Millie Deere interviews Oxford alt-indie musician Baby Maker who will star at Common Ground on 14th March
“Moody” alt-indie musician Baby Maker released his first album last year: From the Desk Of. Dry-wit lyrics toying with evocative rhymes make him one to watch on Oxford’s up-and-coming music scene.
Q. Your SoundCloud profile tells us you “cherry pick and prod at the carcass of influence”. Where do you look to find your influence in your music?
“I think I had a few jobs doing gardening and stuff, where I was just mowing lawns; I could just have albums on all day. And there’s that book: One Thousand and One Albums Before you Die. There’s a website version of it; it auto-generates a new one each day if you just listen some randomly. Also, I was just a big history music buff growing up I suppose, reading a lot of Wikipedia articles.”
Q. Do you have a favourite line of lyrics that you’ve written?
“Full Metal Jacket; I quite like that song. It’s story-esque, rather than just verse-chorus-versus. The lyric in that I like is: An old flame burned eternal entwined within his tribal sleeve.”
Q. Watching you perform, I really enjoyed those tinges of that dead-pan British delivery. In your music, how important are lyrics and their meaning?
“It’s definitely not an afterthought; I like good lyricists. It’s a good way that you can conjure up a world or a different take on stuff. And I get a bit of a kick out of trying to come up a cool stuff. It’s just nice hearing people mess around with words and come out a bit off the wall, essentially.”
Q. Tell me a bit about your writing process.
“It varies. I’ve had a baseline going around for a while that I like, and I want to try and finish it. I do all of it recorded at home, make it myself. My brother and I did a lot of the drums on the first album that’s out. He’ll come down and just record a bunch of stuff randomly and then I’ll sample it in a sense. Sometimes I like writing to like drum grooves, rather than sitting down with an acoustic guitar, ‘four chords and the truth’.”
Q. Has Oxford influenced your music at all?
“Wherever you live I think it’s gonna be an influence. There’s a couple that I’ve done about stuff that has happened to me in Oxford. But yeah, one hundred percent, I’ve been there a whole Olympic cycle now.”
Q. How has your relationship with your past work changed?
“I mean it is what it is, I suppose. I think it’s nice to have even if you’re not mad on it. It’s a nice snapshot of where you were… if you have stuff to look back on. And it’s nicer to have something to look back on than nothing at all. I listened to The Blindboy Podcast with Johnny Mar from The Smiths. He was saying that a lot of people’s musical identities are forged when they’re fourteen. And what you liked then will echo throughout the rest of your life.”
Q. What are you listening to right now?
“I took this straight off The Guardian’s top albums of the year list, but Cindy Lee. The album’s called Diamond Jubilee. They’re a bit of an outsider artist. I think it’s like the drag persona of this person. If you hear me crying is really good. It sounds like girl groupy stuff from Motown. It’s thirty-two tracks, so it’s a bit of an opus.”
Baby Maker will be in Common Ground on 14th March.
Spotify: Baby Maker | Spotify
SoundCloud: Stream Baby Maker music
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