Bathe Alone’s Bailey Crone takes us track-by-track through her intimately enchanting third album ‘I Don’t Do Humidity,’ a deeply vulnerable record that finds the Atlanta-based artist channeling grief and trauma into dreamy, bold, and achingly beautiful indie pop music.
Stream: “Victims” – Bathe Alone
It can take a day sometimes to wrap your head around a smile. You think it’s me, I think you’re in denial…
Bathe Alone’s Bailey Crone opens her third album I Don’t Do Humidity with a deceptively innocent question.
“Is there anyone around who can dance in your rain?” she sings on “Lake Sympathy,” her soft voice shining bright against a warm backdrop of acoustic guitar riffs and shimmering keyboard chords. On the surface, her words serve as a provocative, poetic introduction to her latest endeavor; dig a little deeper, and heaps of emotional turmoil and inner tension add fresh depth and color to that listening experience, as we recognize Crone’s lyrics for what they are: The beginning of a much-needed boundary between herself and a toxic relationship.
Endings – however important they may be to our long-term health and wellness – are never easy, and Bathe Alone’s latest LP is the product of multiple endings that all culminated around the same time for the Atlanta, Georgia-based artist. Fueled by grief yet full of life, its songs are poignant, passionate, and potent – filled to the brim with visceral energy, soul-stirring emotion, and an undeniably raw humanity that moves the ears and the heart.
First step: flattery
(You two are perfect, you two are lovely)
And I wish I could get Tyler
To be that good to me
Second step: isolation
(Are you just comfortable or are you happy?)
‘Cause I know what I am with Tyler
And I wanna plant the seed
I need to be saved
You could be my savior
We could misbehave
While she’s in Decatur
You could be my flavor of the day
If you want, babe
You could fill it up, babe
Look at what we became
We are victims, baby
– “Victims,” Bathe Alone
Originally released June 7th, 2024 via Nettwerk Music Group, I Don’t Do Humidity is as warm and wondrous as it is brutally honest, achingly beautiful, and utterly gut-wrenching; a gentle giant of dreamy, emotionally turbulent indie pop music channeled through singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Bailey Crone’s singular, stunningly intimate gaze. The album’s deluxe version, which adds two brand new songs and an alternate version of “Call Me Back” to the tracklist, is out now as well.
For fans of Bathe Alone’s last effort – the pseudo-sophomore album, two-EP collection Fall With the Lights Down (released in full last August), the arrival of I Don’t Do Humidity this summer would have come as a (welcome) surprise, given the relatively fast turnaround between the two records.
Atwood Magazine previously hailed Fall With the Lights Down as a “breathtakingly intimate and spiritually energizing” experience, praising Bathe Alone for her music’s sense of wonderment and nostalgia and for how her lyrics delved headfirst into memory and connections past and present, resulting in an “achingly human record plunging into the artist’s very own history.”
Bathe Alone’s third LP sees Crone once again closely collaborating with longtime producer Damon Moon (Curtis Harding, Lunar Vacation), who’s been with her since her project’s debut in 2021. The worlds they’ve created this time around are at once the most cinematic, refined, immersive, and expansive we’ve ever heard from Bathe Alone – a set of qualities that makes for an especially moving audience experience as the artist wears her fractured heart and heavy soul on her sleeves.
“Looking back now, the overarching theme of this album is dealing with the grief of a failing friendship, and the traumatic ending of a marriage,” Crone tells Atwood Magazine. “It was the end of something bad, and the start of something bad, too, all contained in a little time capsule of an album. When I started writing songs for this record, I was in a really toxic friendship with someone. It was weighing me down, and the songs were really flowing in real time as I was processing my decision to end the friendship. For me, I think I internalize a lot of emotions. I am a bottler. But I’ve learned that writing is such a healthy release for me, so externalizing my thoughts into songs has always felt like a diary entry. It can help me see clarity sometimes, and it’s just good to blow steam other times.”
“But then all of a sudden, my marriage fell apart, and a divorce came out of nowhere. My focus sharply shifted in this new heightened state of emergency. So, you can bet that from then on, that was the only thing I could write about. Overall, that pivot point in time from letting go of someone, to desperately holding onto someone else, is what I think of when I think about this record.”
“There’s a bit of duality on this album, both in the messaging and the sonics,” she continues. “The songs about the friendship sort of feel like running away, or fading away, and the songs about divorce are not passive at all. They’re angry and pointed. I’ve never experienced fight or flight like that before. At the beginning of the writing process, I was very much writing from a place of reflection. I felt like I was ready to move on and to set a boundary, and it was a controlled environment. It was very much my choice. I thought the entire record was going to be about that, to be honest. But once the divorce happened, I wondered if that was fate laughing in my face.”
Crone candidly describes I Don’t Do Humidity as angry, longing, and frustrated. Not only is this record a clear emotional shift from the topics and themes of her last record (2023’s Fall With the Lights Down), but it’s also a musical evolution for Bathe Alone’s artistry – which, while remaining unflinchingly intimate and unapologetically vulnerable, is melodically richer, bolder, and more cinematic than ever before.
“There was a lot of change and growth as a songwriter, as I went into survival mode processing my life,” Crone says, reflecting on the space (or the lack thereof) between the two records. “I think there’s an inherent evolution that happened. There was definitely overlap in the making of these records though. When Fall With the Lights Down was finished, songs like ‘Gemini,’ ‘4ever,’ and ‘Caramelize’ had already been written and demo’d out. I think you can tell they’re almost transition songs sonically, like they could go on either record. The overlap was inevitable though, as I treat songwriting like a constant in my life. It’s like my diary after all.”
“I think that artistically, this record has really stretched into territories I haven’t explored before. I think that the major life events that shaped the writing also pushed me into new places, sonically. My writing has always been about things I’m struggling with, and I think it sort of sounds like those things too. Fall With the Lights Down was largely about death, existentialism, and nostalgia, and the songs sonically come from the same cloth as those emotions to me. There may not be a sense of urgency, but rather a focus on mood and settling into a world with purpose. It’s a much more controlled environment. Nothing is on fire, so to say.”
“I Don’t Do Humidity is all anger, frustration, disorientation, and betrayal, and these songs sonically have that undertone too. But more in the directness of it all. It’s like someone gave me a shot of adrenaline. I found out I was able to push myself as a songwriter in ways I’ve never done before. I think you can hear a clear distinction in the urgency of I Don’t Do Humidity compared to Fall With the Lights Down, and especially in the divorce songs.”
The title I Don’t Do Humidity is both a colorful, emotionally-charged metaphor (one of several throughout these songs) as well as an earnest statement-of-fact.
“In my writing, I found that I kept comparing this friend of mine to water, in a negative way. It lyrically felt like a great synonym for someone’s darkness, or their burdens, or constant need for pity or sympathy and such,” Crone says of the name. “It was something I felt like weighed me down, and it made me feel uncomfortable and resentful. The thing was, that even when they weren’t around, I still felt this way. It lingered, and I carried it around with me like dead weight.”
“Being born and raised in Georgia, people always talk about the humidity here. It’s something I never really understood until I went somewhere like Colorado, and all of a sudden, the air was dry, and my hair’s wavy curls straightened, and breathing was less… soupy. I had no idea that it felt so liberating to feel completely dry, and to feel lighter, less sticky, less weighed down by a dampness you can’t escape. I much prefer it. In the song ‘Lake Sympathy,’ I say the title of the record. That’s me saying I didn’t want to feel this way anymore. I was done living in emotional humidity.”
Is there anyone around
Who can dance in your rain?
‘Cause I don’t do humidity
Underestimate your needs
Think I should leave it like that
‘Cause I can’t be sad again
Coming up on sorry town
On your left you’ll see Lake Sympathy
It’s a sign that says “No fishing”
For pity, our sincere apologies
Highlights abound on the enchanting, emotional rollercoaster of a journey from album opener “Lake Sympathy” to the original album’s finale “Dreamboy” and the deluxe edition’s closer, “Call Me Back (Fan Version).” Moody, brooding eruptions like “Archive 81” and “Blame Me” – both of which convey intensely intimate emotions through two deeply distinctive musical tapestries – are instant standouts on the record, as is the softly seductive dance-pop reverie “Victims,” the spellbinding “$35 Copay,” the delicately yearning “Call Me Back,” and the deluxe version’s additions “The Avenues” – an especially painful confrontation with her now-ex partner that aches inside and out – and “W/O Your Rain.”
“‘The Avenues’ was written around the same time as ‘Victims’ and ‘Blame Me,’ so to me it comes from the same sort of place in the grieving process – it was a really angry time,” Crone explains. “The moments I was writing about were the ones that proved all my suspicions to be true. I felt validated, and writing this song was definitely me getting to that place. Originally this song felt a little too close to me to include on the record, but now it feels like it’s time to let this one go free.”
“‘Dreamboy’ is probably my favorite song on the record, right now,” Crone smiles. “This song was a risk in so many ways. It was the only song that was on the whole record that I didn’t demo out at home before bringing into the studio, either. It was on-the-spot studio magic. People don’t know this, but I’m gonna go ahead and say it: The lyrics are a bunch of song titles. Some are released and some aren’t. I’m excited to keep the process going and learn more about what this period means for me. I feel like life events are only overlapping and interweaving. Same with internally processing those events afterwards. There is no stop, start. Life is multitasking. It’s dealing with the ending of a marriage, and taking your cat to the vet, and burying a grandparent, and needing to do your laundry.”
“But moments in time are all connected to one another, so you can really see so many different through-lines depending on where you place your bookmarks. I don’t think ‘Dreamboy’ being the last song means this is the end of anything, or that I’ve tied a little bow on this stage of grief. I’m not sure how long this period in time is going to interweave itself into the next, or if I’ll ever find a place to mark as the end of this chapter. But ‘Dreamboy’ isn’t trying to do that, anyways. It’s not a finish line to cross. I wish processing grief was that simple.”
This album’s lyrics are also especially important to Crone, who feels she came into herself as a lyricist while writing these songs.
“In the past, my goal was mood first, and I didn’t consider myself lyrically forward as an artist,” she admits. “In fact, I hid a lot of my emotions behind the ambiguity of my early writing. I loved the feeling of being hidden in plain sight. A lot has changed, and on this album, lyrics are no longer secondary to mood. There is so much to say, and I almost want to scream it from a mountaintop. I want to lay it all out there and get it off my chest. I want to unburden myself, I don’t want the emotional humidity anymore. I want to make art out of this and come out stronger and empowered.”
“As far as favorite lyrics, I feel like ‘Victims’ pulls off something that was really challenging, songwriting-wise. That was the most transparent I had ever been too. It was scary. But again, I felt lighter. After writing those lyrics, it was proof of concept to myself that the more vulnerable I am, and the more uncomfortable I am when telling my story, the better.”
Third step: the crying
(I’m in the parking lot, can you find me)
And I don’t think I love Tyler
Cause it feels routine
And I’ve been through a lot
And you are all I’ve got
You’re making it so easy
Fourth step: you and me
I need to be saved
You could be my savior
We could misbehave
While she’s in Decatur
You could be my flavor of the day
If you want babe
You could fill it up babe
Look at what we became
We are the victims baby
Ultimately, I Don’t Do Humidity stands to remind all of us – Crone included – that grief, however painful, can still cause moments of beauty, catharsis, and connection.
Bathe Alone’s latest album aches relentlessly and unapologetically the whole way through, all the while lighting a fire in its listeners that is sure to burn bold and bright as we take inspiration, energy, raw emotion, movement, and more from these songs.
“It’s really for listeners to take however they want, because that’s the absolute point of art,” Crone shares. “My part of it all only goes so far. The magic of listening to music is what happens next. And that’s out of my control, and I love it. You’d think that I’d take away a sense of closure after making this album. After all, I keep calling it ‘my divorce record.’ That makes it sound like it’s all there for the taking – I squeezed all the juice from that lemon and left nothing left on the table, and now I get to compartmentalize it and put it all in a box and move on.”
“It’s really not like that. I was kinda hoping it’d be like that in the beginning, but I’ve realized this is going to be a much longer journey than I anticipated. But songwriting is a great tool by my side to help me get these feelings out, and I’m only feeling more and more nourished the more I do it.”
Experience the full record via our below stream, and peek inside Bathe Alone’s I Don’t Do Humidity with Atwood Magazine as Bailey Crone takes us track-by-track through the music and lyrics of her deluxe album!
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:: stream/purchase I Don’t Do Humidity (Deluxe) here ::
:: connect with Bathe Alone here ::
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Stream: ‘I Don’t Do Humidity (Deluxe)’ – Bathe Alone
:: Inside I Don’t Do Humidity (Deluxe) ::
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Lake Sympathy
Fun Fact: This one was inspired by Bombay Bicycle Club’s “Rinse Me Down,” who we just played a show with and played this as our opening song… so we got to play our Bombay song at a Bombay show? How cool is that!? My first tattoo ever was a Bombay tattoo as well, dedicated to their song “Lights Out, Words Gone.” So, “Lake Sympathy” will forever hold a special place in my heart because of how full circle it’s come for me as a musician. This song was one of the first pieces I wrote for the record that used water as a metaphor for a toxic friendship. Both can feel heavy and weigh you down. The name of the whole record comes from a lyric in this song, too. Also, there is no Lake Sympathy in real life. I checked on Google Earth.
$35 Copay
I went through a phase where I was buying baby synths online. Like, for actual toddlers. One of the ones I bought was a Casio SA76, which like all baby synths, is full of these rinky-dinky tones. But I love how unconventional it is to build something grand out of something rather minimalist. After all, this song sounds massive to me. Damon and I always joke that this is the song we’d play at Coachella. But it’s crazy to me that the song itself is just a bunch of cute little boops and bops from a toy piano usually in the hands of a four year old. This song is a testament to myself that gear doesn’t matter, songwriting does.
Caramelize
The thing I think of everytime I hear this song is that snare. I’m taken back to when I was living with my ex in a house where family friends were staying over, and they had a baby. I really wanted to track this new snare I got, so I used brushes instead of a stick. That’s me trying not to wake up a baby. The song has this delicateness to me that none of the others have. It maintains a sort of quietness throughout until the end. I love that you can’t really tell when it gets big either. All of a sudden you sorta realize that you’re just surrounded. But the journey to get there was so subtle and brewing. To me, at least. Maybe the baby didn’t think so.
Gemini
This one was written before my divorce was even a thought. It may even be the oldest song on the record. This or “4ever” is. I can’t remember. It feels like so long ago, and it truly was a different “me” that wrote this song. I had a whole different life with a whole different set of problems before the divorce. I was writing about mental health and existential topics back then. I remember finding this really interesting voicing in the bass, where I hold out a flat three in the chorus. The whole time that note happens, I just feel “off.” It’s out of key. It’s technically “wrong.” It desperately asks to go somewhere, to be resolved. Which, I do resolve it up back to a normal three. This tangent has a point, I promise. I kept imagining in my head, holding out that flat three for forever. Like, imagine being trapped in a world where that note never gets resolved. To me, that’s what depression feels like. Something is just wrong. Something is just “off.” And depression can be hard because it doesn’t feel like there’s a way out sometimes. I think music finds ways to explain feelings better than words. That flat three is so tactile to me. Anyways, the other cool thing that happened in this song is the fact that, after my divorce, the entire narrative flipped for me. I was absolutely singing about my own depression back then, but now I can’t help but see that I’m singing about my partner’s depression, the Gemini I was walking hand in hand with.
Fear Everything
This is actually the first song on the tracklist that addresses the divorce. Which, I had a hard time deciding how to unveil it all within the context of an album. After all, there were so many emotions happening all at once, some complete opposite of others, that it became impossible to figure out which one I was actually feeling. I’m not even convinced that this is the right song to be hearing here, to start changing the subject from toxic friendships to BAM, a divorce. That’s what this feels like to me in context of the previous songs. It comes out of nowhere. But, that’s actually what it was like in real life, too. Life imitates art, I guess. Or is it the other way around? The song itself, though, is a sister-song to “Call Me Back.” They were written probably days apart. I was having fun with this squiggly acoustic tone and minimalist drum machines. The two songs come from the same moment in time to me. But that’s exactly what I mean about not being able to figure out how I’m feeling. “Call Me Back” is so longing. And this one is so blaming, pushing away, and resentful.
Archive 81
I had just separated. I had to find new normals and face the fact that this was actually happening. You’d think that I’d be ruminating on the drama and the trauma, but actually, in the stillness of my new environment, I found myself missing the mundane things. There’s a feeling of safety that comes with familiarity and routines. The last TV show we had been watching together was Archive 81. I wanted to go back to the way things were before and do the things the way I did them before, including finishing this stupid TV show. It’s not stupid, but I do think longing for finishing a TV show with my partner over addressing the root problem with my partner is silly. Or maybe, it’s just human.
Blame Me
This one is a doozy. Part of me wanted to save face and write more songs like Archive 81, where it’s introspective and hardly airs dirty laundry. But some things were revealed shortly after the separation that I actually knew were true all along. It had me reflecting on a night in my marriage where I confronted my partner about my suspicions of infidelity. I felt gaslit into believing otherwise. The confrontation escalated, and my partner stormed out and drove off. I reached out for help from his step-mom. I had never been more scared to tell someone my story, but she knew him, she was a mutual party, I knew it was a safe space. So I spilled the beans. I told her everything. And she completely validated my feelings. She told me, “There’s no room for three in a marriage.” Which, she was referencing a Princess Diana quote. It was so potent, it stuck with me. When I subconsciously sang the first lyric of the song, “Ain’t no room for three” came right out. I thought, “I guess we’re writing about this then.”
Victims
In the same vein as “Blame Me,” I was finding support in my friends during the chaos, and after explaining the situation of my partner and this other woman to them, it was actually Damon who said the next thing that really stuck with me. He said, “That’s manipulation 101.” It was so blatantly obvious to him, and I hadn’t seen it at all. I was so used to giving people the benefit of the doubt and making up excuses for their actions, that it didn’t even cross my mind that someone could just have bad intentions. Another thing that my partner’s step-mom told me on the night of the “Blame Me” incident was, “That woman knows exactly what she’s doing.” It was the combination of that, and what Damon said that lit the lightbulb in my head — I was going to write a song as the other woman. But make it almost comically obvious that she’s just got a step-by-step guide on how to steal your man. There are real steps to manipulation. After looking them up I was dumbfounded by how accurately it reflected my own experience back at me. All of the auto-tuned vocals in the song are real things she said. It’s all embarrassingly real. Writing this song was such therapy for me, as I was able to see how it all happened so easily.
Fresh Start
So many of my friends noticed something about me while I was going through my divorce. Someone said “you’re so stoic.” Someone else said “you’re handling it very well, I would have never been able to tell.” In a way, I was surprised to hear I came off this way, based on how I felt on the inside. I tried to describe the way I felt to them like this: Imagine you’re in a terrible car accident. You look over in the passenger seat and see your husband is dead. What are you going to do? Are you going to cry and grieve? Or are you going to look in the back seat to make sure your kids are okay… That’s what this all felt like: survival. There was no time to shut down because of all the logistics I needed to sort out first. Coping mechanisms can give you real superpowers… This song starts off with me not being able to tell if I felt any pain. However, I contradict myself in later lyrics by acknowledging the pain. So, unlike my friends, I didn’t quite fool myself. I was able to see some cracks in my superpower.
4ever
Like I said, I don’t remember if this or “Gemini” was the real firstborn of the record. This song is so existential, and kinda dark. I had no idea at the time of writing it that it’d be a wonderful palate cleanser from my own tumultuous story.
Call Me Back
I mentioned earlier I was having a hard time figuring out how to unveil my divorce story within the context of my own album. I didn’t put them in chronological order of how the events unfolded. Or chronological order of the dates I wrote them, or anything like that. After all, a lot of this happened so quickly it feels like a blur. And I didn’t experience one feeling and get over it and experience the next. The stages of grief weren’t linear for me. I’d bounce from depression, to anger, to denial, back to anger. Who knows what emotion truly came first. But I do know that finding out my suspicions, after the fact, were right, played a distinct role in starting the journey to acceptance. Which is also a stage of grief and I didn’t mean to do that. We didn’t quite get there to that stage in this album. Actually not even close. But “Call Me Back” feels like a better way to leave things off. Taking it back to the feeling of longing, instead of anger. I wasn’t trying to close doors with this album. This was the original last song of the album too. Oh what a wonderful ending it could have had…
Dreamboy
Damon told me to write one more song and “make it brutal.” This is my favorite song on the entire record. It’s blunt and unambiguous. This is one of the ones where I think music can be more descriptive in a feeling than words can right now. The screaming guitars at the end are so emotive to me, it sounds like a crisis. This song is like being curled up in the fetal position, in the middle of a room, crying your eyes out in the most visceral way. But not even that, it doesn’t feel like the act of doing that itself. It feels like the moment you stop crying, and the room around you is… silent. Whatever that moment is, whatever that disconnect is from the emotive human in the middle, to the stark stillness of the room, that’s what the song feels like as it cuts out at the end. Is it loneliness? Vulnerability? I can’t figure it out, I’m not good at figuring out my feelings.
The Avenues
“The Avenues” was written around the same time as “Victims” and “Blame Me,” so to me it comes from the same sort of place in the grieving process – it was a really angry time. The moments I was writing about were the ones that proved all my suspicions to be true. I felt validated, and writing this song was definitely me getting to that place. Originally this song felt a little too close to me to include on the record, but now it feels like it’s time to let this one go free.
W/O Your Rain
“W/O Your Rain” was supposed to go on I Don’t Do Humidity, but it always felt like an outlier. Originally the arrangement was much different, and the more the album took shape, the further away this song felt. Since the album has been out, I decided to reapproach this one so I can put this in a box and compartmentalize it, along with all the other divorce songs, where it belongs. This song was the first one that I wrote that used the idea of water or humidity as a negative thing – the album was named by literally having this song included, so it only felt right to tie the bow on it. Sometimes grief can feel never-ending, and as complex as it is, coming to terms with it can feel empowering, but hopeless at the same time. This song is me taking back control over my own grief.
Call Me Back (Fan Version)
When I released this song as a single, I thought it would be fun to set up a hotline for people to call in and leave voicemails for people in their lives that they never got closure from. It was originally just a cool way to engage with our fans, but once we started listening to the voicemails, we were blown away by how heartfelt and personal the messages were – and by the sheer number of people that participated. It felt like the song meant so many different things to different people, so I wanted to make a new version using some of the voicemails (with everyone’s consent, of course). All the messages were so special, and I’ll never forget how connecting in this way with everyone felt.
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:: stream/purchase I Don’t Do Humidity (Deluxe) here ::
:: connect with Bathe Alone here ::
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