Back In The Bus

"It's pretty simple. We love what we're doing. And we love the music,” Baroness' John Baizley says straight up. “And though there's a seemingly endless supply of mishaps that get put in our way, we're just not willing to let that kind of thing stop us. We love touring, because that was the reason that we started the band: to tour. And we're going to keep doing it until we can't anymore. And now when I say that, I mean it quite literally.”

August 15, 2012, as the band was just getting stuck into their Yellow & Green album tour, the brakes on their tour bus failed, causing it to crash. Baizley sustained the worst of the injuries, breaking his leg and an arm. Baizley says there was a moment where he was unsure whether he'd be able to play guitar again. But once it was clear everyone would recover, Baizley started thinking about getting back on the road.

“We certainly thought for a couple of days that maybe we won't be able to tour. But once we got past that and we were relatively positive that we could play, it was not a difficult decision to start moving towards being an active touring band again. In fact, it was very definitely one of the earliest goals we set for ourselves; that we would consider ourselves healed, and we'd consider ourselves past it for lack of a better term, when we were touring again.”

But for Baroness, touring again would not be as simple as recovering. As the band was gearing up to start heavy touring again at the start of this year, drummer Allen Blickle and bassist Matt Maggioni decided to step out of the band, leaving Baizley and guitarist Peter Adams to recruit two new players. After all, they'd come this far; they couldn't let a couple of line-up changes stop them.

“There's anxieties when you change one member; when you change your whole rhythm section, well it's like 'I hope they like each other, I hope we like them, I hope they're good musicians and there's a chemistry onstage, I hope they can handle being on the bus and just the act of touring itself. That physically and mentally they're up to the task'. You know, all that and so much more went through my head getting this band back on its feet. But being out and touring with these guys, it's seemed like they've just checked off every fear on my list. And I think that's been quite therapeutic in a way, because we've had this bundle of fears and stresses and concerns, and it's like we've been actively, aggressively, seeking those things out throughout this process, and [then we] cross them out and rob them of their power to be concerning anymore. And we've had to go through all this stuff sort of publicly, and keep our heads, and, without sounding too cliché, we really just had to stay positive and trust in what we initially set out to do. Of course it becomes hard to do that when you get dealt this sort of rotten hand, but it's a very validating feeling to be getting to the other side of that. It actually gives me some hope about what I've chosen to pursue with my life.”

According to Baizley the new line-up, featuring Nick Jost on bass and Sebastian Thomson behind the kit, has “clicked” after spending the better part of the American summer on the road together. The frontman says the band is at the point where they're thinking about writing new material together. But before they do that, there's still the matter of touring Yellow & Green everywhere they can – hence the band's decision to return to Australia as part of Soundwave 2014. After all, this was the record that marked their total emancipation from the sludge metal ghetto from which they came and re-established them as a thunderously dynamic alternative band. “The album was written to be performed. And for a short period of time we thought that we were never going to perform those songs, and then once we got to the point where we knew we could, the conversation on the business side of things was 'Do you want to tour on this record or should you get healthy and write a new record?' Of course our answer was 'We wrote this fucking record to play live. And we want it to be heard live. It would be an absolute shame if we didn't go out and play it'. So that's what we have been doing heretofore, and it's been very gratifying.”