by Taylor Ruckle (@TaylorRuckle)
Even over Zoom, looking in at Worried Million Dollar Studios feels a bit like touring Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, if, instead of candy, it was turning out gonzo experimental synth pop. The practice and production space of Providence trio babybaby_explores is wallpapered with art and piled high with whimsical apparatuses: the cut-and-pasted tracklists for their next two albums, and the repurposed Twister spinner they used to randomly divide tracks between them; the green screen; the massive cue card covered in effect setting diagrams they made to help them avoid looking down during a livestream set.
More and more crafts crop up throughout our conversation, as singer Lids B-Day, guitarist sam m-h, and drum machine/synth operator Gabe C-D finish each other’s sentences and give off a little of the creative electricity that powers their new record, Food Near Me, Weather Tomorrow. Written throughout 2020, the album documents a group of friends using silliness and sound science to cope with the unsettled shape of the world, writing dissonant, improvisational songs about ducks, chewing gum, and conversations so terrible they make you bite off your own tongue.
Over the last three years, babybaby_explores have shortened their band name (they used to be called Baby; Baby: Explores the Reasons Why that Gum is Still on the Sidewalk) as they’ve grown their reach beyond the local noise scene–they’ve opened for acts like Black Dice and Lightning Bolt, and a leak of Food Near Me, Weather Tomorrow earned them a deal with Angus Andrew’s No-Gold label. Ahead of the release, the trio sat down with Post-Trash to talk about their scientific methods, their folk-goth aspirations, and their policy of saying yes to every dress.
How is your Saturday?
Gabe C-D: It's been good. Today's our normal day to practice, so we're normally together.
What is a practice like for babybaby_explores?
sam m-h: It depends on what's happening in our little world. We'll set up different goals, like maybe we're focusing on writing music, so we might get together and just jam for hours.
Gabe: Yeah, like, pure nonsense, no aims. Sometimes we just drink beer and fool around and don't practice. So that's just as important, I think.
Lids B-Day: We always fool around.
Gabe: [laughs] Not like that!
sam: When we know we have shows coming up, we'll make sure we're practicing a set and then we also have to correspond. So lately, it's been a lot of--
Gabe: Correspondence.
sam: We’ll run through our songs, and we'll correspond, and go through our giant to-do list of what the hell is happening.
Lids: But we've been trying to go on field trips.
Where to?
Lids: We went to [Gabe’s] work.
Gabe: Part of my job is to feed this composting machine. It always has to be above a minimum weight. The PM feeding shift can be between 8:00 and 11:00. [laughs] So we did that a couple weeks ago. I just roll a trash can up to it and it dumps it in. It takes, like, five seconds.
sam: It smells like weird cinnamon.
What do you feed it?
Gabe: It's all food scraps. Like, anything. The bones come out of the machine un-composted.
sam: Bone machine.
Gabe: [laughs] Yeah, it's a bone machine.
The bio mentions that you were all high school best friends. How did you start working together musically?
Gabe: Well, me and Lids in the summer of eighth grade–you had a guitar at your house, so we got together and sang Moldy Peaches songs and stuff like that, just to be fun and be funny.
Sam: Cute.
Lids: We were trying to be very cute.
Gabe: We were trying to be anti-folk superstars. [laughs]
Lids: And look at us now.
You did it!
Gabe: Yeah, here we are!
Lids: We're folk musicians, actually.
Gabe: We made a little high school band and made a page on Facebook. sam saw it, and at that time, recognized our faces, but we weren't friends. And they messaged us and asked if we needed a drummer, right?
sam: Yeah, I clicked the page because it was this really weird graphic of Mickey Rooney, but like, old, and there was ham flying into his mouth. Like, "What is this?" So I clicked it, and I was like, "Oh, these people." I just wanted to play music with people in general, so I was like, "Hey."
Lids: We just were playing together as friends.
Gabe: Yeah, as an activity without a presentation mindset. We would just be making songs all the time.
sam: Or, like, making clothes or something.
Gabe: At different points, me and sam made songs, sam and Lids made songs, me and Lids made songs. So it was always tumbling around.
How did it all tumble together into babybaby_explores?
Lids: It was one of the renditions of me and sam making songs at first, in 2016. It was like, goth music.
sam: I was really obsessed with finding old 70s albums from bands in, like, Europe, and I was inspired. And it was really cold. It was winter.
Lids: We were using very tiny amps and tiny guitar–it was very lo-fi.
Gabe: Like, a child's Fender Strat.
sam: It was just supposed to be kind of naïve. Everyone in this music community was really, like, machismo, and really serious…it was kind of a parody of this concept of taking yourself so seriously and not having room to be humble.
Lids: I think we played one show, and then Gabe asked to join the band. That was it. We started writing songs all together. One of the songs that's coming out on the new album was a song that me and sam wrote with the tiny instruments, when it was goth. It's funny because these songs have gone through different renditions. It got less goth.
Gabe: It's still goth, in a way.
Lids: It's like folk-goth. 'Cause we write everything on the spot, like folk musicians. We have no musical backgrounds. We write everything together in one go, and then we listen to recordings and try and reenact it.
It's interesting that you've all played together in different permutations. What do you think distinguishes the music you make as a trio?
Gabe: I don't want to speak for everybody, but when [sam] and I would make music, it always would sound the same. It'd always be this weird kind of 70s spy film track. I feel like there's a genre that comes out of our duos, and there's a similar genre that we all do together, and I think it's a little less identifiable, in a good way, when it's the three of us.
sam: It's just funny, though, 'cause you and I still are playing–
Gabe: The same stuff? [laughs] Yeah.
sam: I'm like, is it actually different? Or is it just Lids' presence…
Lids: It makes you act different, maybe.
sam: Yeah. A lot of the time I'm actually looking at you, and I'm trying to get Lids to do something. [laughs] I'm trying to prompt you.
Lids: You both look at me like you're trying to get me to sing.
sam: The dynamic of all of us together makes my behavior kind of pop in a different way.
Lids: I think it also has to do with what instruments we're using. For this project, we have specific setups that we cultivated over the years.
How did you settle into your roles? The vocals, guitar, and drum machine trio.
sam: You know what's funny? There's that piece of paper from, like, 2014…It's like, lined paper, and it has three random faces on it. We put our names under the three faces, and we–we weren't actually in a band together, but we wrote out all this gear we thought we would use to be in a band, and it's kind of this band. [laughs] I think that piece of paper is in our binder.
Lids: I wanna show you our binder. [Exit Lids]
Gabe: You've played guitar more than anything else, so it makes sense that you'd play guitar, and whatever I've done has always been rhythmic. I've had the same model of drum machine for, like, 12 years now, so I'm super attached to this particular model, and it's what I can be confident to do the most different things on and not feel like, "Oh, I'm playing keyboard, and I really only know how to do this one thing.” Same with Lids. Like, Lids' background is in dancing and theater. [laughs] You have training to be a frontperson, in a way.
[Enter Lids, holding an overstuffed black binder labeled “BBY; BBY:”]
Lids: Yeah, but it doesn't mean that's why I'm doing it. I just feel like you guys didn't want to sing.
Gabe: We forced Lids to do it.
Lids: I have to do it, and then I’m more inept with playing musical instruments, since I don't practice as much. [laughs] But one day. We had a drummer once.
Gabe: Not as babybaby, but the three of us would play with a drummer. It was very rock.
sam: I guess what you use, Lids, is the most new.
Gabe: You manipulating your voice through pedals--
sam: And using a sampler and stuff was a new thing in your life, but it was for this project.
Lids: I was doing it when we were playing with Austin too.
Gabe: That's true.
Lids: I don't know why I started singing. I can't answer it. But we have a binder.
Tell me about the binder!
Lids: This is where we keep everything from over the years.
Gabe: It's with the pretense of organization, but I don't think it's very effective. [holding up clipboard] This is a music notation.
What are the tally marks?
sam: I think we were trying to count.
Gabe: Counting beats.
sam: We made up a song on the spot, and we didn't know what we did, but had recorded it on an iPhone probably, so we were trying to listen to it and understand how to think about what happened, maybe?
Gabe: Or determine where to make changes.
sam: This works for Gabe and Lids, a chart. It doesn't work for me. I can only listen and respond to it. I can't count in measures or anything.
Lids: We keep all kinds of stuff in here.
sam: We've also been in this place for eight years.
This was going to be my next question. Tell me about Worried Million Dollar Studios.
Lids: Yeah, it's also called Lost Bag.
Gabe: That's the venue, and then Worried Million Dollar Studios is the production studio.
Lids: We have a green screen. You made that up.
sam: Yeah, but you and I both were into making videos.
Lids: Yeah, I would build big sets. Gabe and sam would help me. We've been here for eight years. It was a smaller room, and then they knocked down the wall, and we kept it big.
How did you come to be in that space?
Lids: Well, we lived in a big warehouse, and then we had to evacuate as soon as possible. We all wanted a studio still, so we found this one when we were 20, and we just stayed here.
sam: There used to be a nightclub under us that was open from 2:00 to 7:00 AM, or something.
Lids: Called club therapy. [laughs] It was, like, a late night thing.
Gabe: Yeah, so we knew we'd been here too long if the club music started. It would vibrate the whole place.
Lids: Anyway, we have a binder, and we used it for organization, but now...
Gabe: Now we use Google Drive, which is a little bit less scrapbook.
Lids: I know, [the binder is] like a scrapbook. It has all our setlists ever written and dated in here. I also, like, never throw anything away. I would love to show you more of our graphic scores.
Gabe: On newer albums, we've made a page for each song and just kind of added notes.
sam: We have two albums that are ready, but the one that's coming out not-as-soon was actually made longer ago in the creative process. It was years ago now, I guess. And it's kind of demented. [laughs] And straightforward at the same time, musically.
How did the new record, Food Near Me, Weather Tomorrow, come to be?
Lids: It's all in this binder. [laughs] We wrote too many songs, and we separated them, cut and paste, into these different categories. Album one, album two.
sam: We had this timeline like, "We're gonna be creative for x amount of weeks, and then we're going to take whatever we have and we're going to turn that into songs that we practice for x amount of time, and then we're gonna make demos by x date, and then we're gonna just record them."
Gabe: And that's pretty much exactly what we did.
Lids: And then probably six months to a year after we recorded them, we found someone who would put them out.
Yeah, how did you connect with No-Gold?
Gabe: Well, there was a big dip in the amount of shows happening, so when stuff started to happen again, I feel like we just–well, we almost always say yes to everything.
sam: Say yes to the dress.
Gabe: "Say yes to every dress" is our motto. [laughs] We had just garnered enough underground–I don't really know, they just reached out.
sam: What happened is that a few specific people in our music community who were friends with people outside of Providence, they would often ask us to open for these touring bands. We were playing with a number of bands who were maybe relevant to people who were getting involved with No-Gold.
Lids: They just told people about us.
sam: It started with Black Dice finding out about us, and then basically, our album got leaked to a bunch of people who were friends in that kind of community, and Michael LoJudice–
Lids: Who is our booking agent.
sam: –found us too, and through that, we got connected to No-Gold.
Is that [Food Near Me, Weather Tomorrow]?
Lids: Yeah, that was the album that was leaked. It wasn't mastered yet.
Gabe: We just went on our own accord and paid for the recording.
sam: Jon Galkin also was sending it to people. [laughs]
Lids: Everyone was just sending it to everyone.
Gabe: Which is what we wanted anyway.
sam: Yeah, and it's been cool. This is our first experience working with a label, and it's really ideal. Versus how maybe a normal label is set up, this is more aligned with our values too, as people. And Angus is really awesome, and just a really amazing artist.
What is it that appeals to you about their setup?
Gabe: Pretty much they told us their goal was to be supportive and let us take almost all creative control, and have the ability to say, "We don't want to make that decision, actually. Can you guys do it?” It's kind of organic. They were like, "Do you want to release the two albums two weeks apart or two years apart? Whatever you want." They obviously will give us advice, and have experience, but ultimately, that seemed like what they communicated their aim was.
Lids: It's kind of experimental.
sam: There's a level of autonomy and ownership that we are still granted as artists, and also, aside from legality or whatever, the energy of being like, "We are psyched on music, and we know what it's like to have an uncomfortable contract, and to avoid that--" it's nice to be like, "We're just trying to lift you up in any way possible."
How did it get back to you that your record had been leaked?
Lids: 'Cause we got the emails. That's how the booking agent was like, "Hey, this person showed me your record." We were sending it 'cause we were looking for labels, essentially, and then when we were in New York, people were like, "Oh yeah, I heard your album that you haven't realeased yet." We were like, "Aw, damn, it's in the email thread or something." [laughs]
sam: People from the labels that we did send it to were sharing it, but they weren't signing us. [laughs] We were like, "What's happening?"
Gabe: We sent it to Black Dice, didn't we?
Lids: I can't remember. I don't think so.
Gabe: We sent it to Galkin.
Lids: They just took a video of us, and Galkin reached out to us, 'cause Black Dice is on Four Four Records, which is Galkin's thing.
sam: And Galkin was working with Anniversary [Group]. It's been a really strangely paced timeline.
Because there are videos of you all in 2020 playing songs that are on this record.
Gabe: Yeah, we've just been waiting. [laughs]
sam: We wrote a lot of this album in 2020, in the spring and summer.
Lids: One of the songs was written in, like, 2017 though.
Gabe: “Duck Song” is really old, too.
sam: After we finally got the album recorded and got it mastered, it wasn't until only months ago that we finally signed a contract to have a release.
Lids: It was the end of the summer, maybe September or something.
sam: Yeah, so it took three years.
You mentioned "Duck Song" is an older one. What do you remember about the writing of that?
Lids: Oh yeah, it was based off of a dream I had where I was a duck and I was in Columbia, and I was splashing around through the snow, or something. I had woken up and written my dream, and the–
sam: At the end of your dream you kept saying–
Lids: I was like, "I am a duck! I am a duck!" Anyway, sometimes I'll look up stuff if I can't think of lyrics to make up on the spot. I'll use things for inspiration. When we were writing that song, it was during the great expansion, 'cause we were over here. There's pre- and post- great expansion of the space.
Gabe: Which is the wall coming down.
Lids: Before that, we had practice over in this corner, and then we switched over there. I just remember being over there, and I remember when I changed the octave pedal on my voice, we laughed, and usually we keep songs based off how hard they make us laugh while we're making them.
Gabe: That one struck a chord. One of the ways we approach writing a song is that I'll have beats on my drum machine that I've just made–it's kind of a sketching thing that I'll do.
Separately, outside of practice?
Gabe: Yeah, most of the time. Sometimes right on the spot. I'll just cycle through–like, play a beat, and like, "Okay, nobody's doing anything. I'll try--" [laughs]
Different beat. [laughs] Yeah, next one.
Gabe: And I'll improvise bass lines over them. I suspect that was one of them. I'm not sure.
Lids: We have it recorded. Like, I have the first rendition of the "Duck Song," because we have it on the bootleg CD, and I sing this song about my squirrel friend Donald.
Gabe: Yeah, that's right.
sam: It may have been one of the weird moments of, like, “We just played a whole song, and now we just have to look back.”
Lids: Like, listen to it and redo it.
sam: And maybe you didn't have all those same lyrics, but yeah. A lot of the time, it's just a happening we catch, and we try to recreate–keep alive.
Gabe: Most of the writing process is we have a crumb that comes from somewhere, from any of us, and we just react to it and come up with something all together.
Lids: In that writing phase, we had every single practice recorded into Pro-Tools, so we have files and files of hours of us creating every song. So someday, if they want to make a movie, we've got it ready to go.
You've got the archival footage.
Gabe: Yeah. I'm not sure there's any specific story about our parts.
sam: In how I play it, I think about your narrative components. So in the beginning, summer time, it's drippy, I'm using reverb and delay and playing around. And then I think about Broadcast when I do this one part in the song, like I'm referencing them. I really liked that band as a teenager, but I don't think I was intensely like, "I'm choosing to do this right now!" I think it happened, and I was like, "This reminds me of that, and I like that, and I'm gonna keep that for that reason."
So much of the way the songs get written is improvisational. Are you trying to replay how things came out in practice note for note, or is it different every time?
Gabe: We definitely don't waste any opportunity to play it differently whenever we want. Even the versions of the songs that are out now, or that will be coming out, and that are on the original album, I'm like, "Damn, I can't believe I didn't come up with this part before that.”
Lids: Yeah, but we've been playing them for, like, three years. I feel like we have to keep it interesting for ourselves.
sam: In the sense that we end up choosing to record a song based off how much we enjoyed playing it in the moment, I think we're trying to keep that moment alive, so whatever keeping the joy involved is–however to do that, it will impact the output of the song.
The name of the band has been shortened over time.
Lids: Oh yes! It's so fun to talk about this aspect of it.
Gabe: Our label does give us some creative advice.
Lids: It was marketing.
Gabe: It was partly practical. For example, we had the old name in Spotify, but it had to be modified just to be supported on that platform. Pretty much anything digital, it was just too long.
Lids: It was different on every page. Like, everyone had different names for us. That's how I think we became a weird enigma. Our band was a word of mouth band, and now it's becoming more commercial, but it's fine.
Gabe: Literally dozens of times, people would come up to us and be like, "I looked up Baby Baby and I thought you guys were gonna be this pop punk band, or this bedroom pop indie band." Because our name was written so many different ways, and there are so many other bands with similar names. There was a lot of confusion. [laughs]
Lids: 'Cause people call us Baby Baby for short, but the actual name was Baby; Baby: Explores the Reasons Why that Gum is Still on the Sidewalk.
sam: I was never confused about any of it, but now I am.
Lids: We changed it to our Instagram name, 'cause we were like, "Well, what are the options?"
sam: That's just the most simple way. I'm not certain this name will stick. In our heart, it's still Baby; Baby: Explores the Reasons Why that Gum is Still on the Sidewalk. It's just short for distribution. It's just for citation and ease of use.
Lids: Sometimes when we're performing live and I say our name to everybody, I accidentally just keep going with the longer name.
sam: I think that's still our name.
Gabe: The band name currently is a nickname.
Lids: So if anyone asks, yeah, we're Baby; Baby: Explores the Reasons Why that Gum is Still on the Sidewalk. [laughs]
“Food Near Me” and “Weather Tomorrow” are the two most Googled phrases. How did you happen on that factoid?
Lids: You know, I do the lyrics, but sam comes up with the names. It's also ironic because our band name was so hard to find.
So not Googleable, yeah. No SEO.
Lids: So that the album title would be incredibly–yeah, it's kind of meta. We're talking about or making fun of ourselves or something.
Gabe: To me, there's something so sinister about these human needs. Like, "I'm a human. What's the weather gonna be like, and I need to eat." I just like that.
sam: Those two things together–I felt like those phrases were like, "whoa!" It's kinda heavy and simple. These are just necessities. This is life.
Lids: And I think the tone of the album, reflecting on the feelings when we made it–
sam: We were all cooped up, not sure what the hell was going on in this world, and what would be happening ever again.
"Will there be food near me? Will there be weather tomorrow?"
sam: Yeah. Yeah.
Lids: And we're exploring...that.
sam: Yeah, just thinking a lot about what is inside the shape of this world, and how the shape is shaping. [laughs]
Lids: Make sure you include whatever that was.
Gabe: What are you talking about?
sam: About the flat earth. [laughs]
Lids: Is it flat, or is it shaped?
Tell me more about the overarching feeling of the record. What joins all these songs together for you?
Gabe: Actually, it took so much deliberation to figure out. 'Cause we wrote 20 songs, and we were like, "Well, it's maybe a little bit too much for one album." They felt like they were different, so we split them up into two ten-song albums, but it took so much talking. We all had our own ideas about how the 20 songs should be split up, so we did this elaborate pseudo-statistical game. The three of us were casting votes, but there was also an element of randomness. We were using the Twister spinning wheel–we had just split it up to go either one way or the other. And what ended up happening through pure luck and serendipity was that the randomized results ended up being exactly what sam's choices were. [laughs]
Lids: We use science a lot in this band, I guess.
Or divination.
Gabe: It was kind of like that, especially when it just turned out to be–
Lids: What sam had chose. It was so funny.
Gabe: Wait, did that answer your question?
Oh, no, I do want to know–aside from the element of probability, what do you think joins all these songs together?
Lids: I don't know, 'cause they're all creepy to me! They all creep me out. They're like, wicked creepy.
Creepy?
sam: Why? You wrote them. Why did you do that to us?
Lids: I think that these songs share the similar energy of mystery. I compare to the rest of the songs, which is–I cannot give anything away, but these are clearly freaky.
Gabe: For me, it's in contrast to this next-next album, where those feel a little more campy and kitschy, and pretty straightforward in a rock or pop structured way.
Lids: Yeah, these feel more like…
Gabe: They're more experimental.
sam: It's a really specific side of the coin.
This will all make a lot more sense when the second one comes out.
sam: Yeah, you'll understand later. [laughs]
Lids: You have to wait.
I had not picked up on the creepiness, but now that you mention it, there's a definite air of mystery. The guitar parts are all very open-ended and sort of dissonant.
sam: That's me. I definitely have the creepy–
Lids: I sing really weird cursed things all the time.
Gabe: Yeah, you do.
sam: There's definitely specific elements of this album in the sound aesthetic, you know? That was a big component in why I felt like they belonged together. They exist in a really specific world. For whatever reason, I can think more clearly about the other one now that we're talking about this one. I feel like [on Food Near Me, Weather Tomorrow] they're definitely less silly.
Lids: But they are still so silly.
Gabe: They're still silly, but imagine the next one.
Lids: These feel more serious–these feel like real artistic songs.
sam: I feel like there's something on the line here a little bit more with these songs. With the other ones, we were playing music in a different way. It was early in the pandemic, and we really needed to be distracted by sound and bring joy in absurdity. We were feeling like life was extremely absurd, and those songs came out of that time. These songs were written in the spring and summer where things were still really tense in our community and in this world, but it was also nice out, and there was all this back-and-forth of, like, "Things are getting better! Things are getting worser!" [laughs] It was very intense of a time, feeling freaked out and trying to find joy, and I think that there's some of that energy.
For each of you, what is the most fun part of being in babybaby_explores?
sam: Getting to hang out with my two favorite people.
Lids: I was gonna say being mean to you. [laughs]
Gabe: I think we see each other at all levels of human emotion, and we're pretty equipped to deal with that for each other. There's a lot of safety, and we're able to explore with each other because of that.
Lids: And fool around. And I would never leave Rhode Island if I didn't have this band. I would be here. So it's good for my health.
sam: It's good for your personal growth. [laughs] I love people and I love meeting people, and I love that I get to do that through playing music with my two favorite people.
Lids: Oh my gosh!
sam: But I also hate you both. [all laugh] My two mortal enemies. It is fun to fuck with you both, musically.
Are there musical pranks? Is that what you're saying?
Gabe: Definitely. That's why all my parts are cheesy as fuck. [laughs]
Lids: The whole thing is like, "How annoying can we be?" At least, I'm trying. And then you fuck around too, and I'm looking at you like, "Play the part!" And you won't. But the audience is probably like…[looks back and forth in confusion]
sam: I feel like on stage, we're like this–[deadpan stare] but what's actually happening is we're having a fist fight.
Mentally throwing down.
Lids: Yeah, it's funny. Usually when something seriously goes wrong though, we are really good about just laughing and being nice to each other.
Gabe: Yeah, there's no, like, "You fucked up!"
sam: Except for…
Gabe: Except for that one time.
Lids: I think they're just joking. It's all a joke here.