LOUIS BAKER: The Boy Who Won’t Be Left Wondering
An interview by Sarah Kidd.
Louis Baker is a young man going places. With his soulful voice as well as expressive and inspirational lyrics, Baker easily manages to convey so much in a single song. As mentioned in his NZ Music Month Profile, Louis first picked up a guitar at the age of 11 years, influenced by artists such as Joni Mitchell and Jimi Hendrix. Fast forward sixteen years and the kid who was once too shy to sing in front of an audience has just last Friday dropped his latest single ‘Addict’ and is currently working on his debut album.
With sold out shows in both Auckland and Wellington this month it is clear that Baker already has a solid fan base across New Zealand:
So why Hendrix and Mitchell; what was it about their music that inspired you at such a young age?
“It was the howling guitar of Hendrix and the lyrical, amazing poetry of Joni Mitchell. And that’s my Mum and Dad basically, my Dad being Hendrix and my Mum being Joni. That’s how I got exposed to that sort of music and from there it inspired me to start to look at music in a different way. When I started learning about Joni, and I probably didn’t really start looking into what she was doing until I was about 15 or 16, I started to look into what her influences were; all the amazing poets, TS Eliot and Walt Whitman etc. So I started getting into poetry.
From Hendrix I started looking into (apart from all the other 60s music I was exposed to) his life and what moved him. Obviously what stemmed from him was Cream and Clapton; and before that I was listening to a lot of the Beatles, St Pepper etc. and from there down the rabbit hole (laughs)”
I take it that your family is rather musical as well?
“Dad is naturally musical but if you said that to him he would be like “naaaahhh” (laughs) – he is a firefighter and an amazing artist, but he also has a huge passion for music. Mum played a lot at Stage Door in the 60’s and 70’s, she was playing quite a lot of folk stuff and blues, so she sang and played guitar. My sister is the dark horse, she is really quite amazing. She hasn’t put much out but she taught me quite a few of those first guitar chords.”
Music is such a unique thing; it has an ability to cross borders and genres. You yourself have musically moved around several genres have you not?
“Oh yeah big time! Once I got into Hendrix you know I went down that road. I started looking into heavier and heavier things and being a young adolescent teen I started to get into Pantera, Metallica, Megadeth and Meshuggah and lots of different types of metal. But then that whole technicality and proficiency that metal gives, and desires of a player; that lead me down the jazz route and made me think maybe I should go to jazz school. And so that’s what I did!
We as human beings love to put things in boxes and give them labels and tags. I think that is just a part of our logical brain because it helps us to communicate things and that’s what we primarily do with one another, it’s fundamental for us. Genres help us convey things to one other so that’s one side of it but yeah too often we do put things in boxes and quite often they are not as they seem.”
At the age of 17 you won a guitar as the first prize in a National Song Writing Competition. I understand that you still travel with and play that guitar to this day. Is that due to the sentimental value? Or has it become a good luck charm?
“I don’t believe in good luck charms, I think you make your own luck really while leaving a little bit down to spontaneity and chance on the things that you don’t control. But yeah, I still play it; I think it plays nice and it sounds good. I have always had people say ‘Oh man your guitar sounds great!’ so yeah it seems to be working so I will just keep it going.”
In 2013 you were selected from more than 4000 applicants for one of only 60 placements at the Red Bull Music Academy in New York. Following this you have toured and travelled extensively, including plying at several major overseas festivals. What lessons have you taken away from these experiences?
“You make mistakes in life, and you have the choice to learn from it or keep making the same ones. It takes certain awareness or at least a conscious mind to be able to learn from them. I’ve learned a lot from my manager Cushla Aston [founder of Aston Road, she currently manages Louis Baker, Estère and Thomas Oliver] she really has been the one behind the scenes making a lot of this stuff work and happen for me. I was a 20 year old with not a lot of vision and not a lot of ambition but a great love of music. And that all kinda changed when I met Cushla; I have definitely learnt a few things working with her and she has been steadily working in the background.
And yeah some of it is the talent that artists have that gets them places, and other parts are to do with the teams that are working with them. But it’s really about having the conscious mind to learn from the things that happen in your life; you can either be oblivious to it or you can at least try and make some sort of change.”
Growing up you were quite shy and used to sing only in the privacy of your own room. Now you say that performing live gives you a high. What is it about performing live that spurs you forward?
“I feed off the live band that I am playing with; and if I am playing by myself then it’s the crowd. It’s that connection with the crowd. I definitely was a shy kid, it took me awhile to get me out of my skin and kinda of get through just playing a song and singing you know? I was literally shit scared at [the thought of] it. I remember I froze up on the first time I did it, I actually froze up and I had to walk off stage! I was just so scared, but I think everybody is different in that way. I wanted to get going with it and persevere. So yeah I have always gotten a high off playing with a band or playing music on stage and I continue to feel this way.”
Speaking of performing and music etc., let’s talk about some of your songs. ‘Addict’ is your most recent single that you have just released on May 12th.
“It’s a co-write, I did it at SongHubs last year with Sasha Scarbeck who is a two time Ivor Novello Award winner and he is also a Grammy nominated songwriter. He has worked with all sorts of people like Jessie J, he’s an amazing guy. Also Em-Haley Walker, better known as Theia who’s had a few singles out and is doing really well; and then the fourth writer is Josh Fountain who is part of Leisure and is also the producer for MAALA and Theia.
So we [all] wrote the song together and I really got off on the connection that I had with Sasha because he is a really good keys player. He was playing the Wurlitzer at Roundhead Studios when we started making the song and because we have that soul music kind of love and common ground we thought ‘hey, let’s make a soul tune’. It’s a really cool chance to be experimental and creative with writing and that’s what I really enjoyed about the experience.”
Your song ‘Fade’ features the beautiful line “sometimes you have to leave your own shores to realise who you miss’ – so were you missing someone at the time that you wrote it?
“It was about a girl, but that’s the beautiful thing about music you can see it in so many different ways. It really is about long distance love, having that feeling of being so far from home which a lot of us have had. It’s typical in a human beings character to take something for granted and then when it’s gone wish that you had it back.”
What about the song ‘Gave It All Away’?
“I was in England and I had been on tour for quite a long time, on the road, by myself. I got back to the hotel and ended up writing the song in about 15mins! It’s about that determination to survive and be heard as an artist; that desperation to live out your own dream. I had been pushed; I had been up against it for quite a while. I think when you have been touring by yourself it’s quite a solitary kind of a thing; you’re alone a lot of the time. I mean it’s not like I am in a prison or anything, but its marching to the beat of your own drum which is the best thing in the world sometimes … [other times] you go ‘Well I wonder if the crowd really felt it tonight, I’m not sure that they did’ and then that self-doubt can come in. So yeah that song is about persevering. “It could be me left shivering out in the cold, it could be me left wondering when I get old” that line sums it up really, it’s about striking when the irons hot.”
The video for ‘Rainbow’ is quite beautiful as it expresses vulnerability, and yet at the same time it is rather confronting – Whose idea was it to film it in a single shot take?
“That was my idea, I wanted to do it in the rawest, most vulnerable way that I could do it because that’s what I thought the song really was; and the song meant a lot to me. I wanted to honour the visual depiction; I wanted it to be like the song. I’ve had quite masculine guys come up to me after a show and say ‘Oh me and my girlfriend watched that video and we both cried and its made our relationship stronger because of it’ you know and then the other side of it is “Oh I didn’t really like it that much ay, I found it kinda weird’. It was supposed to be a point of view shot of someone else watching me sing to them because it’s about a girl. I did everything to honour the song and that’s what makes me happy.”
Music is obviously so key in your life right now, and you have been inspired by some amazing artists. Out of interest, who are the artists you would love to work with if you could?
“Steve Jordan, a drummer from the states and Pino Palladino, a bass player from Wales. He played on albums by D’Angelo. I would love to work with those guys, or just have a lesson, be around them you know (laughs)”
And if you could choose a vocalist?
“Oh! D’Angelo would be up there and Anderson .Paak, he would be incredible, his new album Malibu is amazing! Probably Jaime Lidell as well – I met him in Barcelona when I opened up for him last year, it would be awesome just to be his guitar player!”
Louis Baker is performing live on two very special (SOLD OUT) occasions this Music Month, including a gig at Auckland’s REC, tonight. This interview is also part of our NZ Music Month coverage. For more information on Louis Baker you can visit his website, or follow him on Facebook and Soundcloud. For more information on NZ Music Month you can visit their website.
Image Credits: Promotional Image courtesy of The Label. Live Image courtesy of Instagram / @louisbakermusic.