An interview with Baths!:

NEILL:  Hi Baths.

BATHS: Hello!

NEILL: So what’s real name?

BATHS:  My real name is Will—Will Wiesenfeld.  Baths is just a newly adopted pseudonym as of a year and a half ago.

NEILL:  How did you come up with it?

BATHS:  I love taking baths.  It started that simply, but then like there’s like a lot of really interesting connotations with the word so I feel in love with it very early on.  I thought it was going to be a song title or an album title but then I changed projects, so I just adopted the name.

NEILL:  Where did you originally start off, like who did you originally start playing your music to?

TRISHA:  Where are you from first of all?

BATHS: Yeah, I’m from Los Angeles and I’ve only ever made music out of L.A., like I’ve never—I haven’t lived anywhere else.

NEILL:  I’ve had friends or myself, too, talk to you online or on message boards.  I actually talked to you after seeing your show at the Troubadour like a couple months ago.

BATHS:  Yeah, yeah, yeah, cool, cool, cool.  Yeah, I’m definitely in it.  I’m like inside the internet all the time.  I’m always on Facebook and like whatever else.  It’s just like—it’s really interesting because I owe a huge—probably almost one hundred percent of the success that I’m having to the fact that the internet exists, because it’s sort of like helps perpetuate your music so much faster than any other medium.  Just the fact that you can post one song and if people really, really like it, it can spread like a disease, like a virus in a second.  It’s crazy. It’s the best.

TRISHA:  So if you were to live in any time period, which time period would you choose and why?

BATHS:  It would have to be now, because I’m obsessed with my life.  I love my life, I love everything that’s happening to me and everything that’s happened in my life.  I’m a perfectly content person, so I don’t know.  The amount of speculation I have about the future, I feel like comfortable thinking about that stuff from this time period, and I don’t really want to go in the past too far, so I’m good.  I’m super good.

NEILL:  You make music, right?  But what other music do you listen to, like specifically?

TRISHA:  Influences?

BATHS:  My first influence that I sort of branched most of my other influences out of from is Björk, like I’ve listened to her very early on and she’s sort of the first initial change in my listening and like what really changed me I think and made me want to create music, electronic music especially, and all that.  Her and then I started branching out listening to her producers, her collaborators, all that sort of thing.  I don’t know, starts with Björk and most often ends with Björk.

TRISHA:  Have you always been into music ever since you were little?

BATHS:  Yeah, I was classically trained on piano from four to twelve [years old] and then had a huge falling out with classical music because it was all spinal memory for me and like when I was playing, it was just all in my bones and I didn’t feel anything I was playing.  It was sort of like very detached and weird, so I took a break from classical music, for like a year, and then, uh…

TRISHA:  You returned?

BATHS:  Yeah, well when I came back to actually playing the piano again, I only wanted to play whatever I wanted, so I started messing around and I realized how much fun it was to actually write songs and write music on the piano and from there I just grew out of that.  I was listening to Björk around the same time, so like recording with a computer and all that was sort of integrated to me restarting piano so all that sort of happened all at the same time—like piano, recording music, my voice, using percussion, layers of things, and all that happened at once.

JENNY:  If you had three bands or artists to perform with at a show, what would your three ultimate, or maybe even two…

BATHS:  I have no idea.  I mean Björk, the one I mentioned before, then outside of that I’m not sure.

TRISHA:  Dead or alive.

BATHS:  Dead or alive? F**k.

JENNY:  We got to edit that out.

BATHS:  Well I have no clue, I don’t have an answer.  I don’t know, I have no idea.