Baths on Writing About Sex, Video Games, and Making a Living

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Will Weisenfeld didn't have to become the kind of musician he is today; his 2010 Baths debut Cerulean was exactly the type of record that felt fresh while having immediate appeal, you could imagine someone less ambitious simply content to replicate (and water down) its sound. instead, every Baths record has showcased complex and aggressive evolutions to his songwriting, and Gut—his first since 2017's Romaplasm—is his most striking move yet. I really love it, and I'd somehow not spoken to Will since we ran into each other a looong time ago at a CMJ party (remember CMJ?), so it was great to hop on the phone last month and talk through everything regarding his career, his life, and more. Check it out:

So, the one time we'd run into each other in person previously, it was right after we'd done the Rising profile on you over at Pichfork. It was a unique period of time where that stuff seemingly had, if not a financial effect, at the very least an impact when it comes to career visibility. I'm curious to hear you reflect on that period of time.
Before that time, I spent a lot of time online learning about and being a fan of other musicians—experimental electronic stuff. So from doing that, there's no explaining what it's like to then suddenly see your name in the same areas. It was completely surreal. The very first post was Pitchfork posting my song "Maximalist." They were just like, "This is cool," and that was like my whole body was on fire. I couldn't believe that it had happened. It was like my brain exploded. I was screaming, running around. I told all my friends, my parents—my parents didn't understand at all. But it was crazy to me.

The reality of it is—you learn this later on, years down the line—that you don't want to put too much weight into a single press outlet as being the only thing that matters. But there was an era where Pitchfork really seemed like a step further than most. They kept posting stuff—a Braids remix, the Rising profile, they reviewed all my records—and it kept going for a long time and made me feel kind of invincible. There was a a ripple effect from that. There's tons of people working press and doing their job to help get my music into other people's hands, but they were the first champion of my stuff. I felt like there were people on my side before I was even on my side.

The earliest champions in my own camp was Jonathan Larroquette from the band Jogger. He pushed my music into the hands of Alfred Darlington, aka Daedalus, and Daedalus pushed me into the beat scene. Daddy Kev from Low End Theory gave me my first residency out there. There were all the folks at Pitchfork—you included—giving me continuous coverage, as well as all these different components where the whirlwind speed of it meant that there was no time for me to take stock of anything. It felt like I was on a rocket and I had to play my part. I don't even know how I found the time to be creative, because the fervor was so intense.

Now, if anything is happening to me where I have to pay attention and be on social media...I'm self-releasing this new record, and so much of that is having to do a million things at once. I'm finding it very hard to be a creatively inclined person while that's happening. I'm half-working a 9-to-5, except there's no proper schedule to it. It's very hard for me to crisscross between those states of being. I'm becoming this type of person where, when I go on tour I'm that type of person, and the creative brain for my own music is separate.

The whole first wave of all that stuff, I don't even remember most of it. One of the first dates of my first headlining tour—I think it was D.C.—they'd said the show had sold out, and I being like, "This is fucking crazy. Two years ago, nobody knew anything about me, and now all of this stuff is happening." I let my head get really—not big about it, but a little not grounded. I was like, "Oh my God, this can happen forever, this is so crazy—this is my life now." Of course, the reality of the music industry is that happens once in a blue moon.

Yeah, when I first started doing this for a living, I was always like, "I really like music and that's pretty much it. I have a lot of opinions, and I'm gonna share them." But as time went on, especially as I got distance from that specific job, I was like, "Oh, shit, this has a little more impact on peoples' careers and lives than I thought it would." Now it seems like it's back at the beginning, where as someone who covers music, getting people exposure is much harder now. I feel like it's gone from "Pitchfork has too much power" to "Nobody has any power anymore."
That's definitely what the musician perspective was at that time. In all honesty, as much as people were thankful for getting posted on Pitchfork, people were also afraid of Pitchfork. I was, too. The wrong thing gets said about you or the wrong review gets posted, and your whole future in independent music is way different than it was the month before, Maybe it's not as astronomically intense as all that, but that's how it felt.

There was so much power in it, and you're saying now that you don't know where the power is....I have no idea what or if there is perfect coverage, or where any of that sits. I have no perspective on anything. I don't know what's going on at any given point in time. I never know what's happening. I don't know what's going on.

I do know that I really like this new record. Talk to me about what the last seven years have been like for you in terms of developing this one.
After Romaplasm...I mean, there's a way to tell this that's a little more divorced from professional stuff that was kind of askew. That's more complicated to go into, and I don't know how deep I'll go. But if we're talking emotionally and sonically, there's two different conversations that we can have, and I'll figure out how to talk about it without naming names or whatever.

Basically, I'm in a really good place now so there's nothing to worry about—but touring Romaplasm, it was really fun, but it was also a dissolution of not understanding what I wanted out of my own music, and what I wanted to do next. It took, as it always does, a break from doing things and getting back to a normal life—exercising, getting into routine, and realizing that so much of the music I was listening to is band-oriented music. I've always been a fan of electronic music, but there's more immediacy and access to emotion in the loudest bands I'd heard. I don't listen to them anymore, but Daughters was a big one at the time. Gilla Band was a massive influence on me. Stuff that skirts this line of being noise music, but also being rock music and kind of post-punk—music that was energetic in a very specific and emotional way.

The way pop music can give me this direct sadness or uncertainty, and electronic music can give me wistful emotions, there's something I was getting out of this kind of rock music that was something I hadn't emotionally come to terms with—maybe a little bit on Obsidian, but definitely not on Romaplasm. It was really driving and intense. I was obsessed with relentless music that beat you over the head with an idea and didn't let you escape at all. That became really exciting to me, and that also veered into the horror movies that I ended up liking.

I needed to take personal responsibility for making myself healthier, and I wanted content that cared me more—music that pushed me into this place of, "I don't know how to feel about this." It just feels good to have that sort of thing. Between any record I'd make as Baths, I was somewhere other than where I was on the last record, so that wanting something relentless and unflinching would be skewed into whatever Gut became. I had this philosophy where all the music and inspiration was the Gut feeling. I kept thinking of emotions that I didn't have control over, and I didn't have ways of being intellectual about it anymore. That became really inspiring to me—not being able to intellectualize my emotions and just acting on them. To me, that's a very punk ethos. A lot of punk rock and louder metal is just blasting the thing in your face. I don't think Gut is that, but I think it's inspired by that. I still make whatever music it is that I make, and I don't think too much about what it is—I just make it.

A lot of that, because of who I am, was embarrassingly horny and direct—really frank lyrics about sex. It's not a thesis for the record, but there's a line on the record that's very much emotionally what I was trying to do, where it's like sex on a tarp in an empty house. It's not lyrical or poetic, it's just "Here's a situation and it's a real thing that I did once." Afterwards, I clocked how ridiculous that was, but also that I didn't hesitate to do that. I was just like, "This is something I'm doing now because I decided it was part of my day today." The emotions surrounding that were so complex that I was trying to write a song that made that make sense and talking about other instances that made me feel that same way.

My bandmate Morgan, when we were touring together—we no longer tour or live together, but we're still totally amicable, it's just circumstantially we're not you know in the same place anymore—Morgan and I have always talked about how a lot of our favorite music is emotional in a way that neither of us are able to articulate. It's not like, "Here's a sad song, here's a happy song," it's something in between all of these different things thatfeels intense in some way that is hard to describe. I always have that feeling while trying to make music, and I allowed myself to do that a lot more with this one.

Talk to me more about writing lyrics focused on sex. It's not necessarily something you get all that often from indie-electronic fare, so when someone's doing it my ears perk up.
With writing lyrics and music about sex, the commonly understood thing is that if you say, "This is a song about sex," often that's immediately interpreted as "sexy"—a celebration of sexual autonomy. It's this thing that's really skewed in a positive light, and when people are writing songs about sex in a darker way it's something that's usually related to drugs or sex addiction—negative subjects to talk about. But in what I've listened to, it's been harder to find music that talks about sex in a frank way—a really direct, almost academic and anthropological way. "This is the way a modern gay person interacts with the world through sexual activity."

So much of the way that I write about sex is trying to be very direct and clear with thoughts and experiences that I've had—things that were either extremely real to me, or things I've had a very real imagining of in my head that relates directly to something that happened in my life. It'd be a disservice to the record to go into exactly which things are true and which are not, but the weight of the reality or unreality of those things are the same. It's all stuff that feels really pertinent to me, and writing about that stuff feels really natural to me because I'm well past the point of thinking about sex by itself as a negative or a positive. It's a human experience where it can be a million different possible things, and Lord knows I've had a million different sexual experiences that have gone in all sorts of directions. I like hearing—or even writing—about sexual experiences that are just, "This happened, and I'm thinking these things about it." Or, "This happened, and it weighs on me in this specific way. Even if that's an unreality, this is the way I'm interpreting it." So much of where I'm at in my life right now, I know that I'm spending too much time thinking about it. It's such a prevailing, pervasive force of being an adult gay person—especially one who is not in a relationship.

I've dealt with a bunch of weird personal and professional stuff in the past couple of years, where I've had to reignite myself creatively and professionally in a way that is very good now—but the past couple years, I was really going deeper and deeper into a depression, and a misunderstanding of what I was doing as an artist. The first couple months of last year were some of the hardest in my entire life—it was crazy. I had no money, I was in a massive overhaul of everything behind the scenes. Where I'm at right now is a totally new experience. I feel really revived, and creativity is starting to flow back into me.

The other weird thing is that Gut was made and finished in 2022, amidst all of my uncertainty about myself and trying to push something out that made sense to me. So, to circle back to the very first part of this question, writing about sex in that way is the thing that feels accurate and correct to me, as opposed to trying to only glorify or shun it. It's uch a massively faceted experience that I can't choose to write about it one way. I have to see it through in writing about it a thousand different ways, especially if it's something that is the most pervasive thought I have.

Let's talk about the ups and downs of being an independent musician. It's obviously a lot different than it was when you started out. I say to people all the time it almost seems like gambling now.
That's a very accurate way to put it. I think the greatest misconception of the past decade in independent music was that everybody had money. Straight up, that was not correct. It was correct for a very certain ilk of musician that had much larger followings or record deals—sustenance, networks of people behind them—but basically...

In my own life, also, I've had—I can talk a little bit about this—my dad passed away three years ago, and he had a lifelong problem with gambling that none of us knew about.

Oh wow.
It was this thing that, upon his passing, made everything about the whole past part of my life make sense. I'd lent him money for certain things that just never got returned or fell flat. I was a musician that was successful, but I also had less and less and less of a safety net, to the point where I didn't have one at all. If music started to fail me, that was literally it. I had nothing else I could turn to. I couldn't ask my family for any more money that wasn't there. My brother and my mom have had to work their asses off independently for themselves to exist the way that they exist. All three of us are totally there for each other. That was a really crazy time.

You operate and think about the world so differently when you don't have a safety net—and I was a person that grew up privileged enough with upper-middle class comforts when I was younger. I existed in the world with that feeling. "No matter what happens, there's something I can fall back on." To be fair to my parents, they were very adamant that, "This won't always be here for you, you know. You need to get good at a job so you can stand on your own two feet." But the reality settling in more and more that that was just slowly disappearing, and having to weigh the idea that all I can do is be an independent musician against that is a very daunting feeling. Even on dates, when somebody asks what I do, I say, "I'm an independent musician, and the pay is like," and I do this gesture of a mountain going up and down.

I have no fucking clue what I'm going to be making. It's just about doing what I can, when I can—and not past the point where I feel like I'm losing my soul. So the idea of trying to be financially stable, especially now, is more difficult than it's ever been. I can't speak to every single person's individual experience, and I know that it has been hard for me, but I'm also a person who is lucky enough that I have some level of a following where I can exist with this comfortable expectation of the fact that if I put music out, people will want it, which is incredible. I literally couldn't operate and do what I do without having the comfort of that expectation. It's a very powerful thing, and I wouldn't give it up for anything, because it's the only way I'm able to do what I do professionally.

But at the same time, it's—like you said—a gamble. Everything that you do is still a risk. Self-releasing Gut is the biggest risk I've taken in a very long time, because the amount of effort I want to put into releasing it properly is very tough on the wallet. You have to put up a fuck ton of money up front in order for all the pieces to coexist properly. There's PR, record pressing, the individual components of putting it out—you have to pay for a bio, press photos. I have a great manager now who's comfortably tallying all my things and making sure that we have everything in order. The act of self-releasing this record is essentially just me and her, plus the component pieces of the team we're helping to put things together. We have the full-time job of of making this happen. It's very weird, because it's a financial strain—it's highly stressful and intense—but it's also the most I've ever understood about my own career in my entire life. I literally feel like I know more about making a record now than I ever have, and I still feel super in the dark about most component pieces of it.

I'm pivoting now a little bit, but this record is a very band-sounding record—guitar-based, drums. I still have that lingering jealousy of seeing the way other bands I know can make a record, where they go to a studio and live there for three weeks or a month and just make a record in a studio. I've never done anything like that in my life. That seems like a complete fantasy to me. I have no idea how people can afford it, but it makes sense when there's a safety net or a band has a record label that can help cover things like that. I've never existed in those playing fields. I don't know how it works. So I came to a point of knowing that despite the drive in me to make a record that feels that way, I don't need a studio situation to make that happen. And that's not like a revolutionary idea—producers and artists have been doing that forever. But it was revolutionary to me as a solo electronic artist. I had to prove to myself that I can make this sort of record, because it's emotionally where I'm at—and I need to do it now if I'm ever going to, in order to make sure that I have the ability to do it in the future.

So it was a little bit of a proving ground, but once I started aesthetically dealing with that sound, a lot more of what I wanted the record to be about made sense. If it's this direct and this honest in terms of what I've been inspired by aesthetically, then the lyrics also have to match up with that and frankly talk about the things I've been thinking about for the past five-to-ten years. It's difficult financially to do anything, but it's not difficult to do the art correctly. It's just a matter of balancing all the different pieces that you have, in a way that's taken me a long time to figure out.

Even though this record does sound different for you, it does also sound very Baths-y too. Tell me about how you see your sound in terms of your contemporaries.
My answer very much deals with the experience of community, which is a word that I have a very strained relationship with. In terms of people that I see myself aligned with, it's so all over the place. I'm friends with a ton of musicians, but I don't necessarily see the music that I make as aligned with what they're doing—and I think that goes both ways. There are bands that are huge influences on me, but I also don't think the music I make aligns with what they're doing. There's music I'm inspired by that I keep trying to make, and when I fuck up the process of that, it turns into whatever my music ends up being. It's people whose shit I endlessly respect—a lot of experimental and electronic producers—that I feel that way about. I love their shit, and I'll try to make something inspired by them and be like, "What the fuck is this?" And then I take it in a very different direction.

It's not like I'm trying to avoid sounding like somebody else. I list and talk about all of my influences all the time. On every social media thing, I'm constantly posting about music where I'm like, "Oh shit, this rips, this person's doing something amazing," blah blah blah. I never want to shy away from that stuff. I'm a fan of music, art, animation. I'm going to talk about that shit all the time. I love to talk about it.

But I have this problem where, when I look at the way people talk about community in music, it always exists as a double-edged sword, It's a wonderful thing, on a personal level, to have friends that are musicians. But there's also this lingering homogeny that can happen in a deeply communal musical space. When a lot of like-minded people who are fans of each other stick that close, sometimes a lot of the music starts to cross over between all of those people and some things that get released sound more and more similar to each other. It's not in a bad way—sometimes that makes people make the best records they've ever made—but I'm a demonic control freak when it comes to my own music.

Talking about Baths, I'm now in this place with this project where I'm putting out a reflection of myself at whatever point in my life. To allow other people into that space and infiltrate whatever that effort is, in a way that's not heavily ordained by me, doesn't feel correct. It's not an emotionally loaded thing, it's just the way I see myself making my own music. The metaphor I use is looking at a painter. Some painters have assistants and folks who come in and help them make the work. But there are also painters who do the painting themselves—nobody else is involved in the process. Far more often, that's the case with smaller, more independent artists, and when it comes to making music, it's always felt like the most normal, honest, and reflective way.

In independent music, because of how much we need to always look out for each other—because there's so much predatory practice against us—the idea of fiercely, intensely wanting to be independent in your process is often seen as a little bit incorrect or selfish, or not necessarily the right way of doing things. There's so much conversation that's going in the opposite direction. There's not a lot of people who are like, "Hey, I fucking hate making records with other people." There's nothing wrong with me not wanting to make a record with other people.

That being said, there are collaborators on this record who came in in a very ordained way, where I was like, "I need drums on this song, can you play drums?" i I wasn't like, "Hey, let's hop in the studio and play around." I was like, "I need you to play in a specific way." My relationship with collaboration has always been a little skewed because of how much control I like to have over what I'm doing. That's neither good or bad —it's just the way that it is.

Yeah, I've been doing this newsletter on my own for almost five years now, and at this point I way prefer it to the process of having to pitch things to an editor internally and all of that.
I'm always trying to shout that it's valid to have it that way. It's not like you or I are working against the grain and telling other people, "There's a better way." It's just like, "Hey, this works for me, and that's okay." The thrill and fun of all creative endeavors is not saying that there's a right way for it to be done. It's like, "You do whatever the fuck you want to do, and I can't wait to see what you do with it." That's how I want people to absorb me talking about my process.

Tell me more about the score work you've done recently. At this point, so many independent musicians I talk to do it very frequently.
Earlier, I'd mentioned how I'm compartmentalizing where being creative is different than when I'm on tour, or on admin email duty. That completely carries over to score work. Scoring Will is a different person. I'm in a completely different creative headspace where everything about the way I'm making music is infinitely less precious, in a good way. I'm recognizing that I have a style—my likes and dislikes—but ultimately I'm writing for somebody else's vision. That's the priority, and it's been nice because I'm a little kinder to my process and much more comfortable with being like, "Oh, this is terrible, I'm gonna throw this out and try something new." There's less emotional weight to that. I'll get an email that's like, "This isn't right at all. Can we try something else?" And I'm like, "Yes, that's fine." Whereas if it's my own music, I'm the only person who's like, "Is this bad? Is this good? Maybe I have to wait two weeks and see." With scoring, all that thinking is relegated to the folks who are creative minds on the project.

With Big Boys, it was about discussing possible approaches and me sending samples of ideas that I thought could be good—but, ultimately, the director pointed to a very specific record of mine, the Geotic album Sunset Mountain, which was an all-vocal record that he loved. I was very geeked on that, because I don't think that was a very popular record of mine, so I was excited to try that approach. The samples I tried made so much sense for the movie, which is a solitary, deeply layered gay male vocal being the narrative thoroughfare for a gay boy moving through his adolescence. The more we tried it, the more we liked it, so the whole score revolved around that idea.

Scoring work is usually stuff like that: Trying to find the right idea, or the creator's intention for the vision, and then auditioning ideas the same way you would audition ways of doing a scene before you act it out. Sometimes, I'll get a note from a director that's just like, "I don't know what I want in this scene," and I'll be like, "Okay, I'm just gonna try some stuff and do a couple of things." Sometimes that lands, or sometimes—and more often—they're like, "This didn't work, but now I know why it doesn't work, and this is what I would like you to do." That's the most affirming note to me—that a director knows what they're doing. I can trust that
they're comfortable enough to tell me that they don't know what they want, and in turn, it means I trust them enough when they get back to me with notes about something they didn't like after I tried it.

What video games have you been playing recently?
I'm, like, in turmoil. Dragon Age: Inquisition is one of my favorite games of all time, so I played the new one and had problems with it that stemmed from the fact that it's way more chaste than the previous games. I'm playing Path of Exile 2.

How is that? I have a friend who's really into it, but I'm hesitant to pay for Early Access.
I'd say that if you're a fan of Diablo 2, it's the closest and most streamlined version of that experience with a really creative and fun approach. The biggest problem with games like that is the balance and pacing—maintaining the feeling that you have skill unlocks to look forward to. I think Diablo 4 suffered from everything happening too quickly and becoming like a machine that you're just turning on and having it play. Path of Exile 2 feels like you're constantly making decisions and reworking your build in a really fun but not stressful way, and the skill unlocks come at a very well-intervaled rate. I'm really impressed with how fun it is and how hard it is. Certain boss fights are really tough to the point where I have to rework everything. It's literally the best Early Access experience I've ever had, and apparently it's only half of what the full game is going to be, which is insane. I played for 50 hours and I'm not even finished.