If you’re a Vampire Weekend fan, you’ll know Chris Baio: bassist, backing vocalist, and unsung Twitter hero – the composer of such painfully beautiful tweets as, “wearing pants w/ a big ol’ rip in the butt is a good way to encourage strangers to shame you for wearing pants w/ a big ol’ rip in the butt”.
Speaking to Baio from his new home in London in the midst of Vampire Weekend’s tour for their third record Modern Vampires Of The City, it seems it never stops for musicians!
“I just got home from tour two days ago, so I’m doing really mundane errands like laundry, things like that – and working on a little bit of music, just hanging out at home.”
He’s not just a member of the beloved indie outfit, however – he has an electronic side project, BAIO, for which he’s about to launch a second EP. It’s such a vastly different genre to what audiences perhaps expect, but is something Baio’s been passionate about for a long time.
“Electronic music was something that I looked at with envy for a very long time, because I have done DJ’ing and I do love DJ’ing. I did college radio when I was in university, and we would just go around to parties and play music there. I didn’t DJ for a while after the band took off, but I got really back into it around 2009, in terms of being serious about it and trying to create stuff,” Baio says.
For someone in a group with such a devoted fan base, branching out alone and playing a different style of music mustn’t come without its challenges.
“People can be pretty rude to your face, and there’s something kind of challenging about everything that DJs have to face. I think that can give you thicker skin, which is such a good thing in music,” he laughs.
It’s really interesting listening to Baio talk; he’s an incredibly articulate and thoughtful speaker who is humble but still intensely realistic about his career and the music industry in general.
“Sometimes you’ll have to deal with very drunk people who come up and tell you they hate everything you’re playing and in a way I think it’s a good thing”“If you’re in a band,” he says, “there’s a really fierce social construct where you’re going to play certain songs, and the audience know what they’ll get, but with a DJ they can play anything. It’s not as clean cut there. Sometimes you’ll have to deal with very drunk people who come up and tell you they hate everything you’re playing and in a way I think it’s a good thing, because it made me feel a little less complacent and more comfortable about making my own tracks and putting them out to the world.”
Despite his electronic music being largely instrumental, Baio uses words extremely intelligently and speaks a lot about lyrics – particularly from Vampire Weekend, whose third album was quite lyrically stimulating and thought-provoking in its obscurity.
“Someone asked me the other day what my favourite Vampire Weekend lyric is, and as a joke I just said ‘A, A, A’ (from “A-Punk”)! I was thinking about it though, and there’s this lyric that’s on a B-side of ours called ‘California English Part 2’, and there’s a line that Ezra has, and it’s ‘How many nations think that they own you?’ and I really like that. It’s very evocative.”
Baio is surprisingly candid not only about lyrical content, but about how different the atmosphere is and indeed how intimidating it is to be onstage on his own, as opposed to having the audience’s attention divided by four and often aimed at the frontman.
“There are two things. One is that when you’re DJing you’re doing work, you’re queuing up the next song, and you’re reading the crowd. You’re a lot less occupied than when you’re playing bass and singing, so there’s not quite as much to do, and you’re the only one there, so everyone’s looking at you. I’ve been getting more and more used to it. It’s quite an adjustment. I’m not going to, like, jump up and down and take my shirt off or anything like that, that’s not my energy as a DJ, but oh my god, such an adjustment!
“We’d play these big shows with the band when I really started picking up DJ’ing, and I DJ’d to like 50 people after (the shows) and I’d be SO much more nervous for the second one even playing to one-twentieth of the people. But I feel way more comfortable up on stage DJ-ing now and I really do love it.”
His new EP Mira is – strangely enough – being released on indie Sydney label Future Classic, a label that has produced artists such as Flume, Jagwar Ma, and Flight Facilities.
“Well, I put out the last record on Greco-Roman which is based in Berlin and London, but I felt like the music I was making was definitely suited to Australia. I always really enjoy DJ’ing there, so at the end of last year they asked me to just do a remix for one of their bands, New Navy, which just recently came out. In the middle of the New York winter I got on a plane, and I flew over to Australia and met up with the Future Classic people in Sydney.
“There’s always some nerves when you send tracks to a label you really admire, and they say they like what you’ve sent them, it’s a very exciting feeling – so when they said they wanted to put out the EP I was all for it!”
Good news for BAIO and Vampire Weekend fans alike, Baio is hoping to play some DJ sets when the band comes to headline the Falls Festival dates over the New Year.
“You know, I was actually supposed to DJ at the Falls Festival three years ago, but I got snowed-in in New York! There was this crazy, crazy snowstorm and they weren’t able to get the snow off my block for about five days, so I couldn’t get a flight to Australia – but to be coming back with the band and headlining, it’s like I had unfinished business. I’ll finally get to Falls!”
“I felt like the music I was making was definitely suited to Australia.”As well as the side project, Baio has entered into the world of film, composing the score for the film Somebody Out There Likes Me, which screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival earlier this year.
“I really loved the world of film; I watch a lot of movies. I loved that process, trying to fulfil and complement another person’s vision. I was working on that around the same time I worked on my first EP, so I had the more rhythm-based project and the more melodic project where I’d write a minute-long song on guitar, send it to the director, and he’d take all the pieces and develop some longer pieces. I really enjoyed the process and it’s something I’d like to do more of in the future.”
And if a biographical Baio film was made, who would be the star?
“I’m going to say Jack Nicholson. I need someone a lot older than me to give my life some gravitas that it doesn’t necessarily have!”
A humble, sweet, and eloquent man of many talents (and many words), it’s pretty hard to imagine any lack of gravitas in Baio’s life.
BAIO’s new EP Mira is out now through Future Classic
Watch ‘Mira’ here
