NEW SINGLE : Baio (Vampire Weekend) releases new single and video

Recorded over 18 months at Damon Albarn’s 13 Studios in London, as well as Baio’s personal C+C Music Factory (founded with Vampire Weekend bandmate Chris Tomson in Los Angeles), ‘Dead Hand Control’ takes its name from a rumoured Soviet missile system designed to obliterate America (“Dead Hand”), and a legal strategy for attempting to control the beneficiaries of your will after you die (“Dead Hand Control”). 

Baio, who is also the bassist for the Grammy-Award winning band Vampire Weekend, explains, “I was looking at the past five years of American life and obsessing about topics like death, wills and nuclear war,” he says, of the album’s origins. “But at its heart, it’s about how the only thing you can control is the way you treat the people in your life.” 

This is not an album about annihilation. Instead, Baio zigzags joyfully between techno, art rock and a dash of funk, exploring what it means to care for one another in a society in upheaval. 

It’s a perspective on full display in the propulsive title track, which reimagines the defiant spirit of an outlaw country song as a battle cry against the end times. (“Dead hand control / You can take my life but you will never take my soul”). Baio further explains, “Dead Hand Control” is a song about anxiety and the limits of control. I was thinking a lot about how, as a musician, I have control over what a recording is, but that once I put a song out into the world, I no longer control its life. That’s essentially what the chorus line is saying – “Dead Hand Control / You can take my life but you will never take my soul” – you can do whatever you want to me, but the things I’ve made will (hopefully in some way) outlast me. I’d like to give a special shoutout to Jazz Ambassador Robby Sinclair for his absolutely heroic improvised drumming on the back half of the song. I filmed the video on my phone at home during Los Angeles’ second stay-at-home order.” 

“Take It from Me” explores the idea of being there for a person from a simpler perspective. Baio shares that; “‘Take It from Me’ is an attempt at writing my version of a children’s song or a standard. Like many songs on Dead Hand Control, it is about being there for the people in your life to the fullest extent you can. It’s a song based around a very simple idea: you can take whatever you want in the world, so long as you take it from me. 

Baio wrote all the songs on the album with the exception of “O.M.W.”, the nearly 10-minute long closing ballad written in collaboration with Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig. The album features a small cast of eclectic collaborators, including Baio’s long time guitarist George Hume, drummer and State Department Jazz Ambassador Robby Sinclair, Future Classic’s Buzzy Lee, and VW touring member Greta Morgan, on backing vocals. The album was made with Baio’s longtime engineer John Foyle and mixed by Lars Stalfors (St. Vincent, Still Woozy). 

While it arrives at a tenuous moment on the national stage, the album marks a banner year in Baio’s career, which saw a Grammy win for Best Alternative Album for Vampire Weekend, the release of an EP from C.Y.M., Baio’s experimental Krautrock project with British producer and DJ Mike Greene (a.k.a. Fort Romeau), and the launch of the popular Ringer podcast The Road Taken (which teams up Baio and Tomson interviewing touring musicians about life on the road).