Dropping out of college wasn’t a difficult decision to make for Dylan Baldi.
Baldi, the mastermind behind the fuzzy garage pop of Cleveland’s Cloud Nothings, had been having a less-than-spectacular first semester at school. In December 2009, he was offered an opening slot on a bill with indie rockers Woods and Real Estate in New York.
“‘I want to not be doing this,'” Baldi said he thought during his brief time in college. “‘I want to go play music.’ That’s how my first semester went. It wasn’t the best.”
And after he sent a heartfelt e-mail to his parents and they granted their approval, Baldi left school to focus on his music full-time.
The 19-year-old will bring that dedication and his live band to the Rock and Roll Hotel in Washington tonight, opening for Toronto’s F—ed Up.
Baldi started Cloud Nothings in December and has since released a number of cassettes and 7-inch singles, as well as a full-length, Turning On. Most of his released Cloud Nothings music will be re-issued as one package — also titled Turning On — on the band’s new label, Carpark Records, on Oct. 12.
Not bad for a teenager.
“Yeah, I was just thinking about that because it’s only been [less than] a year since all this has been going on, and it’s been really crazy stuff that I didn’t think we were gonna do,” Baldi said. “We’re going to Europe in a couple months, and I didn’t ever think I’d go tour Europe before I was, like, really old. So it’s all pretty weird, but I’m definitely way happy with everything.”
Baldi should feel accomplished — aside from “some of the 7-inch stuff,” he sings and plays every instrument on his recordings. The band that plays with him live are friends “who happen to play instruments,” he said.
He also writes his own lyrics but admits to outsourcing to the Internet for inspiration.
“If you go to Wikipedia, what you can do is search for people born in any year and it just gives you giant lists of people who aren’t even [very well known],” Baldi said. “It’d be, like, a Wikipedia entry on my dad or something. No one knows my dad except his friends or whatever, but it’s just entries like that. So I go to those and find someone interesting and then write lyrics about them.
“None of it’s personal experience,” he said. “It’s all Wikipedia, just about people that I don’t know.”
Cloud Nothings is planning to release a new full-length album on Carpark in January 2011, and Baldi says the new songs sound much cleaner — a contrast to the band’s first lo-fi, distorted rock songs.
“All the songs are pretty much fast, and it’s really hi-fi,” Baldi said of the new record. “It’s not lo-fi anymore. It sounds, like, good. There’s no distortion, pretty much.”
The low fidelity of his original recordings was a constraint of Baldi’s recording equipment: just a microphone and a computer. For the new album, Cloud Nothings recorded in Baltimore with producer Chester Gwazda, who has also worked with Charm City artists such as Dan Deacon, Ecstatic Sunshine and Future Islands.
Baldi’s eagerness to produce better-sounding songs may likely be a result of Top 40 radio, which he claims inspired him to write pop songs.
“I listen to a lot of stuff that sounds like the Turning On album,” Baldi said. “That lo-fi kind of stuff. But then that kind of music — I always thought that it didn’t have that great of a catchy chorus or that kind of thing. But I always listened to the radio a lot, too. Just Top 40 stuff.
“So, I [wanted to] do the lo-fi pop stuff,” he said, “but make it super catchy.”
Cloud Nothings will play at the Rock and Roll Hotel tonight. Doors open at 8 p.m. Tickets cost $14 at the door.
rhiggins@umdbk.com
