretic-speak. So what we found was an interesting and very exciting tactic to use was just to jam a lot, just to play the idea of the song for 10, 12 hours, two days, whatever, just rehearse it, rehearse it, rehearse it. And as soon as the piece of music or the composition begins to take form, as soon as the parts begin to lock themselves in, it’s all a feeling thing that you have to pay attention to, before we get to the point where we’re stressing super details and before we’re getting too granular, we would just press record.

And in that way, we’d have original compositions that as we were recording them still had a little bit of liveliness and a little bit of anxiety and a fun sense of anticipation because we hadn’t worked out all the drum fills and all the notes and the guitars and everything like that.

So there’s still, even in the most organized parts of the songs, there’s still a little bit of like loose improvisation happening and then there’s some of the songs which are pure improvisations. So that’s the thing that is really most unique and distinct about this record from my standpoint.

That comfort level of you guys have been together for years now sort of helps to create this sound, right?

Right, and I find that the most sincere and earnest presentation of music tends to come with the least amount of conceptual resistance or analytical overthought, which is something Baroness is very susceptible to both of those things. We’re very critical thinkers and we over-intellectualize what we’re doing. And I think in so far as sometimes that the concepts of music that we’re tangling with can and have at points in our career become more important than the song itself.

I believe that with this record, we’re very song-focused. And the way that we made decisions, each one of them had to feel musically like a song. And it had to feel like narratively that there was a song in there, even though, vocally, I’m more poetic than prosaic, or I speak a little bit more in figurative language and metaphor than anything else.

So what I mean is that the music itself creates a kind of narrative arc over the course of one song, over the course of several songs, but certainly over the course of the record. And we just had to feel that out.

It’s more like when you reach a certain level of maturity as a musician, I think technically and musically you’re not going to go a great further distance. What you’re then doing is, you’re relying on your instincts, and the cool thing about instinctual playing and writing is that it’s an incredible thing to be a single singular entity doing it, but when you’ve got four people acting on instinct, that kind of communication, it feels very direct. It’s an exciting workspace environment.

I think that the music that comes out of that has got a sort of a different dimension or power to it than it would had we done everything more verbally, if we’d dictated a little bit more, if we had figured out a little bit more.

When you’re writing like this, are you aiming for the album to go several layers deep with the lyrics, the music, the whole overall story of the album?

Not consciously, no. There’s a whole layer of trust in music making that I think is really important to be aware of in so far as sometimes the trust equates to a concept like even simply saying to you an answer to that question, I don’t worry about those layers. I trust that we will understand when the music has reached this critical point.

People ask you, “How do you know when a song is done?” And typically the closest thing I can do to answer that is to say that it feels done to me when adding one extra thing is going to take away from the overall picture of the music and similarly simultaneously when removing one aspect of that music then blurs the picture. There’s just like a perfect focal point for every song that we write where that balance of normalism and embellishment work together with that balance of feeling and atmosphere and attitude and technique and everything sort of dovetails into one central locus point, and that’s when the song’s good.

And it’s not about a melody; it’s not about a lyric; it’s not about a drum filler (or) guitar solo. It’s about the way that we naturally organize all of these musical tools of generating sound and energy to a point where the music can have an effect on another person, on the audience. And that nature of that effect in this sort of alchemy, this sort of like pseudoscience of music, there are predictable things we can do in music to generate predictable results.

But when you try to predict too much … when one writes music that has too predictable an outcome, then all of a sudden that music is held to a very strange standard. If the outcome you predict doesn’t occur, then it’s a failure. If it does, then it’s a success. And I think that sort of binary up, down, left, right, wrong, right, sort of thinking in music, it can generate more problems than it can solutions.

So what we try to do is, it’s like a classic artist answer, we let the music come through us and you trust that it’s going to do something, you use all the tools that you’ve got in your kit, but at the end of the day the music has to move you too.

So, again, there’s a narrative, but the details of the narrative aren’t important to me. It’s important that you, the listener, have the opportunity to go that distance. It’s not, it’s loud music, have fun with it. But I take it really seriously. So what I’m looking for when I listen to other artists is I’m looking for that deeper experience.

I’m desperate for it, because when I was 12 and I heard (Nirvana’s) “Nevermind” for the first time, my mind was blown. I had never heard music speak directly to me before. And then when (Radiohead’s) “Kid A” or “OK Computer” came out, I was just like, oh my god, the experience of listening to this is transcendent or “Wish You Were Here” by (Pink) Floyd or whatever. Everybody’s got their records, the Beethoven piano sonatas for me, like it’s just like the ultimate exercise in music and technique and brilliance, but also in feeling and atmosphere.

And it’s like music can ask you all these questions that you then have to sit there and ask. That’s the experience that we’re sort of concerned with, but there is no formula by which you can distill that process. You just have to, as a band, what we do is we’re trying to find, we’re trying to discover new things, we’re trying to invent, which is nearly impossible in music. It’s nearly impossible to invent, but we’re trying. I mean, you get 12 notes. I’m just gonna copy and bite and rip anything that is of interest to me and try to make it my own. That’s what everybody’s been doing for thousands of years. That’s what we’ll continue to do.

The goal is that at some point in your career, you say something unique and that you reach people. And I wish, no, I actually don’t wish that there were a formula for it because the process of creating in that manner is important, it is what’s exciting to me. The album is about the process of making the album because the album is about the experiences that we go through during the process of that album.

It’s been, because we put records out every few years, it’s always been evident to me that the concept of the record is just to capture this two years of time from a personal standpoint, and from the standpoint of the band. So it’s a big, heavy duty, emotional dramatic process. I would love it if everybody appreciated it on that level, but also music is fun.

Music brings us together. So there’s also these sort of lighter elements to it that I think are equally important, but I’m not as tuned into. On this record, I think especially, there’s instances where you can see that it’s easier to tell a heavy story with a really over-excited piece of music. It’s easier to be melodramatic with a lot of volume, and then similarly when you strip it, opening a strip on the volume, you’ll hear this sort of like bulkier songs on that record, then it’s easier to speak directly to someone in an intimate way.

For me, being a musician is gaining an understanding for all of those variables, you’re never going to understand what the sum total of all these variables is and just letting the magic happen. That’s why I say it’s sort of like alchemy or pseudoscience. There’s a lot of stuff that we do understand, and there’s a lot of stuff that we don’t understand. And it’s the stuff that we don’t understand that really affects us the greatest. It’s the tools, it’s the understandable stuff that we use that sort of mimic those moments of mystery.

It’s always exciting to write music. It’s always exciting to try to create these records, because I’m always, always operating well beyond the balance of what I consider my real strength and capabilities. I’m always reaching far beyond what I should be doing sensibly in a musical sense. I’m always reaching too far on technical musical stuff that I can barely play. But I know that in a year it’ll be easy. I’m always trying to reach, dig in a little further conceptually with the lyrics. I’m always trying to use fresh voices as a vocalist. As long as we’re excited and I think it’s the only thing that translates through the speakers. And I think that’s the most important thing is that when we put out our record, it’s gonna be us through and through, we gotta believe in it, we gotta feel it because that’s what the audience hears.

(Baroness has) been around for 20 years. I was wondering where you see yourself 20 years in the future? Can you sort of chart that progression of where you are now versus where you want to go?

Maybe. I mean it’s only easy for me to explain where I’d like to be in 20 years in the broadest abstract sense. I know in my heart that I’ll still be involved in music. I want to get as much touring in as possible before my time is up. I want to see as many places as I possibly can before my time’s up. How to achieve that is an ever-changing thing, so if I’m too clear about my intentions or my goals, if I’m too clear about them, it’s just setting me up to fail when whatever I’m doing doesn’t align with that idea. So I try to keep my goals kind of conceptual like, my goal is to be impassioned about the artistic process in 20 years in the same way that I am today.

My goal is that no amount of technique, technical wizardry, no amount of attention or external success and that no amount of hardship will ever knock me off of the place where I am now, where I genuinely love submitting myself to the creative process, as hard as it is sometimes and as easy as it is sometimes. I think it’s a very tremendous thing to have managed to be allied with at this stage of my life, so I would hope that that continues.

Speaking of creativity, I know that you’re also doing a lot of the album cover art. Can you tell me a little bit about the process that went into making this image?

What I try to do is I try to find any — because visual art and sonic are very different — I try to find those points of connectivity where sound and vision, sound and light, synchronize well. And, generally speaking, with our album covers, it’s to try to capture something of the spirit of the album in a two-dimensional pictorial sense.

So I think the outlet, the recorded music and the painted picture are very different things, but they can support each other and add, again, dimension to the music. That’s in the same way that the sound can add dimension to the artwork. So I find that when things synchronize well, that marriage is a little bit more self-evident. So, for instance, with “Stone,” the way we wrote it, as I mentioned before, was a lot of reactive, intuitive, non-verbal, non-intellectual, instinctual action. So it was a year and a half later when I started the artwork. And I remember thinking, note taking for about a week or two before I start anything big because I like to hide lots of references.

So all that information is in your frontal cortex. So those images and those motions are close in hand. So I knew from the get-go, there’s a couple types of images I’m gonna do. So I just start sketching, just try to understand the figurative forms about what I’m gonna do. And I’ll write down little notes and quotes from movies and books and stuff like that. The walls are kind of covered in notes and scratching. It’s a little crazy, but it does help me.

Then when I start, I have a big piece of heavy duty watercolor paper because I work in watercolor, and it’s absolutely blank. And I just start in the middle, and I work outward. I didn’t let anything really alter the course of sort of free-form composition because I thought that was an important thing to be dedicated and committed to through the artwork for this record because my whole band committed themselves to that through the process of the music, so I wasn’t going to negate that or forsake that because even though it’s kind of a risky thing to just say, OK, here’s three by five feet worth of blank white space. And again, I’m working with watercolor and ink, which to the layman might not sound crazy, but it means I can’t cover anything up. It means every mark is visible inexorably for eternity, for as long as the artwork lasts, every smudge, every drop of coffee, every misspent stroke is clear.

It’s crazy to me that at the end of the day, I step back and look at the picture and it’s very figurative. The forms and the outlines are very literal. But I don’t ever know that that’s gonna happen. I’m sort of always trying to work toward more abstraction. I just tighten up so quickly.

The artwork is like a free form interpretation of the images, ideas, concepts, feelings, atmospheres of the music that we wrote, created with the same spirit of intuitive and reaction. Don’t ask yourself, there’s some images on the cover that don’t exist anywhere in the record. But they were, because of the free flow of ideas, they’re coming from an original idea that did have something to do with that. So then I started wrapping figurative metaphors in further layers of figurative metaphors so that it becomes kind of like a fun like “Hellraiser” lockbox to undo.

So you know what’s going on there, but it leaves everything else (open) for interpretation for everybody else.

Yes, and on that note, I think interpretation is critical with our music. I don’t think the experience of listening to Baroness songs and knowing exactly what I was thinking is helpful. I think it actually partially or entirely destroys the process. If I was to explain, this song is about this experience or this thought or this concept, I think that would ruin its experience with our listeners.

I would like to think that our listeners have come to understand over the course of six records that while I am singing from a deeply personal and deeply intimate space, part of the language that I use is meant to distort that, the specifics of that story, such that each listener who feels like finding themself in a song has the potential to do so through our music.

Again, it’s not a prerequisite that you have to be this deep with our music. There is fun stuff to it, there are fun hooky melodies and harmonies and all sorts of stuff, but a lot of our listeners have, and certainly myself as a listener, I appreciate the fourth and fifth listen of a record much more than the first or second. So I think our music excels once you’ve gotten used to it, and only once you’ve gotten used to it do the important and magical details become apparent because there’s always a little bit of a learning curve with our records, even among friends.

Where I find that one of the most common things that my personal friends will say, I’ll share a record with them initially, and “Yeah, this is cool, this is cool.” You know, which is friend-speak for “I don’t get it” or “It’s not quite my thing,” whatever. And I don’t care, you’re not my friend because you love my music. … But then I’ve noticed a lot of times very frequently are, my personal friend will come to me six months later and go, “Ah, OK, yeah, I’ve been living with it for now. Wow, I see what you’re going for.” And I think that’s cool. I’m not trying to do that, certainly not trying to make a record you have to discover on the sixth time for the first time. But I do think it’s cool that that is the case with a lot of people, because I don’t need art to be obvious.

I need design to be obvious. I need advertising to be obvious. What I don’t need is an experience where any artist in any format, whether it’s cinema, literature, music, painting, sculptures, I don’t need any artist to hit me on the head with a message. That’s simple. It’s a blunt force trauma. It doesn’t last. It’s sensationalistic.

I think there’s a little bit more meat on the bone sometimes when you create something that has those convolutions and has those distortions that distort the perspective of the viewer or the listener such that they’re then susceptible to a deeper message which is hopefully something that they generate themselves.

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I’m definitely looking forward to listening to “Stone” some more. The first time, the changes from the soft to the loud, it was unexpected.

Yeah, I mean there’s a lot to unpack. We have a tendency to move toward really, really complex forms that don’t necessarily sound complex. You know, it’s like prog, but it doesn’t always sound like it or something. Or sort of like a jazz-like mentality, like a sort of free-form mentality on the music. But we can’t be entirely free-form. There has to be some strictures.

If you listen to a song like “Choir,” it’s just improvisation. We just built a song out of this improv in the studio, where some of them have quite a few parts and quite a dense amount of layers of guitars. It’s never the case that we in the studio are trying to present the raw, real, this is what we sound like live. I’m like, why would you do that? You’re in the studio. The stage is for sounding live. The studio is for sounding better than real. The studio is for taking ideas into some sort of exponential (expletive) overdrive. So finding a balance between the idea of that interstellar (expletive) hallucinogenic psychosis reality and something that the listener wants to hear is like the fun balance.

I’ve listened to “Stone” a bunch. We had it for so long before we put it out. I did spend quite a lot of time with it. The vocal aspects were hard to come by, so I spent a lot of time listening. And I’m like, yeah, OK, so there’s a way to listen to this record where it’s just a collection of rock songs and a couple of kind of folky ones, and then there’s another way to listen to it where, if you’re trying to pull the music apart, it’s like, even to me, as one of the writers, I don’t quite know how we pulled, how some of the stuff was done.

There’s a couple moments on the record where the complexity shift is really kind of staggering, and it’s just simply this fact that we work. We didn’t have a coordinated moment-by-moment game plan in mind, we just had an overall picture for a song and any given recording day so sometimes we’re all operating wildly independently, it just so happens that it all lined up.

I (expletive) love playing music. I love this band. Everybody’s got such a cool way of communicating and composing and everybody’s like fully at this stage of our career like everybody in the band is a songwriter as well as as a musician so there’s like a kind of a cool diplomacy at play throughout the record as well.

I saw that all four of you were credited with the glockenspiel on the last album. Is that true? If that’s the case, who’s the best glockenspieler in the band?

I mean, I don’t know that any one of us is the best because if there’s one best, there would only be one credit on the record.

No, it’s kind of funny because we had, there’s a glockenspiel on all of our records. It’s a consistent thing for me. I really love the way they sound. So we’re doing a song called “Shine.” It’s got glock in a couple of different moments. And as we record the song and continue to refine it, sometimes the glock parts weren’t lining up right or they weren’t the right ones. I think in that song alone, there’s one hit by at least every one of us. Each of the four of us has at least one glockenspiel strike. It’s pretty funny. It’s like, “Aw no, no, that was the wrong note. That’s not the right place. Oh, we have to go do it again. But just the one note.”