Just when you think rock music has become boring and predictable, the Baron Von Bielski Orchestra steps up with an eclectic, amazing new release called Postcards From The Asylum. Jason Bieler recently took some time to talk about this new record and so much more!
Please press the PLAY icon below for the MisplacedStraws Conversation with Jason Bieler –
On who joins him in the Baron Von Bielski Orchestra this time – Man, I have just been blessed with a riches of friends that owe me favors, I guess. I’ve been very lucky in this record I had Marco Minnemann the drummer from The Aristocrats and a million other things, he’s brilliant, Todd Kerns from Slash’s band, who’s another monster musician. Andee Blacksugar, who I can’t speak highly enough who played on the last record, he’s my guitar hero. Edu Cominato, who’s from Brazil, who also played a little bit on the last record, Ricky Sanders played on a track for me on this record, also played on the last record, and I had had my old Saigon Kick bandmate Chris McLernon came in and played bass on one track. Sort of sewing the pass back to the future somehow or another. Ryo Okamoto, who’s the keyboard player from Spock’s Beard, everybody knows Ryo, he is a madman, he was kind enough to play a track for me too. Between the first record and this record, I don’t think you get much luckier in terms of an arsenal of talent way above my ability to pay them. 1:10
On writing music for all of these different players – I think the way most of the writing works on this is that I kind of build this kind of sandbox playground. So the framework is kind of already there, and then I let them run amok with a pre-built framework of what I kinda do. But I just find getting to work with guys like that, I think when you give them any kind of framework, you’re not going, “I don’t know what I wanna do and I don’t know how to do it, so just play something”. They are so naturally gifted that they kind of see what’s happening. I’m telling you, it would take a half hour to name everybody from the first record and this record, in terms of guests, but to a person, any time I’ve collaborated with guys of that caliber, I get back stuff that’s like, “Oh my God, that’s amazing. I wouldn’t have thought to do that”, but as you said, I didn’t want it to feel like I was just throwing people in because it’s a name because, one, it doesn’t really matter to anybody. Other than people going, “Oh that’s neat”, the songs will have to be the songs and the record still has to be the record. So it’s really cool to be able to call up someone like Bumblefoot and say, “Hey…”. 2:46
On if he’s become comfortable with being a “prog guy” – I think I’ve learned a lot about prog. It was never my intention to make any type of record, metal or otherwise. It was just such an amazing gift to have that audience find me because I got to learn as much about them as they probably did to learn about me. The coolest thing about that genre is it is truly a genre where there are no rules. Meshuggah can comfortably sit at the table with Steven Wilson as Yes can sit at the table with Devin Townsend. I think they’re just looking for things that are not formulaic, that are not playing within the boundaries of what everybody else is doing. I don’t mean to speak for the prog community, but I think they’re looking for things that push the envelope lyrically, and musically in any capacity. So it doesn’t just have to be heavy, it doesn’t have to be ambient, it doesn’t have to be anything. And that’s what I found really liberating, and it was kind of cool because you go to find a whole new audience at this point in my career, and the vast majority of those people have no idea about my past is a gift. Not that Saigon Kick was Metallica, some massive band that I couldn’t get out from underneath of, but it’s still rare that you get to a point in your career, you’re always the guy from that band, and so to not have that follow me and have people kind of retro, going back to it, “Oh, wait a minute. That’s the guy”. It’s kind of a cool place to be. And like I said, I’ve bumbled my way into a lot of happy accidents in the last few years. 4:38
On creating the diversity and unexpected nature of the record – Now, I have the reverse problem, and it’s even a problem, it’s a challenge. I think the people who have supported me and that have become friends and fans of this music would crucify me for not doing that. If I made a straight 11, 12-song rock record, they’d literally stone me in a public square somewhere. So the challenge comes from, one, I think you have to be authentic in your love for the types of music, I don’t think you can just try to make it (diverse). Everyone says, “Oh, diverse, diverse”. The Beatles were diverse and Bowie was always diverse, but it never seemed contrived. It seemed like an avenue those artists wanted to pursue and not comparing myself to the Beatles or Bowie, I’m just saying that was important to me. I am in the song “Mexico” or “Flying Monkeys”, because that’s an area I want to be in. Then the challenge becomes, I think really putting the record, so it has some kind of ebb and flow for those who wanna sit down and listen to an hour. In this day and age, everyone’s like, “You should only release three songs or four songs”, and I’ve gone and done two double records back to back. I’m not really paying attention to what the marketing reports are saying, but I wanted to make a record that the song could stand up, should you digest them that way. for those people like me when I was a kid who wanted to sit down with a double vinyl record, open it up, have credits, hear things in the headphones every time they listen that they didn’t hear the last time, and kind of create an ark and a story to the record, I wanted it to be there too. So that was kind of the mindset. 7:08
On always making sure there is a melodic base to a song – I’ve always been a song fan first. The thing about prog for me, and again, I don’t speak for anybody who makes prog, is that it gives me more avenues to experiment or modify things, to go down different avenues, not at the risk of not having a song. To me, my favorite prog things when I don’t even realize they’re in an odd time signature. As a fan of some of the Pink Floyd stuff everybody always brings up, even something like “Solsbury Hill”, I never knew that was in 7. It never dawned on me, I was like, “That’s a great tune. I just dig that song”. Sting has obviously done it a ton of times, and even the Foo Fighters have done some interesting stuff, so I never wanted to sit down and go, “Oh, let’s figure out a math problem, and then make a song out of it”. Song has always been king to me, everything else serves that. I want there to be a melody and a vibe and a feeling, and what I find that the progressive stuff has allowed me to do is not feel confined by a structure, not feel confined by sonics or where I can go with it, or arrangement, dogma. So it’s kind of trying to be a slave to both those worlds, I think. 9:35
On the genesis of the new songs – The majority is all new or in the process of getting towards this record. I think most people tend to write, the songs come in clusters, and I didn’t wanna make a record of “nomadic rap”Numb” and “Sic Riff”, so you kinda got to cleanse the palette and then move along a couple of weeks or months then, “Oh, now I’m in this mode of “The Depths” and “Human Head””, and then clean the pallet of that or so everything was gonna wind up signing like this kind of dark, brooding acoustic thing. Then going to things that are more ambient. There’s all different kinds of stuff, so I think it was more doing that kind of process with the writing. Then I wrote so much that it was really making sure I didn’t have then “Sic Riff’s”, which would destroy me. “Sic Riff” is kind of an ironic, I don’t wanna say snarky, thing about it, but to me it was like I was so tired of hearing, “Oh, this next record is our heaviest record”, and “Oh, this is such a sick riff, it’s such a sick riff”. So it was meant to be kind of ironic that the song was actually a sick riff. I didn’t wanna do it over and over and over again. So it’s pushing and pulling and finding what songs are gonna have legs and kind of fill that role for the record. 11:21
On if writing in clusters prolongs the process – Not consciously, but I knew I kept writing. So some of the stuff that came along with the end was “Mexico”, some of the stuff that came along with the end was “9981 Darkness” and things like that. I can’t say I have a specific thing, but as much as I just felt like the painting wasn’t finished. I knew there was really good songs, and I knew I could have made a 10-song record, but it’s really funny because when I finally finish the record, I put all the lyrics together because I had to have them proofread because I’m a moron, and especially because I’m making a double vinyl, you don’t wanna forever be holding up, proof of lack of education, especially even my wife started reading these things for the first time I was like, “You seriously have some issues, you need to go talk to someone, there are some of the problems”, and then the art person who I’ve worked with on the last record as well is just a genius, Robert Merrick, he was like, “You know this is like a concept record? Are you aware that you flow through it and some of the themes and how it all ends up?” Which I wasn’t actually consciously aware of. I don’t know if something just goes off in my head. This one was difficult to get to that point. It wasn’t that I didn’t have enough material, it just felt like there was a piece, did I have the pieces all together finally? Did it all stand up? So that took longer than writing anything in particular. 13:21
On putting all the pieces into sequence – I think a lot of it spoke for itself in the sense of where kind of angry children on the line, “I’m first, I’m second”. Knowing too that you live in a time where not everybody has the luxury to sit with headphones on and just find out whatever your artist is about. So I wanted to make sure that songs could kind of stand and sequencing it, I wanted to make sure that for those who like the one mistake, I wouldn’t say it’s a mistake, but last record I learned, how many people listen to the intro because it was first on Spotify? That intro was more popular than some of the songs, and that really just comes down to the fact that people are gonna listen, “Okay, maybe I’ll get to it, but I don’t have time”, so that played a little bit of a role. I wanted it to feel like a movie, I wanted it to have a beginning, I wanted to go somewhere in the middle, and then I wanted to have this end to it. I wanted it to feel, more important than really anybody else’s perception, I wanted to feel like this has been birthed. Now, the Baron Von Bielski Orchestra can go to space. We’ve done this, we’ve finished with this land, and we’re going to the next place. That just, I think at some point, became apparent. 15:10
On musical evolution – I just know the records that meant a lot to me, the classic records, they did that, they took you someplace. I think great records, sometimes all of them don’t make sense, the whole record doesn’t make sense at the time when we first got them. I find myself now, whether it’s Queen or David Bowie., Bowie was so far ahead of me, I needed to catch up. What didn’t make sense to me 20 years ago is now my favorite stuff, and that’s what I think great records do, Queen records, Beatle records, we put on the list of that stuff, you go back and you’re like, “Wow, would I loved as a kid is still always gonna be great, but I didn’t realize how good this was because I wasn’t ready for it”. Nothing wrong with passive music and listening to great pop songs that don’t really mean anything. I love them as much as the next person, but there’s something different about, I think our mutual favorite records and favorite artists that stand the test of time, and they try to aspire to do that. 17:04
On playing with Jonathan Mover in Progject – It’s such a great question, because Mover, as we all know, is one of the greatest drummers of all time. He called me up and he’s like, “Hey, I’m doing this prog Progject, would you be interested?” And I was like, “Jonathan, I wanna tell you right up front. Anytime I can play with you. The answer is yes”. Now, in terms of prog, prog to me was like Genesis with Phil Collins, “Owner of a Lonely Heart”, Peter Gabriel, the “Sledgehammer” record. I was aware that I always had to say Robert Fripp was great but not necessarily as aware as I should be why. It was like that’s passed down from the generations. If you’re at a cocktail party and someone brings up Robert Fripp, you automatically say, “He’s brilliant, game changer”, without really being as well-versed in it as I should have been, so shame on me. So getting late to the game, learning all this stuff from him and Ryo and Michael Sadler who grew up, that was their everything. Going into the songs like “Lark in Aspic”, all this King Crimson, the Genesis songs that were like 15-20 minutes long, and all this stuff, it was an amazing kind of collegiate crash course and mind-opener in the sense that it’s changed me forever. Like we were talking about, I was just like, “Oh wow. You can just do anything”. It broadened everything for me, it was like going from kind of like a vision of music like this to when the screen opens to the movie theater fully and the curtain’s pulled, “Oh, I didn’t realize there was that much more to the image”, so I’ll always be thankful to those guys, getting to play with them was just an absolute honor and it was unfortunate, I couldn’t commit to doing the whole tour schedule they had, but yeah, it was a game changer for me. 18:42
On playing the new material live – It’s really important for me to bring this record to light the right way. Even doing the Prog Power Festival, which was an honor and I couldn’t believe I was asked to do it, but so many things were going wrong, the bass player we had came in and got Covid the day before he was supposed to show up, and then I had to get a replacement and the songs are so complex. In the through-and-go environment of a festival, I wanna make sure that I was able to take a step back and go, “Okay, that was an amazing experience”. But I want to do this and present this a certain way, not that it has to be an arena tour or anything like that, but I don’t know, that throwing everything on stage, 30 minutes before another band goes on and ripping it all down does these songs justice the way I’d like to do it. So we’re looking at putting something to get more towards the end of the year into next year, I’d definitely love to do a bunch of shows. So I think everybody wants to do shows the right way. 21:00
On his duet shows with Jeff Scott Soto – It is more a tribute to vaudeville than rock or metal. There’s no rules, you’re just as likely to hear a Lizzo song as you are Slayer, or horrible jokes, or just unbelievable arguments. It’s been this really fun thing where I think the premise was, let’s play really short versions of a ton of different material that we like, Let’s go to cities we love and with great restaurants, and find a way to have a boys weekend whenever we’re not doing other things. Because it was done so pure of intent, it’s become this thing where the shows were all selling out now, and it’s been one of the more fun things in life because it’s just going all these different places we love and people are getting it now. People, I think the first couple of times people saw the show, it was like, “What the hell was going on?” They were laughing, they were enjoying it, but they’re like, “I don’t know what is happening”. Calling it a storytellers hour to me is like…most acoustic shows, I think were just indicative of like, “Okay, I’ve heard three songs and now I wanna kill myself. It’s enough, I just don’t want to sit here, I can’t, please play a hit and let me get back to the car”. We wanted to do the absolute opposite of that. It’s really been a lot of fun. Obviously, I have known Jeff since I was 18 years old, so he’s one of my oldest friends who gave me my first job in the music business, which I think we talked about last time. You’re talking to one of the luckier people in show business, I mean, there’s a couple of guys that did better than me, like maybe the Beatles or Zeppelin, but in terms of luck, I’m pretty damn lucky. 22:13
On if there will ever be a Soto/Bieler record – We’ve dabbled in discussions, but then we realized, there’s something so pure about not writing together and not ruining. We can sit there and say, “You wanna do a Carpenter song?”, “Yes”, or, “Do you wanna do a Harry Styles song?” “No”, or, “Yes”. It’s never a personal (thing), we’re not in that dynamic of creating music. So we spent more time going, “Well, I’m gonna say this”, or “This would be a fun topic. We could argue about that”. We just are arguing randomly in the middle of the show, not even arguing, just having discussions. For example, he always texts me like nine pages of detailed stuff and I’m like, “Dude, email me, I can’t go back in search texts for this”. To me, a text is like, “Lobby five minutes”, not detailed flight information and immigration protocols. We’ll just bring this stuff up, life in later we’re arguing like two old guys from the Muppets. 24:21
