In 2005, Chris Baio saw Akron/Family perform for the first time, and the experience forever altered his thoughts about live music.

“They were my absolute favorite live band,” the Vampire Weekend bassist, who also records under his surname, gushes while describing a tiny basement show he saw the freak-folk band play for his college radio station. “One specific way they influenced me is in the physicality of how they performed; they would stay seated for the majority of their performances but would stand up for special moments. That simple amount of motion was extremely dynamic. When I was putting together my live show, I would stand behind my electronics for instrumental passages and then walk to the front of the stage and hold a mic when I sang.”

As he thinks back on his days chasing Akron/Family around experimental New York venues like Tonic and The Knitting Factory, Baio is mourning the recent, unexpected passing of the band’s co-founder Miles Seaton. And while he didn’t know Seaton personally, he’s quick to share a memorable encounter he had with the multi-instrumentalist outside an Akron show at the New Museum a few years after Vampire Weekend formed. “My friend had to dip out at the last minute, so I was going to the show alone,” he admits. “Standing around in a room full of people with no one to talk to before the band starts playing is my social nightmare. When I got to the gig, Miles was at the door greeting everyone. He gave me a little head nod, which helped put me at ease about being at a show alone.”

At the same time, the 36-year-old, Los Angeles-based musician is also celebrating the release of his third fulllength solo album and first in four years, Dead Hand Control, which was issued on Glassnote in January. Baio, who studied Russian at Columbia, says that he read about the “Dead Hand Control” concept—which he describes as “this idea of trying to control someone you bequeath your assets to after you die”—shortly after releasing 2017’s Man of the World. “I made my last record very quickly, almost purely in response to 2016 as a year,” Baio says during a Zoom call from his property in coastal Oregon, where he and his wife have been riding out the pandemic. “So I knew I just wanted to take my time and make something very deliberate with this one. Every record is a reaction to the previous record, and I felt the words ‘Dead Hand Control’ told an entire story.”

He pauses to smile beneath his thick, shaggy quarantine beard. “Dead Hand Control is also a rumored Soviet missile system that—if it detected a nuclear attack in the Soviet Union—would automatically go off. Its existence was never fully confirmed, but some version of that weapon system is still in operation today, which is a horrifying thought. It got me thinking about the nature of control.”

When Baio first started toying with Dead Hand Control, he was living in London, where he moved at the tail end of his 20s for his wife’s job. But he really started sculpting the songs in 2018 after relocating to LA and launching the cheekily named C+C Music Factory with Vampire Weekend’s Chris Tomson in a former dentist’s office that was also once inhabited by Mario C.

“I came back to finish [Vampire Weekend’s] Father of the Bride record and put the live band together, and this opportunity arose,” he says. “It’s the first time in my life where I felt like I had a fully professional setup that I could go to every day that was just mine.”

Baio continued fine-tuning Dead Hand Control between his Vampire Weekend commitments, laying down some additional material at Damon Albarn’s 13 Studios in London and enlisting contributions from guitarist George Hume, drummer and U.S. Dept. of State Jazz Ambassador Robby Sinclair, Future Classic’s Buzzy Lee and Vampire Weekend touring member Greta Morgan. Like most of Baio’s solo work, the set is a blend of post-punk and electronica, centered around his baritone vocals and synth-heavy beats. Baio says that the New Wavey “Endless Me, Endlessly” hinges on a turn of phrase he came up with “Dewey Cox style” while he composed the nearly 10-minute-long closing ballad “O.M.W.” with Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig around the time of 2013’s Modern Vampires. Baio says he’d usually clock in “9-5 office hours,” although one night when he worked late resulted in the nine-minute, technoinfluenced smoky title track. “It has that ‘light a candle and drink a little red wine vibe,’” he says. “I envy that hip-hop thing where you start work at 10 p.m. and it’s quasi work, quasi party.”

Despite his Grammy-winning band’s often busy schedule, Baio has been honing his solo career for almost a decade, originally moonlighting as a DJ and then applying that approach to his own vocal-driven music. “As far as Vampire Weekend, Ezra has always been the primary songwriter,” he says. “I was a co-songwriter on the first three records and Ezra was the main songwriter on Father of the Bride. My role there is to be a sounding board, come up with bass parts, and play a supporting role. And that line has been clearly established for 15 years, since we started playing together.”

 After listening back to some of his earlier solo work, Baio realized that, though “there’s light and happy songs, it was just too much doom and gloom” and his tunes lacked a bit of catharsis at the end. So this time—despite dealing with heavy topics including a doomsday clock— he aimed to find a sense of hopefulness and romanticism in his music, both sonically and spiritually.

“I already had plenty of anxieties about the world— plenty of fears, plenty of thoughts about a myriad of injustices on this planet—well before 2016,” he says. “But then I realized that what matters is the way that I am to the world around me, the way that I am to my community, the way that I am to my family and friends.”

Shifting from Dead Hand to Deadheads, Baio also makes a point to shoutout the various archival webcasts that have kept many jamband fans— including Tomson and Koenig— sane during the pandemic. While his interests sway closer to Queen and Krautrock—he explores the latter style with his CYM duo—Baio’s enjoying Vampire Weekend’s jamaspirant evolution.

“Taking the live show in that direction wouldn’t have been my first instinct, but the shows were so much fun,” he says. “But, Ezra taking us there, and CT [Chris Tomson] having all this knowledge about that world, makes me super psyched for the future. The combination of having this great experience touring Father of the Bride with having that tour cut short has given me so much more of an appreciation for that world—I’ve been listening to the Grateful Dead Channel and other jam stuff. It was definitely my favorite touring experience of my life.