"Gold & Grey" At Home: Baroness's John Baizley On Their First-Ever Livestream (Interview)

We spoke to John Baizley about Baroness‘ upcoming livestream set for tonight — 9/10 — at 8PM EST. The band headed out to Long Island City’s Culture Lab LIC to perform a start-to-finish rendition of their critically acclaimed Gold & Grey album, which, sadly, the band had yet to perform in front of US audiences due to the onset of COVID-19. We spoke about the implications of the pandemic on Baroness and the music industry as a whole, as well as the concept of live streaming and what it means for bands who constantly tour and what it is like to write music during the year that is 2020.

-Tom Campagna

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I wish everybody was having a different day. Everything has been so, so crazy. I’m certainly pushing good vibes towards any and everybody I kind of come across as my general M.O. right now.

I literally have put it like this: I’ve been saying for about four or five months now that I think my job, in this current situation, is to just keep a positive attitude. That’s it. That’s the work and that’s all of it. If I can do that, then everything else happens in an OK way. If I am not able to maintain that positive attitude, it starts falling by the wayside. But it’s hard work and I’m doing it.

In terms of the show recording, it looks as though you were over here in New York. Was that you recording it today?

We’ve recorded it. I feel like it’s sort of weird, like what it’s like going on right now. But you know, I think we’re in a pretty weird situation right now in that we, Baroness, are in a situation where we’ve decided to enter the live streaming music sphere. That’s something that we never, ever, thought about doing. It’s like, you never know. Up until recently, it was never anything that we ever thought about or really reckoned with. We had, from the moment that we decided we’d do the live thing, which was just about just about a month ago, basically spent the entire past month just dealing with logistics. One of those is the fact that I guess some people are truly live streaming it, meaning like at the moment. What happens if there’s an error, you know, if you’re doing a ticketed event? I don’t know what everybody else’s infrastructure is. But I know that for Baroness, we decided to do this, for a variety of reasons, out of necessity.

Amongst those reasons, we decided to do this with the bare minimum crew. By the minimum, I mean it’s the band and our sound guy. We set up everything and the whole production was installed and operated by the band. It’s a crazy thing. And because we didn’t know how this sort of thing works and all that, yeah, it seems like a responsible choice on our behalf, given that we had a week to prepare for it.Also there was traveling and trying to figure out how to get people tested and yada, yada, yada. That was a total nightmare. Well, we filmed it slightly in advance in case that there was a malfunction or something terrible happened. We are extremely lucky, because we had a number of terrible things happen all at once. We had, like all of our shit blow up on us. And that’s without the typical infrastructure of technicians or venue staff, employees or engineers or, you know, whoever it is.

So what happened?

We had a weird, funny, like, sort of half start and then, you know, the idea is to keep the integrity of the performance as alive as possible while still willfully engaging in broadcasting. We had a couple of camera guys on it who work for the streaming service. Amongst all of us, we really had a handful of totally anticipatable, very normal kinds of gear malfunctions and production stuff. And luckily for us, we did that and recorded everything in one go otherwise. And, yeah, it was crazy. It’s a crazy, crazy thing to do. A very crazy thing to find myself doing.

It’s like you said, you wanted to deliver it as live as possible, but also while running a skeleton crew. So that way, you knew exactly who was involved. And considering how fast some things can happen in this world, you wouldn’t want to have all these extra moving pieces involved in all of that, too, and have to think about that at another time.

Unfortunately, the situation that you just described was very much our situation. Logistically, this is a brand new thing. I spent 20 years on tours essentially dealing with every imaginable type of problem. The reality of throwing a ticketed concert like we did up until recently was very much a situation of problem solving. Each and every day on tour, you’re dealing with thousands of variables, all of which have just as likely a chance of malfunction as they do working correctly. And so, for many, many years, we’ve spent our time trying to preconceive those things, trying to come up with workarounds and all sorts of things and take it to the live music game. And it’s fun because there are so many things you have to consider. And now 2020 kicks in and the whole music industry shuts down and gets pulled out from underneath us right on the eve of what’s going on. And we’re in a situation this month, where, do you know what? We want to start playing music again. We want to start playing this again for our audience. And in the six months after, we’ve been writing music, which is, you know, as you can imagine, a very different mindset than playing music.

So we had to switch gears all at once. And then we, as this whole thing’s been panning out, we realized it’s very different from life. It’s a very different atmosphere. It’s a very tough workflow. It’s a very different concept than playing actual music in front of an audience. So all of these things that we’ve trained ourselves to deal with, all of the, you know, strings breaking out, amps blowing up, microphones falling off, the standard cables not working, just like the typical stuff that’s still there. My head’s still spinning from how different an experience this was. Walking into it, having never done that before, it was nearly impossible to imagine what it would be like, which I think was part of the excitement. I think we’re all kind of amped on doing something. We’re playing music, so psyched to play for our audience. It was a very unique situation that it brought with it and we’re excited. Maybe it just was exciting because it was new and there were so many things that we couldn’t anticipate or expect as to how this very contemporary thing is happening. We’re trying to adapt and evolve into it in real time, which I think is easy again. When the band gets together, because we live in two different cities, we have to test ourselves. We also have to constantly be informing one another on where we’ve been, who we’ve seen and what we’ve been up to in order that we can get together responsibly for peace of mind. To adapt and evolve into that, as well as the idea of playing and performing music now, in this climate, it’s terrifying and there’s so many things about it that feel awkward and difficult. But it’s been a very enriching experience with respect to the fact that it’s new and it feels like the first few years of being a band where everything was unexpected and where, you know, you really couldn’t try to make things work in any specific way because they just were going to happen and it was in the way that they were going to happen. It’s been exciting because there’s all these fresh obstacles to overcome. And I think about bands like Baroness and it works really well in that environment. There’s been so much fluidity in the lineup and the things that have happened to us both on and off stage. And at the same time, it’s kind of new.

Without saying something cliché and talking about the “new normal” and things of that nature, because that’s kind of what’s been said ad nauseum at this point, some of the things that you maybe had done in the past that you’re referring to start to feel new again. You get a different kind of anxiety because even though it’s something you’ve probably done countless times, because of the current obstacles, they start to feel new again. But you start to appreciate maybe what you’ve been able to do and to be able to convey what you’re trying to convey, even if it is in this kind of a different arena, still has to make sense to us to kind of have some enriching qualities about it.

I think that’s something that we all have to reconcile with that in our own way. Personally speaking, I believe I speak on behalf of Baroness: we have to categorize this climate within the music industry and within and across the globe externally. You know, outside we have to work really hard to shine a light on the opportunities that we have here, whether they’re conceptual opportunities or real life opportunities that we’re in. We, like everybody else out there, are in the process of adjusting and making, in some cases small shifts, in some cases paradigm shifts as to how we approach certain things. I will say that the one thing that has been by far and away the most difficult to me to grasp, and one of the things that I haven’t yet, is the fact that we’re playing and we don’t have an audience.

That is a situation that has never existed before. For instance, we rehearse a lot and write in seclusion and that’s not an uncommon feature of a year where there is no pandemic. However, we’ve never played a show. And I have learned from the rehearsals and from the conceptualization of this strange event, that is what I said on stage. What I’ve said in interviews for the past three decades rings more true now than ever, which is that Baroness is a four piece. But our fifth member, and an equal player in a live show, is the audience. And without that, it does feel as though we are missing an essential aspect of what we do. And I think I’d better explain it by saying that we’re a fully capable band to get on stage every night of the week and play the music that we’ve written. Yes, that’s simple. It’s always not easy music to play, but it’s simple enough to get on stage and play music.

I saw you guys at Webster Hall with Pallbearer back in 2016 and that was four years ago now. It was just like you talked about, with the fifth member being in the audience. I remember both bands really bringing it that night. For some of my friends that knew your band, an album like Purple was something different for them and they were really sucked into the whole idea of your live experience. I think you’re totally right. I think you guys definitely invite the audience to be a part of the whole celebration.

Quite simply put, that is the reason the band exists, to perform our music in a large setting. And by and large, I mean with a crowd in attendance. I have always thought the foundation of my musical understanding is predicated on the fact that music is meant to be enjoyed communally. And I think listening on Spotify is fine and watching YouTube is fine, you know, listening to our albums is great. I highly encourage that! But the real experience is the one that we have tailored everything towards and that’s the live experience. And I say this because when we’re performing our music, as I mentioned earlier, it’s relatively simple to get up and play the songs — you know how to play because you wrote the songs. But what we’re looking for and what we’re trying to inspire with each show is that our audience becomes part of that show through their expenditure of energy, through their connection with the meaning behind our songs, through a shared connection with the atmosphere in the room. And it’s one that is very much like an electrical circuit. It works in a very circular way where we transmit energy that travels, you know, from my mouth and into the guitar, drums and these microphones and speakers, the speakers transmit that energy and amplify it. The crowd receives and absorbs that energy. And then, very critically, they retransmit it back to us. That drives us to play in a different way and it adds energy to our music that we would be unable to add otherwise. When that happens, that gets broadcast again and it moves in a certain way and it becomes a feedback loop. And that’s why every once in a while you’re in a show by an incredible band and you’re feeling it downstream and you’re driving that, and that becomes the trend since four or five musicians are doing that on stage or with the thousands of people in the audience and doing what you heard on records becomes something bigger and bigger and better.

Now consider the standards of the Covid-19 universe, in the Covid-19 earth: we’re unable to access that audience in the same way. I think for a band that’s spent so much of their time trying to understand the challenges of having that audience and trying to enrich the experience that the audience has, by virtue of that, they’re trying to enrich the experience that we have, the connection that we have with our own music. I think that we can feel somewhat untethered or at the very least without a net beneath us because we’re so accustomed to that member of the band and that extra variable that drives our performance. The idea of these streaming events, the idea that on the whole, the music industry, it’s skewing towards these isolated events that are ticketed and broadcast and watched by, I am struggling currently to find and to imagine the net result of all this in a positive way. I hope that what we’re working towards is that moment when it’s a civically responsible thing for us to get on stage in front of people — it’s, you know, morally and ethically responsible for us as a band to ask people to get admission to a physical location that we can show up to where we can get back into the normal routine with the normal obstacles and play music the way that we intended for it to be played. In the interim, I’m wrestling to balance out whether or not what we’re doing now is meant to stand in for that or if it’s meant to be a way station on the road towards playing rock music again, or if this is for the time being, the way music is performed.

And so, I think for a band that’s been around for a handful of years and released as many records as we have, how much do we have to meet the needs of this new environment? Obviously the answer is not at all. You know, I hear you like what we like to do, music the way we like. We got into it for a specific reason and I’m hoping that, you know, through this event — and hopefully very few others like it, but very likely until then there will be more of this — we can learn something substantial. Then, of course, we can learn something substantive about this format and how we can use it to better express ourselves.

It’s the responsibility of you as a band and also other people, like whether you would feel comfortable putting people into harm’s way. And the idea certainly would be to not do that. But that’s a mentality that’s kind of developed out of this whole situation that’s completely unique unto itself.

Of course. I think a lot of it was just a given because the industry and the venues and the environment that music is played in have also taken us into consideration. There are liability issues that the clubs deal with, the contract I mean, and now it’s a whole other world. For us as a band, we assume venue safety and the security, that our audience is going to be kind and considerate and compassionate. But now there is a heightened level of responsibility that not only we as a band have to contend with, but our audience to contend with as well. I think, you know, we look at it like the Smash Mouth and Sturgis and all this is just a complete nightmare, and I hope that it doesn’t impact the greater listening public at large in such a way that they think that that’s indicative of all bands because in fact, it is not. And that of course, we immediately saw a real threat that as a band we are potentially like these super spreaders because we’re in a different city every day. We live in a self-contained 45 foot steel tube vessel where if one of us gets it, if the band or crew get sick, everybody does. And then we’re potentially going to miss it every day, in fact. Right. It’s very obviously irresponsible.

I still think there’s a way to do it — you know, the parking lot shows, people want to feel things together, and the closer together, it’s seemingly the more fully you experience that concert event. So I think it would even be irresponsible for us to say, let’s do something in the nature of the six feet apart, because our band wants to bring people together. It flies in the face of responsibility. But also, you know, if it passes the message, it was the basis of our message and our business and our philosophy as performers. So it’s like we have a huge responsibility right now not to create an environment in any way, shape, or form that puts anybody at risk. I think all bands certainly are unique in doing this, and I hope everybody is getting better amongst musicians — as a result, all of my friends and I are just getting closer and closer to this desperate need to tour and acting on it. We’re adventure addicts, we have been on an adventure for two decades. And the adventure ended in, you know, the early portion of 2020. I just wanted to start again, but I wanted to start the right way. But it comes with its daily/hourly frustrations and anxieties and fears for ourselves, and more importantly how we can act responsibly in a specific manner and meet the creative goals and needs of the band and the goals and needs of our audience. How that’s all achieved is somewhat mysterious to me at this moment. It just seems like it takes a whole lot of engineering and logistics to get anything together. I’m anxious to see how that pans out this week as we continue through this.

With all the current negatives, I think there’s going to be hopefully some net positives to come out of this. And certainly nobody would ever want to have to go through all this. But if it were to have some kind of an end game or some lesson to be learned out of all of this, I certainly would hope that’s kind of what we’re pushing towards. You can make your contribution, however large or small it is with some of these streaming events, it’s going to positively impact somebody. It’s good to see other people, even if it’s through you know, Zoom calls, Microsoft Teams, whatever it is, some level of familiarity to see that the people that they care about are okay. And I think you guys doing an event like this would be, at whatever level it may be, some indication that you guys are still doing okay. And to put yourself out there and considering what people are dealing with and the band is still going… maybe I can, you know, keep going, too.

That’s such a critical part of Baroness, too, to have a meaningful connection with our listeners beyond the superficial. But we’ve, as many people know, spent a great portion of our career trying to maintain more than the average engagement between artist and audience. We’ve really taken great strides over the course of our career to break down the perceived barrier that tends to elevate and put the band on a pedestal and so forth. I mean, that’s the real physical implication. But what we’ve done so frequently is we walk around the audience after shows and shake hands and hug everybody, things that are not possible now, and meet people outside and have conversations. I think for us now, part of the challenge is to figure out a way to approximate that or a new way to engage with our audience that has those similar aspects, while at the same time respecting what are very real and very obvious restrictions and boundaries between us.

Initially when the pandemic came down, we shut down. Our attitude was, “Let’s just keep our heads down. We don’t need to be posting. We don’t need to be selling. We don’t need to be doing the normal stuff because we’re not on an album cycle anymore and it’s not going to happen. So, let’s really dedicate ourselves to creating and producing something new.” I’ll say that 2020 from a purely musical standpoint has been one of the most, if not the absolute most fruitful year of our existence. It’s actually been kind of great because we’ve had to take this worldwide situation, and we’ve had to absorb it and turn it into something that we consider creative and uplifting, and try to be positive. It seemed like a really easy and good and genuine way to turn the negative into a positive in a minor way, in a way that we can contribute. And as things went on, seeing all these timelines kind of extend themselves, at first it was we’ll kick everything down the road six months and then, you know, we’ll take everything down the road, 12 months. That sort of felt like a joke at the time. And then all of a sudden you’re talking in terms of 18 months, a year and a half. We’ll push all the shows and kick off festivals down a year and see what happens and put a hold on all these things, but let’s manage our expectations. And as soon as that happened, it became clear to us and we found that we can’t keep our head down that long.

This week and this month is really our first foray back into facing and addressing the public and our audience. Hopefully the inspiration works both ways, because we work really well when we’ve got an audience. I think this feels as timely as it possibly could. Where once I was extremely resistant to the idea of doing this thing, now it’s a definite reality. And I think we’re already sort of thinking in terms of the future if we have to do this again, because the timeline on this is too long, like we’re already brainstorming new, more adventurous things to do. For now, you’re talking about the creativity in everything before we get to anything like on the new side.

What are some songs that you were looking forward to actually playing to this audience that maybe you haven’t really had a chance to do yet?

In the US at least, we have not supported this record. We toured in 2019 and that was prior to that being released, and then immediately after the record was released. We did the opening night show, a few little things here and there. But then we were in Europe for like nearly three months, and so we were supporting in a very literal sense of the word. We’ve never really gotten an adequate stage or environment to showcase any of our songs, so this will have to do for the US touring. It was just this year, and for the European shows that were missed this year and for the Australian and Japanese and all the international shows that we’re meant to play, we were really looking forward to the stuff that we didn’t play on the tour. I think that we had maybe three or four songs in that Deafheaven tour, so it was a huge, huge album left for us to work out, you know, work out the kinks onstage and figure out the live versions of them. Unfortunately, that rug was pulled out from underneath us.

I think Gina suggested that we do the whole record. And it was like, yeah, of course, it’s a hugely ambitious thing because it is some of the most dense and some of the most complex. I think it’s one of the cooler things, playing an entire album live, but we’ve never been able to pull it off. We’ve never written or recorded a record that we’ve been able to play all the songs off of. There’s typically at least one or two songs that are so concocted and organized by the studio that it would be, you know, sort of physically impossible as a four piece to perform. Although with Gold & Grey, it is a wonderfully dense and ridiculously complicated record, it’s also performable. And so what we did was after five or six months of not playing any of this stuff, because all we were doing was writing, we spent a week just calling ourselves in marathon rehearsal sessions, trying to work out how to play material that has an extremely high dynamic range. That’s everything from the most physically demanding and intense sort of playing that I’m aware of in our catalog next to some of the most tender, gentle and soft stuff that we’ve ever done, trying to learn how to use that whole dynamic range in a very short period of time. The idea was actually a hugely ambitious challenge.

I think because of it, it became something that felt like being in the band normally again today, because I was always pushing for these painfully difficult concepts that we engage in and you have been in a relative, musically speaking, comfort of the writing cycle for so long. And then to just jump straight back into a performance that’s got pressure amid all the pressures that come along with that, I think it was really exciting, it’s going to be more like a white knuckle experience the entire time. It feels metaphorically like we’re on a high dive and we just jumped onto the springboard and it’s down: whatever happens, I know we’re about to go flying up in the air; who knows where we land? It’s going to be a total mystery to me, but I hope we get to do a whole bunch of tricks before we do that. I don’t want the necessities that it brings to the forefront to inexorably change what this band is and to fundamentally shift what we are and why we do it and how to do it. I want to think that like every other situation we’ve been faced with, we can make the situation work for the best as opposed to making the band work inside the context of the situation, which sounds similar.

I listened to Gold & Grey a couple of times recently and I felt like this time of year… summer is winding down and the fall is coming. I kind of feel like it meets that transition and in a really kind of a natural way. And it felt like, almost like the perfect time of year to maybe put on this show.

That’s an extremely articulate way of saying it, because I’ve always felt that the cycle of touring in a band is really hinged around the seasonal shifts and fall is a fantastic time to tour. The weather’s great, you’ve just come off the summer. Summer is usually festivals the whole time, and it’s usually in Europe. And it all is, technically speaking, the time when you start moving around a lot, you know, it’s normally when the big worldwide tours happen and the full US tours happen that take months to accomplish, it puts you in every different type of market in the US. For me, personally speaking, it was my favorite season because it always brings with it all these changes. It sort of makes me feel like travel makes me feel — like going on an adventure. It’s been like playing music in front of people. And so to be able to listen to that now, I get what you said and I can consume more time because this is like starting.

I’m just thinking about how you got to turn these negative experiences and these life altering experiences into some level of positivity. This is your way of doing that. You also talked about the current state of the band, you’re not really on the album cycle anymore, too. But it’s still relevant, for US audiences, since you added Gina to the mix. What is something that she brings to the table for the band? Something fresh and new? What kind of presence does she afford the band?

I have to admit, she’s been in the band for such a period of time now that she doesn’t feel like a new member anymore. It can be an interesting thing to note that where we have undergone a lineup change, it was always difficult, difficult for everybody involved. We’re in the middle of something big and we feel like this is an opportunity. We respect and always have the highest amount of respect for anybody who’s been in this band. We’re stepping up now. She has more of a personality, to say, that’s sort of a prerequisite for this band, but she’s also an incredibly talented musician. Fantastic voice. Just a pleasure to play music with. To have been in a band for so long and to have gone through so many lineup changes and to have been able to say this with each new member, that they genuinely are inspiring musicians and individual people. You know what? I hope to have lifelong relationships with people, people I love, people that I have real chemistry with.

The perfect chemistry exists every single time you invite somebody to enter your group. And luckily for us, that has been the case and I think it’s hard for me to understate how amazing that is while at the same time it happened so quickly with so much enthusiasm on everybody’s part. It was almost hard to tell when anything happened — she’s just such a strong player and such a strong performer, and she has a vitality that you always hope for. So she’s coming into a band with three other members who share that as well. And everybody’s got this high level, sort of overwhelming intelligence sometimes. It’s just great to see things continually moving upwards from a creative standpoint, from a performance standpoint and I still feel as impassioned and invigorated through Baroness as I ever did. When you first start, with that kind of like doe-eyed enthusiasm that you have when you’re a teenager and start a band, you don’t have to lose that. I think that’s the lesson that’s particularly for me, is I never thought I would have to sacrifice that. As I got older, I thought that that would be something that faded with time, like so many things. But in fact, it has been almost like the only constant in this band. It’s our music. I think it’s really hard to explain just how special that is and how important individuals who comprise that system for me are.

Nick, Sebastian, and Gina, what they bring into this band is priceless because it’s inspiration and it’s motivation. And it’s all those things that are sort of hard to calculate, hard to quantify. But you certainly don’t know.

Yeah. I mean, certainly with everything with the band, with all the members you’re certainly not going to keep going if you don’t feel like you have some kind of a unified front in terms of how you approach things, how you want to play, and what you want to write.

Yeah, I mean, it just wouldn’t make sense. This is pointless. There’s a pointless profession to be in if you don’t really love it if you can’t find the positive qualities in it all. And, I mean, there’s a lot of good stuff as well as the bad stuff. And if anything, it’s easy to say how often is that? We just travel around with music in front of people. We meet new people trying to feed, swim on exotic beaches, climb mountains, meet the amazing people of the day. That’s so great. But it takes time. It takes effort. It carries with it a lot of frustration and that carries with it the zero financial security or regularity. When a pandemic hits your home, prevention shuts down, for instance, and you have to have this attitude that you can overcome any and all of that all the time. That’s sort of the common denominator, especially now with everybody that there’s always something to do, and there’s always a new song to write. There’s always a new set of lyrics that are going to be important to create. There’s always new artwork to make. There’s always another one. There’s always a new city that you haven’t been to yet that you can’t wait to go to. And that’s the case with us. And yeah, if our line up was slightly different in some situations, or had been different by one or two aspects, I don’t know that situation would still be the case. But it is. I mean, the thing is.. that’s a pretty heavy statement, I think, for anybody in my position to say countless times into a microphone at the end of the set, hey, you know, thank you. I want to thank you guys, blah, blah, blah. We still love this. We’re still doing this all over again. And, you know, it becomes kind of like a ubiquitous platitude. I genuinely see all of this potentially amazing stuff happening, and I can’t wait for it to happen, and it surprises me that I can still say that.

We’re still here and will hopefully come out of this either unscathed or relatively unscathed. I know some other people are not. And it’s hard to think about it. And I’m not trying to make it like it certainly isn’t about me. And I know for you it certainly isn’t about you.

It’s about the greater good, the collective. The collective that we’re dealing with, not even just in this country. We’re dealing with a global situation, one like we’ve never dealt with before. No, I’m just saying that there’s still the fact that we could still try and have that positive outlook and hope for good to transpire. But everybody has their own circumstances that some people really don’t, or really can’t, see at this point. In its simplest form, I think that we can offer a wonderfully uplifting escape from the doldrums in this situation. And I don’t know if I’m looking for some change. I’m looking for some escape, looking for something to break out of, you know, the daily cycle of abuse and horror and tragedy and awful leadership as well. But I’m anxious to see if we can turn that into something that informs on music and in a meaningful, powerful way without capitalizing on it and without it souring up.

You know us as individuals… I think that we need inspiration, motivation too in times like this, and I know very much when I was a kid, I relied on music to guide me through some of these times because it’s a very, very simple and effective way out of dealing with your emotions sometimes.

On the art side, have you been able to do any of your work on some things during all of this?

The thing that’s come to the forefront recently is that I think initially, when the pandemic started, isolation was necessary, I kind of shut down creatively for it. And it was like real work for me to figure out how to get my stuff drawing. It seemed like music was a little bit easier to accept. I think just because I have had a group of friends that I play with and they’re making music with me, we’re sharing files. And I think that it became really easy for me to get the artwork stuff. And so for the past month or so, I’ve been traveling. I’ve just got back into it. I think I think you and everybody else hopefully will be seeing a whole lot of new stuff that’s coming out, because once I realized that there was a hole in my life, that a void that existed because I wasn’t engaging that particular side of my creativity, I sought to fill that void as quickly as possible. And it’s really because I’m extremely excited about what I’m working on right now, because the amount of time that we spend, we’ve been forced into or given has given me the opportunity to push myself. So I’m very excited about what is likely going to happen in 2021. I’ve got all this pent up anxiety, anger, and confusion. I’ve got all that stuff pent up and that’s the food that feeds my creativity. So it’s like it was nothing for a month or two there and then everything all at once and it was really, really busy. I think especially the fact that stuff I was super excited about what we’re working on right now, which might not come out essentially for a while, but we’re on to something extremely exciting.

The thing is, like, this is all we’re doing right now. In a way, fortunately or unfortunately, we have no other distractions. So we’ve got a really big idea that we’re working on. And I don’t see why but I actually think we’re working faster, and it’s like a higher level of quality and like a new chemical that we’re working with here and writing music. And I think I think actually we’re going to be finished this year between our albums. I think we just wrote a fuck ton of music.

Absolutely. Like you said, you’d never maybe had the ability to write for long stretches of time like this because other things come up during this, that even though you probably may be able to write some things on tour, but to focus writing like this with no touring, you know, it’s not something that I’m sure happens very often. I can sense that you’re excited about this record. I’m sure people are really excited to check out the live streaming events. Well, hey, listen, is there anything else, you know, you wanted to say to your fans?

I think that before we got the streaming idea or something, I was like… I’ll say I’ll admit I was somewhat resistant to it. And through the process of doing this, we have kicked up so much dust and we’ve forced ourselves to learn things that we want to play. The preparation for, and the act of this event has given us more light, in a year where it’s really easy to sort of fall into this general malaise. It’s put fire directly beneath our asses. And I think that’s a great thing for us.

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