Artist POV: Baroness’ John Baizley Creatively Keeps The Blue(and Red)-Collar Metal Band Chugging On The Road

Savannah, Georgia-born four-piece Baroness continues to bring its progressive, influential brand of heavy metal across the world, year in and year out as a working-class touring band that brings a memorable, high-energy show and enjoys doing it.

Led by frontman John Baizley, who not only drives the bus figuratively as lead vocalist, co-lead guitar and songwriter but actually tour manages the band, Baroness tours nearly constantly with its deep catalog of progressive metal dating back to 2007.

Having released and toured on new material with Stone in 2023, for this touring cycle the band celebrates its classic Red and Blue LPs from 2007 and 2009, respectively, with much changed since then but a renewed energy and appreciation for the material that initially helped the band break into the wider music consciousness.

The DIY ethos has seen the band playing a marathon set of blistering dual-guitar wizardry, a clear dedication to tight performances thanks to hard work and commitment to its craft and material. It’s paid off with new fans being made at shows, longtime fans coming out to rock clubs in under-served markets and reflected by a band clearly enjoying the fruits of its labor as much as anyone else in the room.

“The most challenging aspect of this upcoming tour and, and as well as the first leg we booked, is that we’re presenting the first two records in totality,” Baizley tells Pollstar during a break in rehearsals before the tour kicked off in September. “It’s every minute of every song, every moment, every detail is represented. We’re playing everything in sequence, the way they were recorded. It’s a no-breaks-kind of set. It’s just like a very, huge, very guitar-centric, musical recital. And in order to accomplish that, it requires quite a bit of precision rehearsals.”

Although changing members a few times in recent decades, the band for more than a decade has found its groove with lead guitar and backing vocalist Gina Gleason, drummer Sebastian Thomson and bassist Nick Jost, more than capable of dusting off the cobwebs on some of the deeper cuts from the Red and Blue LP’s, which includes favorites like the crushing “Isak,” dizzying “Wanderlust” and pummeling “A Horse Called Golgotha.” The tour leg ends Saturday night in Albuquerque, New Mexico’s Sister Bar.

Pollstar: Did you ever think you would be playing “classic” albums on tour in full? Was everybody into the idea of solely revisiting older material for a whole tour?
John Baizley: I think first and foremost, a lot of it has to do with the attitude you have coming into this. We found ourselves in a spot where the timing and sort of particulars of 2025 worked out in that our last record, Stone, we basically finished up all the international touring and support for that record that we could do, through a couple years of headlining tours and festivals and going all over the place. But coupled against that is the fact that we are a professional live touring band. We tour every year, and we tour as frequently throughout the year as we can.

We’ve started writing our new record, but we have yet to complete that. So here’s a year where we could, where we can and probably should, engage in something that’s a bit different or new for us and pays attention to those realities.

I’ve always until recently said I don’t ever want to get into the, “It’s the 20th anniversary, let’s do the record,” or let’s do something just purely for nostalgia. And I don’t think that we can entirely avoid that. There is a certain nostalgia that you as an audience member, and we as a band will have with that. But for us, if that felt tired, or if that felt obligatory for some reason, I don’t think we would have done it. It’s always important that this band applies like a purely test to everything.

On this West Coast run, you’re playing some venues and markets you may not have hit before.
We’ve tried to book this in venues that matched the sort of venues that we were playing when those records were made. More than any of our other music, these songs are sort of designed for clubs. We recognized that doing a show like this kind of speaks to the majority of our fan base. We wanted to make it a special night for anybody to come. We we recognize this really speaks to this particular type of fan, so we want to make sure everybody really can get all the detail and feeling of this music that we intended when it was written.

We’re very appreciative. I don’t think anybody can afford to say they’re not, but genuinely, I’ve always been very, very appreciative of our fans. We’ve developed a loyal fan base over the years and I don’t take that for granted. No matter the situation, we put everything we got into it.

Everything feels very intentional with Baroness, and the fans appreciate it.
We’re sort of anti-production, in many ways. The music is always meant to speak for itself. It’s not about lights or video backdrops. It’s not about hearing all kinds of garbage that’s not being played live coming through the PA . The response on some nights, fans kind of have this punky energy, but there were a couple nights in the last run, we almost closed off the pit because its like, “Doesn’t anybody like this?” (laughs). But we realized people were just paying so much attention that they’re almost holding themselves still to it, just to just to pick up all the details and the performance. So, now we’re just paying twice as much attention as they ever have. We really got to make sure that we’re performing at our optimal level, you know? It’s wild (laughs).

The band has really settled in recent years, and of course after overcoming the terrible tour bus accident in England in 2012.
There’s no new members of the band anymore! But there was a long time where it was always like there was somebody who was new to the band. Now, Sebastian’s been in the band now since 2012, Nick as well. Gina, 2016. This is the lineup of the band. This is the lineup that sticks. This is the lineup that works hard. This is the lineup that enjoys the work and can do it, knows how to tour and knows how to record, knows how to operate as a single entity. This is a group of people that I love.

You’re not just the band leader but actually driving the bus, or van, these days.
Our crew is nearly at the point of being like official band members. Our front-of-house guy’s been with us since 2012, he’s every bit a member of the band, in terms of our live performance. Everybody’s been with us a decade. We’re a fairly working class band, we can’t afford to do giant buses and huge productions and lights and wardrobe and makeup and all that. I drive our van, we have a merch guy. I tour manage this on the road. We all do this because we love it. What I’m looking for and what this band needs to surround itself with is people who are willing and understand that the sacrifice yields an internal success. It’s kind of hard to define.

Of course I pay my crew, but the best nights are ones where at the end of the night, everybody on stage and everybody off stage is proud of what they’ve done and we feel like we’ve all worked toward this one particular end. That’s one thing I love about this. The music industry, especially live touring industry is very much a team exercise every day. Every day is like problem solving. And the moment you get up until, you know, the moment you go to sleep. I feel fortunate over two decades to have worked with such talented people who worked twice as hard as a lot of people we see working around us. it’s amazing how hard people work in this industry and the things that they can accomplish.

You have to find a way to make it work long-term, too.
Well, it certainly hasn’t gotten easier since the pandemic. The pandemic had a very overall negative effect on the economy of live music, and recorded. Since that time period, we’re just trying to reestablish the way things are done, and, you know, to create, you know, some sense of security, because I think that was the first thing that, that went out the window in 2020 was the idea of predictability and security.

Look, I mean things are good. We’ve reverted to more of a boutique working-class model than the sort of loving off the fat of the land of the late 2000s and teens and things like that. I feel like we’re clawing our way back, but I just happen to be the sort of person to enjoy that fight. I’ll say it’s a real shame what certain parts of the industry did after the pandemic, that was like sort of predatory inflation and no respect for the artists.

It did cull the herd a bit, and I think in some ways it created a now-flowering underground music economy that wasn’t healthy at that point. There was about 10 years where I was lamenting the fact that I thought a lot of DIY spaces had sort of gone under, or that the DIY scene wasn’t quite as healthy as it had been, in favor of tehse mega tours that were sort of pricing everybody else out in the industry. I think what that’s done is that’s created an underground place where kids thought it was cool to pick up a guitar again. I’ve noticed youth movements that want to play loud, frenetic guitars again, that’s kind of come back in a really thrilling way recently.