It’s inevitable that at some point or another, one will be faced with a life-altering moment that tends to slap perspective right into their face. For Julia Bailen, one of those moments happened to be just seconds before a driver lost control of their vehicle and slammed into hers. In the aftermath of the accident, she found herself reconsidering her future with BAILEN, the New York indie rock band she fronts alongside her twin brothers, David and Daniel. The experience would eventually help shape SWIM!!!, the trio’s first independently released album (out now), but it would also bring Julia to the realization that seems to have followed her throughout the album’s creation. That life-altering moment of perspective.
Her worth as a musician did not hinge on her ability to fit in with what expectations she had boxed herself into.
“I think that there’s a sense of arrival at myself and us as a band a little bit more,” she says. “I don’t feel quite as concerned about being cool or being part of the cool kids scene or something. I just feel like, ‘Oh, this is what we do, and that’s enough.’ It’s different, and it’s valuable. I don’t need to go and chase after some kind of aesthetic just to feel like I’m making music, like as a part of some kind of zeitgeist thing.”
For a band that has spent years navigating the music industry, that sentiment holds a lot of weight. To date, BAILEN has released two albums with a label, toured all over the country, and even earned recognition across music publications and listeners alike, which gives them an already keen sense of how to build a music career within an established system. Yet, with SWIM!!!, they had the opportunity to reconsider the terms on which they wanted to operate, be it through the way they recorded the tracks on the album to even the way they approached the expectations on themselves.
Take, for instance, the title track. Having been born out of the immediate aftermath of Julia’s accident, she found herself quickly collaborating with her brothers to complete the song, shifting the dynamic into something more insular and independent, whilst still keeping the collaborative approach that had defined their dynamic as a band from the beginning. With the mindset of steering away from catering to the “zeitgeist” of virality, Julia has become more interested in the gap between genuine artistic expression and the feigning of authenticity, especially in an industry that seems to increasingly encourage marketability over quality of the music.
“We’re so hungry for authenticity, right?” she ponders. “It’s all anyone talks about. I feel like the upshot of that is there’s a lot of facsimile of authenticity in the world. We just didn’t want to look at what other people were doing [and try to replicate that] because it just wouldn’t work on us. We’re not really going after what is perceived as authentic.”
Instead, the band returned to what had always worked for them, and what they knew was their strongest suit: making music together. After all, while BAILEN is a band, it is also a trio of siblings, who share a lifelong history under all the collaboration, which naturally shines through in the music. On top of that, they also worked to maintain the relationships they had built with their listeners over years of touring. In fact, David Bailen believes that live performance remains the band’s most effective way of reaching new audiences.
“If someone can come to our shows and see us live, we win them over,” he says. “That’s always been our thing. When we first started, we were just playing thousands of shows in living rooms, in front of 20 or 30 people. But, over time, we started to build connections that way. We’ve definitely tried to stay true to that in our live shows and on our records, so we always end up coming back to that honest kind of intimacy.”
Julia adds the band has invested considerable time into getting to know its fans, going so far as to communicate with them directly over social media and keeping up with what is happening in their lives. Those relationships have become a meaningful part of the work, offering a sense of continuity that can be hard to find in an industry that is so preoccupied with reach.
“We’ve spent a lot of time building up our community and fan base,” she says. “We’re out there having conversations with them on the internet. I know about their lives. We’ve spent a lot of time building up that community in a way that feels very real, as opposed to what’s happening on the internet. We’ve had success, but I don’t think we’re a super-viral TikTok band by any means. We’re all about that IRL life.”
But, that’s not to say that they don’t recognize that adapting to at least some level of presence in the digital environment is simply part of the game. David openly admits that they have spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out how to translate their gift for creating an intimate and genuine music experience into the digital world. But, that notion is counterintuitive to a band who outright tells me during the interview that they genuinely want to “bring back the middle class, singlehandedly.” Sure, David was joking when he said that, but he also notes that he struggles with the concept of having fame or money at the forefront of the band’s goals, while still recognizing that unfortunately, without at least a healthy dose of either, the band wouldn’t be able to do what they love to do.
“It makes you feel sick because you want all these altruistic things, and then you realize that the way society is structured, you kind of have to have all these numbers to facilitate them. Ideally, in a perfect world, we wouldn’t have to think about posting, and we could just have these personal connections with the fans. But, it’s a necessity.”
On SWIM!!!, the band managed to find balance by keeping their love of connection and live performance at its core. Having worked with producer John Congleton on their first two albums, the siblings had a clearer understanding of what they wanted to carry forward and what they wanted to change. Each of their three albums have been made differently, giving them a broader sense of the possibilities available to them. This time, they could draw from those experiences without having to settle on a single approach for the entire album. A process that both Julia and David found liberating and exciting.
“We did two records on a label, and we had a good experience, as far as labels go,” David says. “But there’s inevitably a bureaucracy that you run up against when you have a legal department or people who need to approve things. For this record, it was like, ‘Now we’re the corporate people.’ Now we have to be the ones saying ‘I don’t think there’s money in the budget for that.’ As we’re releasing this, [we’ve realized] this is the part we’re less familiar with. We’re in charge of the budget and how we spend this money we’ve raised for the record, and that part is new territory.”
But, the tradeoff for this new territory was a new sense of artistic freedom. “It was cool to be able to shape this whole project and be as dynamic as we want to be, to have it go all the places we wanted it to go,” says Julia. “I think one producer isn’t going to get every song, you know? It was nice to have the freedom to say, ‘No, we want to see this one out the way we know it can be,’ and know it can fit on this record, without having to come up against a bigger overarching opinion on what the whole record should be. We did it song by song, which I think was useful.”
And although there have been a few bumps along the way, the band feels like they’re settling into their distinctive roles now. All three of the Bailen siblings have assigned roles to each other that cater to their individual strengths, which helps the band as a unit take on more of the work themselves. And, naturally, their lifelong familiarity with each other also means they can be completely direct with each other when something isn’t working.
“You can say some pretty brutally honest shit, and then be laughing again in two minutes,” Julia says. “We’ve said some band-ending shit to each other, and then it’s totally fine the next day.”
“It definitely makes the bounce-back time much quicker,” David adds. “I feel like there’s a lot of bands where bad things just simmer, and the energy is bad. For us, it’s just out there on the floor. The energy can be bad, but then ten minutes later, it’s like, ‘I’m sorry.’”
Like any band, each band member has strong opinions that can sometimes conflict or even collide with those of the others, but ultimately, all three members share the common goal of making sure the end product they’re creating is the best it can possibly be. But even still, their shared history gives them a shorthand that can be difficult to explain. They know how the others think, and that familiarity can make the process more efficient.
That particular arrangement also allows them to keep their focus on the music while sharing the less glamorous work that makes a career in independent music possible. That balance has become especially important as they consider what they want BAILEN to look like in the years ahead.
Which, for now at least, they’re not entirely sure of the specifics of what BAILEN looks like down the road. But one thing is for certain: they intend to keep doing what they do best. They know they want to continue to build relationships with their audience and approach each record as an opportunity to discover something new about how they work together.
“Nobody’s here because we want to be famous,” Julia says. “I feel there’s so much of an emphasis on the quantitative stuff, the quantitative value of an artist, how many numbers they can generate. I am so not interested in being famous. But, I feel like we’re pressured into fame as a requisite for making a living doing this thing. This is what I’m good at. I wouldn’t choose this. It’s a hard life. It’s not easy. It’s not for the faint of heart. But this is what we do. This is how we’re choosing to try and make a living.”
That perspective feels central to SWIM!!!. The album arrives with the energy of a band that has found room to breathe again and is willing to trust its own instincts after years of learning the music industry first hand. Its independence has given the siblings greater control over their creative decisions, but the deeper change is in their willingness to stop treating external approval as the measure of whether those decisions are worthwhile.
Which isn’t to say BAILEN doesn’t have ambitions. Make no mistake, they want to reach more people and keep making records. But, underneath that hunger to keep going is a clear sense of what they hope reaching more audiences and making more albums will achieve. In the end, they simply want to keep playing together, while making music that feels like their own. But most importantly, they want to keep building the connection that first made their whole endeavor of starting a band together worth pursuing.
Photos by Alex Brown
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