Cloud Nothings: It’s better to try and see something positive
Frontman Dylan Baldi on running, rodents, and recording with Steve Albini
VANCOUVER – I was performing a Kintsugi when I first discovered Cloud Nothings. That fall I had relocated from Edmonton to London, ON, leaving behind most of my friends and family. I was 20 years old and attempting to repair a broken heart by melting down nearly every other aspect of my life. I left Alberta needing space; to excavate the year that year that had been, to sort through the debris. To determine what (if anything) was worth salvaging.
That summer I had failed to secure housing in London, so I bought a thrift store bible and found a job as a residence advisor at a Christian university. Though not enrolled, the school was an affiliate of my new alma mater, meaning I could live and work there. I was deputized as a member of the Fun Police and monitored the boys’ residence for drugs, noise, and untoward relations. In exchange, I earned a monthly stipend that covered the cost of my dorm.
It was there, in that small beige room on the third floor, with a window overlooking the parking lot, that I first heard Cloud Nothings and frontman Dylan Baldi.
Cloud Nothings is not for everyone. They write catchy and sometimes chaotic songs – expanding the noisy pop sensibilities of indie stalwarts like Nirvana, Television, and Wipers. Which is more or less why I love them. Two years younger than me, Baldi was nineteen when his self-titled record scored a 7.9 in Pitchfork, a fact I found inspiring then, and mind-blowing now. Thirteen years later, he’s a music business veteran, with dozens of songs under his belt. In April Cloud Nothings released Final Summer, their ninth studio album, which sees their familiar sonic textures lacquered together with a new dust of hope.
Our conversation, which took place last week, explores Dylan’s push into optimism, as well as his running routine, his recent rodent problem, and the band’s time working with Steve Albini, who produced their albums Attack On Memory and The Shadow I Remember, and who died this week of a heart attack, sparking tributes from across the music industry.
Remembering the producer and engineer, Baldi writes:
steve touched countless lives and changed mine and many others for the better. a genuine, singular, principled person. spent the last 40 years helping people make art. there's no reason for him to be gone and the world is less interesting without him. just a really sad day.
ES: Where are you right now?
DB: I’m in Cleveland. I just got back from a run. We’re practicing a little bit and heading out on tour tomorrow.
ES: How long was this morning’s run?
DB: Eight miles.
ES: Just a casual eight.
DB: Well, yeah. Laughs. For me at this point. But it was a nice way to start the day. I like running around Cleveland.
ES: Didn’t you just do a marathon in Texas?
DB: In Indiana. Fort Wayne. The northern fort.
ES: How was that?
DB: Actually, it went really badly. Laughs. I got about eight miles in and started feeling like something was very wrong with me. I was lightheaded and feeling crazy. I told myself, “Okay, I’m going to get through half of this and then check in with myself again.” I got through half and immediately threw up in this children's playground. I tried to keep going but I felt a little confused so I didn’t even finish. I had to stop halfway, which hadn’t happened to me before.
ES: How are you feeling now?
DB: Totally fine. An hour after it happened I was all good. I don’t know what it was. That was two days ago. It was funny. I saw Johnny Appleseed’s Grave. That’s the highlight of Fort Wayne, apparently. They’re very proud of Johnny Appleseed.
ES: How could you not be? Isn’t he, like, the original socialist?
DB: Sort of. He was almost the first capitalist. Well, not the first, but… I guess people didn’t drink water back then. They drank hard cider because the water was all gross and fucked up. So Johnny Appleseed was like, “Yeah, I'll sell you apples and apple trees and stuff so you can get drunk.” Laughs.
ES: That’s like the least socialist thing I’ve ever heard. Maybe I misunderstood his origin story. I thought he was going around giving out the seeds.
DB: I did too. I thought he was some kind of happy-go-lucky Gandhi figure or something. My mom was the one who broke it down for me. But his grave was weird. There was an apple on it, though, so that’s cool.
ES: Are you planning on running every day while on tour?
DB: Well, at home I try to run six days a week. I usually take Monday off. And I try to keep that schedule when we’re touring, too. It gets hard when the drives are long. Or when I was up too late doing whatever the night before. But generally, I try to keep a running schedule. I feel bad if I don’t do it at this point, I don't really know why. I just like to have some sort of physical thing happening in a day.
ES: Whenever I’m in a new city, I find myself directionally challenged. Do you think about your routes ahead of time? Or do you just head out and follow wherever the road takes you?
DB: Usually I’ll try to run in the morning before we head out from the hotel. We tend to stay in the suburbs. I’ll look at Google Maps for the nearest big green blotch and head that way. Sometimes the green blotch is nice, sometimes it’s pretty bleak. But I try to know where I’m going.
ES: I’m picturing you on the side of a six-lane highway.
DB: That almost happened to me not that long ago. We went to Asheville, NC. We drove all day, got to our accommodations, and then we had a day off. Everyone was going to meet our friend for dinner. And I was like, “Cool, I’m going to run there. It's only six miles away.” Little did I know. I was basically on a highway the entire way. It was very scary and weird. I got to the dinner and my friend was like, “What's wrong with you? You might be the only person in Asheville to have ever done that.” Sometimes it’s not great, but usually, you end up somewhere nice.
ES: Oh my god. You mentioned staying up late because of shows or whatever. Is that normal for you? I’ve been really focused on getting enough sleep and I wonder what your nighttime routine is like.
DB: It’s different depending on where I am, I guess. On tour, I have to be up late because we’re usually playing a show. That’s not my natural mode when I’m at home, though. At home, I’m more like you. I go to bed a little early. My girlfriend stays up late. Sometimes the dog comes with me. Sometimes she doesn't. But yeah, on tour I’ll be up until I have to go to sleep.
ES: Is it hard for you to come down after a show? I had a late basketball game last night and my cortisol levels were off the charts. I slept terribly.
DB: Laughs. Honestly, there’s so much to do. You play the show and afterward, you talk to whoever’s there. You sell merch. By the time it’s done, it’s 12:30 AM and I’m tired. And you’re doing that every night for a month. By the end of it, I need to go home and go to bed. But I also wake up early no matter what because, when I’m home, my dog wakes me up at 6. She starts licking my face until I get up with her. So I naturally wake up around then, which is kind of annoying. It helps with running, though, because I can get it done early.
ES: What kind of dog do you have?
DB: We have a little pit bull mix. She’s mostly a pit bull-border collie. Her name is Lavender.
ES: Lavender! That’s cute.
DB: Yeah she’s really funny. She’s a rescue. She’s missing part of her snout. Her teeth are showing, sometimes her tongue is hanging out in a funny way. She’s just a goofy little girl, but I like her. She’s got a lot of personality
ES: How long have you had Lavender for?
DB: Like three and a half years. I think we got her in 2021. Not on Christmas, exactly, but close. Essentially it was “Dog for Christmas.”
ES: Did you read that article about touring in The Guardian? It mentioned that the fees that bands are being paid to play have not risen, even though the cost of touring is up across the board.
DB: Yeah, that’s pretty true. The band was doing well for a couple of years, playing bigger places, but now we’re back to a smaller zone. We gotta be real frugal with how we go about things. We make money when we tour, but we have to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Laughs. We keep it really minimal. We don't have a crew or anything. It’s just the three of us in a van. We stay in one room in a hotel and then we come home and can afford to live, which is nice. But yeah sometimes you go a little crazy out there trying to make things work. And we’re lucky enough to be able to do that. Some people can’t, you know?
ES: Do you guys have other jobs when you’re off tour? Or are you able to kick your feet up a little?
DB: We all do other stuff here and there. Jason Gerycz, our drummer, plays in another band that’s at a similar level to us, so he makes some money doing that. I learned how to code during the pandemic. I’ll make websites for friends and stuff. I’ll do little odd things here and there, too. Chris Brown, our bassist, paints houses. We make enough on tour to live, but we’re not living large by any means.
ES: At the same time, I think Cloud Nothings is pretty creative in terms of finding other sources of income for the band. Like, you’ve got that monthly song subscription through Bandcamp…
DB: Yeah, we’ve been doing that since around the start of the pandemic.
The world is a bad place. But it’s better to try and see something positive.
ES: I think it’s interesting because it forces you to create art on a deadline, which you don’t always hear about. How has that influenced your process – do you find it difficult? Or is one song a month a sustainable practice for you?
DB: One song a month is very sustainable. At first, we did a four-song EP every month, which was a lot, in terms of making things decent enough to share with people. It was easier when we were just trapped at home. But as we started touring again and doing more stuff beyond sheltering-in-place, that became impossible. The lyrics got kind of terrible. Laughs. I was writing songs about cooking breakfast, writing a song about how my dog bit me. I thought “This is stupid, I’m out of things to say,” so we shifted to one song a month.
That said, I make stuff almost every day. I’ve always got a backlog we can work on, so one song a month is not difficult for us. Sometimes, the hard part is finding time to mix it because I’ll be busy for part of the month, and then Jason, who does all the recording, will be busy for the next part of the month. We might have one day where we can get everything done. But our subscriber base for that is pretty small… It’s almost a favor to these people for being a fan of the band for so long.
ES: You mentioned lyrics, and I wanted to ask you about “Mouse Policy” on Final Summer. Reading between the lines, it sounds like it’s based on a real encounter…
DB: Yeah, it’s literally about a mouse. Or mice, I guess. I live in Philadelphia now with my girlfriend. She bought the place two and a half years ago. We've been living there and suddenly we were getting mice. I would wake up and find a dead mouse on the ground every couple of days. It was not good. I tried to find humane ways to get rid of them, but nothing worked. So… We did some stuff that wasn’t as nice to the mice. They’re gone now. But yeah, that song is literally about me being mad at some mice. [Editor’s note: It rips.]
ES: We had a mouse in our old apartment. He was brazen. He would saunter across our living room in the middle of the day on his way to the kitchen.
DB: Laughs. It would be the same thing for us. We’d be sitting there and out of the corner of my eye I’d see something move. Like, “Please don’t be the mouse.” But it was the mouse.
ES: It’s a horror show. It only got better once we adopted our cat, Stu, but even then, it took him like six months. This mouse was running the show.
DB: It sucks. And you wonder, “What are we supposed to do about this?” I don’t want to hurt an animal, but this thing is annoying. It’s my house.
ES: The album feels hopeful by Cloud Nothings standards. Was that intentional for you? Even the cover art feels like a deep exhale compared to your more tightly wound records like Last Burning Building.
DB: I feel pretty bummed sometimes and the lyrics of different records convey that. But for this one, every time I wrote something that seemed negative, I’d be like, “I don’t really feel this way.” I’m trying not to be a downer about everything, even though that’s very easy. The world is a bad place. But it’s better to try and see something positive. Musically, I think everything on the record is in a major key, which is rare for us.
ES: Do you feel like you wrote the record that you needed to hear, or did you write the record that other people needed to hear?
DB: What usually happens is I’ll make something that I like and that seems cool to me. And then going back to it years later, I’ll be like, “Oh, that is literally exactly how I felt and what I was thinking,” even though I wasn’t conscious of it at the time. I wasn’t trying to make something that reflected my mental state or whatever. But if I go back to Attack On Memory, or Here And Nowhere Else, I remember how I was feeling about my life at the time. Often the lyrics will jump out at me in specific ways where I realize what I was singing about, even though I wasn’t aware of it at the time. I have a feeling this one will do the same thing for me.
ES: I’m sure you’ve been asked this before, but how did the Steve Albini connection come about? Why did you want to work with him on previous records?
DB: Initially, I didn’t even know it was an option for us. Our label at the time, Carpark Records, wanted us to record somewhere other than my basement with one microphone. Todd, who runs the label, was like “Would you want to do it with Steve Albini?”
It was fun. We went back and did another one with him two years ago.
ES: Did you learn anything working with Steve? He has so much experience and knowledge, particularly in punk.
I think it’s cool that there’s one guy who does things his own way. It’s something you don’t get anywhere else.
DB: He has a really idiosyncratic way of doing everything. We’ve recorded with other people since then, and I’ve never seen anyone do things the way he does. In a way I don’t even want to learn from that. I think it’s cool that there’s one guy who does things his own way. It’s something you don’t get anywhere else. The way he mixes, is like something out of the 1950s, back when you had to do everything on the fly with no computer. He’s moving faders as the song is playing in order to mix it. It’s really cool to see, and it’s not the way I would do it, you know? I just do things on my computer and it’s super easy and simple. There’s something almost mad scientist about him.
ES: Not to put words in your mouth, but you seem like a guy who, if you can do it yourself, nine times out of ten you will. It makes sense for you to turn to someone who can offer something different.
DB: Totally. Even the fact that he does almost everything to tape. He literally splices tape, which looks hard. But he does it like it’s no problem. He’ll chop stuff together the way I would copy and paste something. It’s incredible to see someone do that. He can pretty much do anything.
Dylan Baldi is a musician. He lives in Philadelphia.