CLOUD NOTHINGS at the Horseshoe (370 Queen West), tonight (Thursday, April 14), 9 pm. $12. HS, RT, SS. See listing.
All you musicians hoping to jam with boy wonder Dylan Baldi on his next Cloud Nothings album, let me spare you a phone call. He’s not interested.
The 20-year-old Clevelander behind the precocious power-pop outfit is self-sufficient. He writes alone, plays all the instruments and, up until this year’s self-titled full-length, out on Carpark, does his own producing.
Actually, to refer to his prior work as “produced” would be a stretch. Lo-fi cassettes, 7-inch singles, CD-Rs and an EP were all basement-born, and it wasn’t until he made the trek to Baltimore last summer to work with Chester Gwazda that Baldi smoothed out Cloud Nothings’ rough edges.
The result is a collection of hook-filled, three-minute gems that make you wonder if he’s the next Paul Westerberg (but without booze issues).
“I do it all myself because I write songs really, really fast and don’t have time to teach the whole band a new song every single day,” explains Baldi. “I just prefer recording on my own.”
Fortunately, this approach hasn’t led him down the regrettable path of standing onstage with a laptop. He’s flanked by three friends from Cleveland’s tight-knit music scene. Still, despite touring most of this year with bandmates, Baldi refuses to call Cloud Nothings a “group.”
“It’s definitely still my project,” he says. “I’ve had to change drummers since the first half of the tour, and now we have a new bassist. Because people can’t get off work and stuff like that, it’s always changing members. For recording purposes I write all the songs, so I’m keeping that to myself.”
Baldi learned piano as a toddler, listened to classical throughout his childhood and later went to music school to study saxophone performance and audio engineering. Within months, he realized he couldn’t handle the faculty’s stultifying attitude toward anything written post-1700s.
“Everyone just wanted to talk about Bach and Beethoven, as if that’s where music stopped,” he recalls. “I knew more about [contemporary] music than the faculty, so I figured I should probably do my own thing.”
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