How a Teen's Imaginary Myspace Band Became the Next Big Thing
By Andrew Clayman
Published in Hearsay Magazine, March 2011
Still suffering from massive foreclosures, record unemployment, and the nationally televised betrayal of its homegrown NBA hero, the city of Cleveland could desperately use a good pick-me-up.
Enter Dylan Baldi.
As the teenage wunderkind behind Cleveland’s manically upbeat pop-punk outfit Cloud Nothings, Baldi just might be the perfect new ambassador for his downtrodden hometown—if only because his music seems to be coming from somewhere else entirely.
“I feel like Cleveland is probably the main reason I’m making music, honestly,” Baldi says. “I mean, as a kid growing up in the suburbs of Cleveland, there’s not much else to do [laughs]. I don’t know if that’s necessarily pride in the city, but it’s something.”
At 19, Baldi is actually impressively well versed in the influential Cleveland punk scene of yesteryear—Pere Ubu, the Dead Boys, Electric Eels-- but as a child of the internet age, he sees Cloud Nothings as part of something much wider in scale, if no less communal and tight-knit.
“I think it’s just because of the nature of how this project started,” he says, noting that Cloud Nothings was originally just one of a dozen or so Myspace profiles he’d created for his various DIY pop experiments. “The internet is just changing things, in that local scenes don’t really mean what they used to anymore; for young people at least. There’s not as many new bands forming their own little underground kind of scenes in one town or another. Now that’s something that can happen worldwide, almost overnight.”
Case in point, Cloud Nothings started generating considerable blogosphere buzz just weeks after Baldi posted a pair of songs (“Hey Cool Kid” and “Whaddya Wanna Know”) to the band’s bare-bones Myspace page in October of 2009. On one hand, both tracks fit in relatively well with indie-rock’s fuzzy, lo-fi trends of the day (Baldi had recorded them in his parents’ basement on Garageband, after all), but they also possessed a playfulness and charm that was consistently missing from a lot of the other Guided By Voices acolytes sprouting up on the coasts.
Noted New York indie-rock promoter Todd Patrick was so impressed with what he heard that he formally invited Baldi to head 500 miles east to open up for Real Estate and Woods at the Market Hotel in Brooklyn on December 4-- just six weeks after Cloud Nothings’ Myspace page had been created. Baldi enthusiastically said yes, even though (a) it would mean skipping a college exam, (b) he hadn’t even played a show in Cleveland yet, and (c) Cloud Nothings wasn’t technically an actual “band.”
“Obviously, when I first started posting my music, I was not really expecting anything,” Baldi says. “I kind of used it almost solely as a reason to convince my parents that it was okay for me to leave college, because I wasn’t having the best time there. I knew I wanted to pursue this, I just never thought it’d take off so quickly.”
Whereas most kids in his shoes would have understandably felt overwhelmed by the sudden national attention, Baldi grabbed hold of his opportunity. He dropped out of Case Western Reserve University, got a band together with some friends from the Cleveland music scene, and played a triumphant first gig for the fickle hipsters of Williamsburg. From there, it was off to the races.
The newly formed Cloud Nothings quartet of Baldi, Joe Boyer (guitar), T.J. Duke (bass), and Jayson Gerycz (drums) tightened up their high-energy act and hit the road throughout 2010, eventually inking a record deal with the reputable D.C. indie label Carpark. Wasting little time, Carpark released Turning On—a CD compilation of Baldi’s original Cloud Nothings basement tapes—last October. And this past January, the band’s official self-titled debut arrived, recorded in a real studio in Baltimore with producer Chester Gwazda (Future Islands, Dan Deacon).
Considering the success of his early lo-fi recordings, Baldi admits he was a tad apprehensive about transitioning his style to the studio.
“I was worried about that, yeah, just because most of my favorite music has that grittiness to the production. There’s always an element of rawness and live energy there that you don’t tend to get in a Top 40 song. So it was a concern, but talking with Chester, he kind of felt the same way I did, so it worked out well, I think.”
The experience was a far cry from Baldi’s college audio recording classes, where “grittiness” had been slightly less encouraged.
“Yeah, I had teachers explaining to me how some Steely Dan record was the greatest album of all time. And I’d just be like, ‘okay, if you say so’ [laughs]. So yeah, this has been a lot more fun.”
And if there’s one thing a band from Cleveland, OH, should appreciate in 2011, it’s having a little fun.
Enter Dylan Baldi.
As the teenage wunderkind behind Cleveland’s manically upbeat pop-punk outfit Cloud Nothings, Baldi just might be the perfect new ambassador for his downtrodden hometown—if only because his music seems to be coming from somewhere else entirely.
“I feel like Cleveland is probably the main reason I’m making music, honestly,” Baldi says. “I mean, as a kid growing up in the suburbs of Cleveland, there’s not much else to do [laughs]. I don’t know if that’s necessarily pride in the city, but it’s something.”
At 19, Baldi is actually impressively well versed in the influential Cleveland punk scene of yesteryear—Pere Ubu, the Dead Boys, Electric Eels-- but as a child of the internet age, he sees Cloud Nothings as part of something much wider in scale, if no less communal and tight-knit.
“I think it’s just because of the nature of how this project started,” he says, noting that Cloud Nothings was originally just one of a dozen or so Myspace profiles he’d created for his various DIY pop experiments. “The internet is just changing things, in that local scenes don’t really mean what they used to anymore; for young people at least. There’s not as many new bands forming their own little underground kind of scenes in one town or another. Now that’s something that can happen worldwide, almost overnight.”
Case in point, Cloud Nothings started generating considerable blogosphere buzz just weeks after Baldi posted a pair of songs (“Hey Cool Kid” and “Whaddya Wanna Know”) to the band’s bare-bones Myspace page in October of 2009. On one hand, both tracks fit in relatively well with indie-rock’s fuzzy, lo-fi trends of the day (Baldi had recorded them in his parents’ basement on Garageband, after all), but they also possessed a playfulness and charm that was consistently missing from a lot of the other Guided By Voices acolytes sprouting up on the coasts.
Noted New York indie-rock promoter Todd Patrick was so impressed with what he heard that he formally invited Baldi to head 500 miles east to open up for Real Estate and Woods at the Market Hotel in Brooklyn on December 4-- just six weeks after Cloud Nothings’ Myspace page had been created. Baldi enthusiastically said yes, even though (a) it would mean skipping a college exam, (b) he hadn’t even played a show in Cleveland yet, and (c) Cloud Nothings wasn’t technically an actual “band.”
“Obviously, when I first started posting my music, I was not really expecting anything,” Baldi says. “I kind of used it almost solely as a reason to convince my parents that it was okay for me to leave college, because I wasn’t having the best time there. I knew I wanted to pursue this, I just never thought it’d take off so quickly.”
Whereas most kids in his shoes would have understandably felt overwhelmed by the sudden national attention, Baldi grabbed hold of his opportunity. He dropped out of Case Western Reserve University, got a band together with some friends from the Cleveland music scene, and played a triumphant first gig for the fickle hipsters of Williamsburg. From there, it was off to the races.
The newly formed Cloud Nothings quartet of Baldi, Joe Boyer (guitar), T.J. Duke (bass), and Jayson Gerycz (drums) tightened up their high-energy act and hit the road throughout 2010, eventually inking a record deal with the reputable D.C. indie label Carpark. Wasting little time, Carpark released Turning On—a CD compilation of Baldi’s original Cloud Nothings basement tapes—last October. And this past January, the band’s official self-titled debut arrived, recorded in a real studio in Baltimore with producer Chester Gwazda (Future Islands, Dan Deacon).
Considering the success of his early lo-fi recordings, Baldi admits he was a tad apprehensive about transitioning his style to the studio.
“I was worried about that, yeah, just because most of my favorite music has that grittiness to the production. There’s always an element of rawness and live energy there that you don’t tend to get in a Top 40 song. So it was a concern, but talking with Chester, he kind of felt the same way I did, so it worked out well, I think.”
The experience was a far cry from Baldi’s college audio recording classes, where “grittiness” had been slightly less encouraged.
“Yeah, I had teachers explaining to me how some Steely Dan record was the greatest album of all time. And I’d just be like, ‘okay, if you say so’ [laughs]. So yeah, this has been a lot more fun.”
And if there’s one thing a band from Cleveland, OH, should appreciate in 2011, it’s having a little fun.
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