Sitting outside on the ground of the parking lot backstage, Baker described his new job with Bad Religion as "What's not to like!" Though he wasn't an original member he admits he was somewhat of a fan of the band."I liked 'How Could Hell Be Any Worse?' when I was young, then I lost track of them and I missed all the pivotal 'Suffer,' 'No Control' period. I rediscovered them at 'Recipe For Hate' and thought they were absolutely wonderful. But even when I joined the band I had still never heard "Suffer." So I was a fan but a selective one. I've known Hetson for 16 years and the others for various lengths of time just through that old punk rock. So it wasn't too hard to assimilate because we already knew each other."
Baker said he doesn't feel pressure in replacing half the songwriting team that made Bad Religion. "I'm just trying to help -- I'm like a Band-Aid!" Rather than stress about it, he says he just does what he knows best, "I had no intention of trying to write half a Bad Religion record like Brett. I can't write lyrics nearly as well as Greg Graffin and the last thing you want to do is try to imitate what was already there.
I just did my usual thing and wrote a handful of Dag Nasty-esque, DC type songs because that's all I know how to do. Greg liked four of them, made words for them and changed stuff around. That's called collaboration. I wasn't trying to fill anybody's shoes. If you have a good riff in your head it just won't go away -- you must share it!"
Though Baker mainly sticks with songwriting, the lyrics are left to Graffin who's educational background includes a master's degree in Geology at UCLA and he's working toward a PhD in Biology from Cornell. Graffin's lyrics are supercharged with social political stances. No "Oh, baby, baby" rock anthems here but rather well written observations that they hope will make their fans think. And it seems they are succeeding. After their show, one fan expressed how he loves Bad Religion because he learns from them, stating how he had to look up two words in the dictionary that were on the new album.
While Graffin may have some strong opinions on the state of humanity, Baker says he agrees with everything Bad Religion stands for. He explained the main theme behind their latest album, "The Gray Race", "It's just a neat use of language for Greg as a metaphor for the human race. Conceptually, he just made an observation that the humans who are the most developed of all animals, are the only ones who can see in shades of gray, but only deal in black and white issues. Greg noticed that, it became a song and it sort of became a theme."With "The Gray Race" and their previous album, "Stranger Than Fiction," Bad Religion are achieving the kind of success most of the early punk bands never thought they would see or ever wanted to see. While Baker's former bands remained relatively underground, he says playing in Bad Religion isn't that different. "It's just like all the other bands I've been in except more people come see us. The dynamic is the same, it's all friends. I don't really think about it from the outside, I think about it from the inside, about how much fun it is to play, the people get along and the songwriting is fun. That's why it's fun for me. I would be in it even if it wasn't popular."
© Copyright 1996 Urban Desires
