Recently I was able to catch up with Anthony Raneri of Bayside to discuss everything that went into their new album, There Are Worse Things Than Being Alive, that just dropped today. The latest record, Bayside’s ninth in total, is a great mix of all the elements that made the band rise to fame in the genre, and as Anthony puts it in the interview, “It sounds like Bayside, but better.” Bayside are currently on tour in support of the new album, and tour dates are below.
Thank you so much for your time today, Anthony. Bayside is gearing up for the release of their ninth studio album called, There Are Worse Things Than Being Alive, out digitally on April 5, and I know the vinyl comes out a little bit later after that. So where did the album title originate from, and what does it mean to you today?
I think it’s about looking on the bright side. I think it’s about…there’s a lot of lyrical content on the record that talks about different struggles. I touch on getting older, growing up, life changing. But the title sort of brings it back to at the end of the day that being alive isn’t so bad, right? We’ve got to make the best of what we have, and that life isn’t so bad.
Gotcha. And I listened to the advance of the new record, which sounds incredible by the way from my perspective, and it feels as if your band is as passionate as you’ve ever been about your music. Where do you continue to draw your inspiration from as a band and as artists growing?
We’re always looking for new stuff. Whenever we approach writing a new record, we are actively searching for inspiration. We’ll find things and we’ll use them as references. Like we will find a band, say I was listening to a lot of Biffy Clyro when we were writing this record, so I’ll bring that and I’ll play it for everybody. Chris, Nick, Jack, they might find things that they’re stoked on in the moment that they want to try to use elements of or use as inspiration, and they’ll share it with the rest of us. And we kind of try to find a common direction. I feel like it’s easier to create with a reference.
Sure, yeah. Bayside have been a band for over 20+ years, which is a remarkable achievement in its own right. What continues to keep you guys motivated as musicians and artists?
Well it might sound cliche, but we just love what we do. I think that you spend a lot of time as a band, especially in earlier years as a band, trying to climb the ladder. Trying to “up” everything all the time. Trying to up popularity, whatever it may be: status, money, whatever. We’re really happy with where we are as a band. We’re pretty satisfied, and that really makes it a lot easier to focus on the music, believe it or not. And that’s something that people lose sight of when they’re trying to advance all these other parts of their careers…they forget that it’s the music that is going to advance all those other things. You could be a band for years and years and put out record after record, and it may never connect. And some bands make one great record and shoot to the top. So shedding a lot of that kind of weight makes it easier to focus on just the craft.
Who are some of your trusted voices that you either test new music or get feedback from? Is there anyone besides your bandmates?
Well, something that I really pay attention to as a songwriter is what somebody who didn’t write the song is going to think of it. That’s an easy trap to fall into when you’re writing songs to fall in love with parts. Or to not recognize that you may hear it a certain way. But you have different contexts. You know, so we’re gonna write for the fans. So I play stuff for my wife. It’s really important to me to bounce things off of people, and I send things to friends. Friends that are in music, friends that are not in music. Shep Goodman, who produced a bunch of Bayside records, I still send him songs all the time to bounce off of him. I send stuff to our agent who’s been our agent for 20 years, and I’ll send stuff to our manager, too. I really like to get opinions from people who are not involved in our creative process, but are also not involved in any creative process. Because then there’s what would I do from other musicians, what would they have their kind of glasses on to so I want to know what the fans are going to think. You know, I want to know how this feels to somebody who has no attachment to it at all. So yeah, it’s really important to me to bounce things off of people and I like to bounce it off of my friends, my family. I don’t live with my mom anymore, obviously! <Laughter> But when we were writing Sirens and the self-titled record and stuff, I would play stuff with my mom all the time. It’s really important to me to see somebody who’s just listening as a potential fan.
That’s awesome. I’m glad you still have these trusted voices still around your environment, too. So, one of your singles, “The Devils” features memorable lyrics of: “No more sunny days / I can report there’s clouds in all directions / Full speed ahead / Because I know the storm like the back of my hand.” Can you explain where some of that lyrical inspiration came from in that particular track?
When I’m writing lyrics, it’s hard to create something out of nothing, you know? You’ve got a blank page. And once you get started, you can sort of get into a groove. But creating something out of nothing is hard. So, I’ve taken to just looking around, and I’ll look around and I might see something on the wall. I might have, like with “Castaway” I was reading a book that made me sort of pop that word into my mind. So you have to start somewhere. So with that, I was thinking he was storming out. I mean, as cheesy as that is, it was storming while I was writing, so I thought about the storm. I thought about the storms that we sort of go through in our life, and then the way that that verse ties up is the struggles I’ve been through, this struggle, and I know my way through it, I guess.
Do you have any favorite poets or lyricists that you took elements from that you put back into your own music?
Sure, I mean, Josh Cater is like one of the greats for sure. Ben Gibbard is one of the greats. Then, Morrissey. Something I take from somebody like Morrissey or Josh Cater, or in particular is like, sometimes they say something that’s a little ridiculous. And it makes you do a double take. And I kinda like that feeling. Like what the hell did he just say? So I kind of tried to throw some of that stuff in my writing.
Yeah, and I’ve noticed that in your band’s career too over time. There’s things that really stand out that make you want to revisit the record again and again.
Yeah, it’s good to have depth. I think that that has something to do with it. I think that we can attribute some of our longevity to the depth that we try to create music and finding new things every time you listen, or finding a new meaning every time you listen.
Yeah, absolutely. It’s definitely one of the things that keeps me coming back to your band. Bayside is about to go on tour starting next month with Armor For Sleep, Finch, and Winona Fighter. With so much great material to choose from in your discography, can you walk me through how you will craft out the setlist for this upcoming tour?
It gets harder <over time>. I mean, we’ve reached the point where there are singles that we don’t play on every tour because there’s so many now, but I’d say at least between a third to a half of the setlist is usually predetermined before we even sit down to write it, because there are just songs that we have to play. There’s the songs that people expect. So, it’s weird. Our fanbase is strange, because we have a lot of diehard fans who want to hear the 10th track on the least popular record, or they want to hear B-sides or things like that. And we try to pepper some of that in. We have people who just know the singles. We have people who just know the old records. We have people who just know the new records, because the newer records have sort of broken into a more mainstream rock audience. And there are people who don’t listen to Taking Back Sunday, but they listen to us, which is kind of crazy to think that it’s gotten to that point. But then there are the people who listened to us, New Found Glory, and Alkaline Trio. Then there’s people who like Bayside, Three Days Grace and Chevelle. So it’s really hard to cater to all those people. And obviously, we want to play new songs too. But usually the formula is that there’s about a third to a half of the set that’s ingrained, and we try to chip away at those songs as much as we can. Then we try to throw in some deep cuts, and some things that we’ve either never played or haven’t played in a long time. There’s an aspect of that in every set, and then some new stuff. That’s kinda the formula.
I’m really looking forward to the tour. I think you guys are coming up near Baltimore, so hopefully I’ll be able to check that out. The well-received “Bayside Acoustic” series added a Volume Three back in 2020. So I was curious, why do you think your catalog lends itself well to acoustic versions, and are there any plans to add a Volume Four at some point?
I think that <our music> lends itself to acoustic versions, because we write the songs that way. Most of the songs are written on acoustic guitars, because I kind of think at the heart of the song, it’s got to have chords, it’s got to have a melody, and it’s got to have lyrics that are all powerful. So if you want the songs to be great, and if you took away all the riffs, and you took away all the rhythms, and even if you took away the energy, will the songs still stand on their two legs as a good song? So that’s part of the test for whether the Bayside song is going to be a Bayside song or not. So it’s ingrained in the DNA of the song really to be able to work that way. That, and also whenever we do those acoustic records, we sync a lot of time. We always say that we can’t just pick up acoustic guitars and play the songs as if we were playing them on electric guitars. Sometimes we completely reimagine the song if it needs it. Sometimes the songs just kind of work as they are. Or, we just have to change drum beats. Sometimes we’ve changed the voicing, or the instruments, but sometimes, we just completely reimagine the song if that’s what it takes to make it work. We’re not lazy about those acoustic versions…
No, definitely not. And it shows the substance of your Bayside’s songs that you’ve written over the years. It really speaks to the power of your guys’ music.
Thank you!
Sure thing! Your new record features a collaboration with Ice Nine Kills, called “How To Ruin Everything.” What drew you to that band to work with them? And do you see Bayside possibly having more collaborations as you move forward in your career?
Yeah, we’ve had very few collaborations in our career, and with very few guest vocalists on our records. I’ve always felt like if somebody is going to sing instead of me, it’s got to really add something to the song. We try to stay away from doing it for “the algorithm” or doing it for marketing. So that came about when we were doing When We Were Young, Adam, who’s been a friend for a long time, and he handles our social media. He also does <Ice Nine Kills>. And he was over my house for Thanksgiving a few years ago, and that was just a couple of weeks after When We Were Young, and he said “Oh, did you see that Spencer from Ice Nine Kills said this in an interview?” And he showed me this interview from When We Were Young, where they asked him if he could collaborate with anybody on the show, who would it be. And he said, us! I had just met him a couple of weeks earlier, and I think he’s got a really cool voice. He’s got a really cool inflection to his voice. I like where he takes Ice Nine Kills’ songs into this kind of horror place with just the timbre that’s in the lyrics, the musicians and it’s in the music also. But just the timbre of his voice, I feel like it kind of lends to this cool, horror thing in their music. So I thought that it added something, and it could really add something interesting to our song, so we asked if he would do that.
That’s awesome! I’m glad that collaboration worked out for both of you. That’s a cool way of finding out that somebody is interested in your music and they want to create art with you. I’m really glad you’re able to make that collaboration happen.
Yeah, I think it’s important to have mutual respect. It’s easy to fall into like another trap of being in a band and feeling like it’s a competition, or getting jealous, and I think it could be somebody who’s an equal size band, or somebody in a bigger band, or somebody who’s just on their first tour…there’s a camaraderie. And I think that there should be camaraderie there. People in bands understand my life in a way that my wife and children don’t, you know? We live really unique lives that that very few people understand. And that’s not just because of touring. It’s also how the creative mind works or what it’s like to run a business. When the business is creativity, or the product is creativity, there’s a lot that goes into this mentally, so there’s a camaraderie, I think, amongst band people. And I didn’t know Spencer hardly at all, but I look at everybody in every band as somebody that I feel like I understand and they would understand me.
And it’s great to give back to the music community in that way, too. So I’m glad you’re always keeping your ears open to the idea of that, too.
Oh and Ice Nine Kills are a much bigger band than us, too. <Laughter> I think he did us the favor on that one! But yeah, I like to look at every musician as somebody who’s struggling. It’s really hard. It’s hard to be a musician and try to make a career out of it.
Definitely. After 20+ years of Bayside, and the fact that you’re now about to release your ninth studio album, what do you hope fans of the band, either new or old, will take away from listening to the new record?
I mean, the thing with Bayside is we really want to always sound like Bayside. And we want to try to figure out how to make that fresh every time. It adds a layer of difficulty to writing a record because we have a lot of rules that we try to abide by that we’ve made for ourselves. We write songs all the time that we feel are cool and interesting, and could be great, and could be something people might like, but we’ll work on them. And with every record, there’s a few songs that we think are good songs, but they don’t sound like Bayside, and we feel like we’re trying to make something work that isn’t working. Sometimes we’ll take a song, and we’ll speed it up, or we’ll try to make it heavy, or we’ll try to be scientific with it. And if we feel like we’re forcing it, or it doesn’t go well, it goes away. So we hope that people will find that familiarity that makes them comfortable and all the elements that they’ve grown to love. We tried to pinpoint the characteristics of our band that we feel like people love and those are the things that have to stay. And then we’re allowed to experiment with that.
And I think you guys accomplished that. Just from listening to you guys over the years, it really sounds like your band is reinvigorated and really ready to continue to take those next steps in your career, which is an amazing feat.
Yeah, we’re just trying to be better at being Bayside. We’re not trying to change what Bayside is. We’re not trying to reinvent anything. We’re just trying to make every song the best Bayside song. When they hear this record, it sounds like Bayside, but better. That’s what we’re looking for.
Awesome. It was so nice meeting you, Anthony!
Likewise, Adam!
Photo Credit: Will Buckley
