Atlanta Dream-Popper Bathe Alone on her Double EP ‘Fall With The Lights Down’
"I HAVE A WHOLE GOOGLE DRIVE OF CHORD PROGRESSIONS — from artists that I like,” Bailey Crone tells me. She is the face (and the guitarist, bassist, and drummer) behind Bathe Alone, her dream-pop project born out of Atlanta, GA. We spend a good amount of our conversation talking about this folder of hers. When I ask her what songs she has in it, she lists just about every Beach House album.
Crone details the songwriting shifts in between Beach House’s self-titled debut and mainstream breakouts Teen Dream and Bloom (it takes a lot of active listening to hear the distinctions, she says). She questions what exactly makes Teen Dream so palatable, why Depression Cherry feels so mysterious, how 7 managed to wriggle into an ear-melting corner of dream-pop.
“It’s kind of like I’m a — I don’t know — an archeologist,” she says. “I’m just digging up the past.”
As a classically trained musician, her artistry is strangely analytical and particularly obsessive. One of Bathe Alone’s distinctions in the dream-pop world is that everything is carefully curated. When her listener feels entrenched in melancholy or dazed by nostalgia, she knows exactly what she’s doing and why she’s doing it.
On her newest project, Fall With The Lights Down, Crone is a master of bending songs to her will. She released the first part of her double EP, Louise, in October of last year. Now, she completes the project with its counterpart, Velma, which includes singles “Missionary RIdge” and “In Your Wake.”
Fall With The Lights Down is a head-turning, refreshing take on classic dream pop. Her devotion to Beach House is no joke. Her previous record, Last Looks, was taken straight from the book of masters. It perfectly fits the dream-pop paradigm with its consistent fuzzy, lush soundscape and Crone’s stunning voice. After mastering the first act, Crone has enough tools in her belt to start breaking the rules instead of following them.
“I’m trying to pick up tools, I’m trying to pick up vocabulary, musically,” she shares. “I feel like that all is probably from being in the classical world in the very beginning. It was always like, everyone was always better than me, so what can I do to get better?”
Growing up in suburban Johns Creek, GA, Crone was a stubborn, anti-authority student in high school. What she lacked in academia she made up for in the wind ensembles and symphonic bands she played in. She studied advanced music theory when she was a teenager. At 18, she taught herself drums by playing Paramore songs on Rock Band. Instead of studying music in college, she began writing music so that she had something to play her drums to. She eventually picked up bass and guitar and became her own band.
Damon Moon, Crone’s writing partner and producer, sees her type-A personality firsthand. He too is classically trained (his first instrument was the clarinet, Crone’s the trumpet) and is obsessed with technique and theory. This is one of the many things that bonds the two together. When he joins our call, they effortlessly riff off each other and constantly point to the other’s greatness. Moon tunes in from his studio, Standard Electric Recorders, that sits right outside of Decatur, GA. The deeper we get into conversation, the more evident his importance on creating Fall With The Lights Down.
“Bailey’s mind is really interesting with it all,” he says. “She’s super analytical in ways that other people I’ve worked with are not… I’ve never met anyone like Bailey that does this, where it’s like, ‘Oh man, this song that I just love, why do I love it? Technically, why do I love it?’”
The two met while Crone played instruments for other indie bands around Atlanta in the late 2010s. One of her bands, “super indie and low on cash,” flushed out a record in three days at Standard Electric. At the end of one of their sessions, when the rest of her bandmates left, Crone suggested that she could show Moon one of her own demos. She played an early version of “Tarot Cards” off Last Looks that, according to Moon, had “enormous potential.”
“I was just totally flabbergasted,” Moon says. “I was like, ‘Why are you in these other bands? You need to be doing this!’”
Together, Crone has the support and space to fully explore the vision for Bathe Alone. Fall With The Lights Down is a sensory experience in which memories oscillate between real and fake. The record explores experiences you only think of after the fact: a childhood vacation you didn’t think twice about, how beautiful a place looks when no one is paying attention, what it’s like when your dog dies and a piece of you dies with them. Crone and Moon use sampling and oddball techniques to communicate these experiences, like ripping apart vintage orchestral records from Goodwill bins on “Blue Days” or scratching up symbols and feeding it through Melodyne on “Childhood.”
“I feel the most self-conscious when I write those songs,” Crone explains. “I love writing it, but then afterwards I’m like, ‘Fuck I did another sad song!’”
But Crone feels at risk of getting pigeonholed into the sad indie girl genre that many of her idols were, such as Lana Del Rey, Lorde, and Billie Eilish. Despite her undying love for Hayley Williams, it was these three that changed her perspective of how she could manipulate her voice in Bathe Alone. Crone discovered that using her voice as an instrument and a texture, laying it in the atmosphere instead of the forefront, is where she is most comfortable. Her friends often joke that they have no clue what she’s singing in her songs.
“I don’t really know how to be vulnerable and feel comfortable about that,” she shares. “I don’t like feeling like people can see that side of me at all times. I want to appear strong and capable and independent. When it comes to singing these lyrics about how I’m actually feeling, it makes me more comfortable with the idea that not everyone can understand what I’m saying.”
It’s hard to see the “emotional robot” in Crone that her friends describe her as. On Fall With The Lights Down, she is in touch with her emotions and it’s important for her to communicate them, even if it means hiding behind the curtain. Bathe Alone materializes nostalgia’s tendency to amplify our colorless memories. When she documents them, she makes them real.
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