By Chris Baio’s estimate, maybe moving to a different continent immediately after dropping a chart-topping and critically beloved album wasn’t the best move one can make.
“It was a bit insane,’’ he said, a slight laugh betraying the understatement. In a telephone interview Baio, who performs under his surname only, recalled his state of mind leading up to the release of his first solo LP, “The Names.’’ The month after his band Vampire Weekend issued its acclaimed “Modern Vampires of the City’’ in May of 2013, Baio and his wife crossed the ocean to settle in London. With one EP of his own out and another on the way, he drank in the change of scenery and got to work on a full-length debut.
“It becomes kind of a feeling; you know when it’s time to seize it,’’ he said. “I knew I had the songs, I knew I had stuff I wanted to write about, and I knew I’d have the time to do it. That’s very important because I think you wanna get things right. You don’t wanna rush anything.’’
“The Names,’’ released last year, takes its name from a Don DeLillo novel, which stuck with Baio after learning that DeLillo once lived and worked in his hometown of Bronxville, N.Y.. With that in mind, Baio, who stops by Brighton Music Hall on Thursday, listed the writer alongside four other inspirations from outside the realm of music.
1. Novelist Don DeLillo “Proximity is a very powerful thing, and to know that the town where I grew up is where one of the great American writers was writing is super, super inspiring. I read all his books, and I really loved them: loved his language, loved his humor, loved his sense of the absurd.’’
2. Filmmaker Ingmar Bergman “?‘Persona’ is a movie that I saw in my mid-20s, and it just kinda blew my mind. The older you get, it’s easier to get more jaded about art, and to be in your mid-20s and have something really kick your ass I think is a pretty cool thing. It’s very minimal. It’s black and white, it’s mostly two actresses on screen the entire time, but it’s one of the most colorful films of all time.’’
3. Photographer Matthias Heiderich “He took the photograph that’s the cover of my album. What I love about his work is that it exists in this kind of middle ground between graphic design and photography, and there’s something kind of uncanny about that. If you were to just look at my album cover for a second and then look away, I don’t think you’d be able to say definitively what is what.’’
4. Filmmaker Elem Klimov “He directed the movie ‘Come and See,’ and it’s a movie I haven’t seen in a while, but it is, along with ‘Persona’ — those are my two favorite movies of all time. There’s just something so bleak and heart-wrenching and affecting about that movie. I would say it’s not necessarily something that has a direct influence on the music I make, but just the ability to move, the ability to evoke something powerful in someone else, that’s kind of a goal in anyone making art.’’
5. Painter Kazimir Malevich “Around the time that I was making my record, there was a really great retrospective on him at Tate Modern in London, and his progression artistically is pretty incredible. His use of color, I find, is very, very influential on me, kind of in a similar way to Heiderich and his photography. It can be kind of a similar exercise [in songwriting] to imagine what the sonic equivalent of a Malevich painting would be.’’
Baio performs at Brighton Music Hall on Feb. 11 at 8 p.m. Tickets: $13, 18+. 617-779-0140. www.crossroads presents.com/brighton-music-hall
JOE INCOLLINGO
Joe Incollingo can be reached at joe.incollingo@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jk_inco.
