In the last year, Guts Club’s sound has shifted to something much darker in tone. “Pandemics will do that,” says frontwoman Lindsey Baker. Pre-pandemic, her band was not known for its sunny outlook—the early albums draw on murder ballad and outlaw music traditions, and have a moody, rhythmic, muggy atmosphere populated by victims and violence. For their next release, listeners can expect less of the country influences in exchange for something even more “doomy and drone-based,” adds Baker.
Moving away from the country tones of her earlier work, Baker feels like the music fits better with her lyrics and that her current sound is more fully realized. The country music tradition is overwhelmingly straight, and she liked borrowing and repurposing elements of it, but her attitude has shifted. “I don’t know why I was drawn to it. I’ve always been drawn to sadder stuff, and I think I liked how masculine it was. I like the hats and the boots, but realizing you’re not invited to the party it’s like, I kinda don’t wanna wear your boots anymore. I don’t need to stand in the corner at your two-step. After living through the Trump era, I think we should take up more space than we used to. I’ll build my own thing.”
Witnessing “the pandemic, Trump, and a fucking insurrection,” has taken Baker’s music somewhere “darker and more scared,” but has also driven her to develop a more focused sense of the kind of work she wants to make, and how she wants to work within her community. As live shows reemerge, Baker is intensifying her efforts to make space for queer, non-male, and artists of color within New Orleans’ music scene. She books her own shows and conducts booking for a local venue with that aim in mind, and she is conscious about who is represented on the bills she attends. Earlier this year she started a record label called Wing and Wing with her friend Jessie Antonick with the goal of making space for underrepresented musicians.
Guts Club started out as a solo project, but Baker brought in more people and louder instruments because she wanted to have more command over a room. “When people are drinking they’re loud, especially in New Orleans,” she says. She didn’t like competing with the noise of a crowd on her own, so she got a band together and upped the volume.
“It started as this little thing. I hadn’t intended to have a band,” Baker says. “I wasn’t into electric instruments. But being queer, you can kind of need these other things to help make space for yourself. It was like this progression where first I had training wheels, then I had a bike, and now I have a motorcycle. And it’s just a lot more cathartic. It feels like I’m scratching an itch I didn’t know I had.”
Baker grew up surrounded by mountains and strip malls in a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania. She moved to Philadelphia when she was 18, and stayed for a good while before moving to Brooklyn, where the first Guts Club album was recorded in a carriage house on the Hudson River. She moved to New Orleans in 2015, a few months after that album was released.
Her confidence as a performer grew alongside her sound. Baker remembers one year playing a backyard show during Jazz Fest in a termite swarm, getting bugs in her clothes, teeth and hair, and grinning as she realized that she could play through it. She knew it would have affected her performance much more when she was just starting out. She says that for her both performing and writing are “wildly satisfying. When they’re successful. And when they’re not successful, you learn how to make the next one suck less. It feels amazing; It feels like the thing you should be doing. Or at least the thing that I wanna be doing.”
During the pandemic, Baker’s longtime collaborator and guitarist Travis Bird moved to Missouri, and drummer Willis Ross moved to New York. She is now working with a new drummer, Ronna Sandoval. Sandoval comes from a punk background. Together they’ve been “using a lot of intense pedals,” running the guitar in stereo with a bass amp, “beating the shit out of the drums,” and gearing up to start performing.
Describing her writing process, Baker says that the songs are fantasies, or wish fulfillment. “A lot of the songs are just love songs but where I’m a stronger person. And I’m just like, I wish I was tougher, or I wish you couldn’t hurt me. I wish I was a stronger person, where I’d be like, ‘I can take care of you baby.’ I’m kind of imagining myself to be this daddy…when I’m just a baby. I’m just a scared little brat. Generally I feel small, and if you look at all of the music that I’ve written, I might start out in the song as a victim and then end up the opposite. You know when someone cat-calls you in the street, and you get home and think of something funny you could have said back? It’s kind of like that. The songs are what I wish I would have said.”
Guts Club will be back playing shows soon, and are planning to record their next album this fall.. The first release from Baker’s new record label Wing and Wing will be Pony Hunt’s album, VAR!, debuting on July 23.
