Few bands have managed to catch on with a sizable audience as quickly as Cloud Nothings have over the past few months. Since the release of Turning On on Bridgetown Records in December of last year, the band has received a landslide of much-deserved praise for the incessantly catchy guitar-pop that dominates the record. In three months, the band has gone from playing their first show to touring all around the eastern half of the country and playing SXSW. The band's rise isn't as meteoric as you might think, however: Cloud Nothings mastermind Dylan Baldi has been playing music for several years under different musical aliases before devoting the majority of his time to Cloud Nothings. Here Baldi speaks about the beginnings of Cloud Nothings and assures an ever-growing audience that plenty of touring and new material will be coming this year.

Inyourspeakers: I guess a good place to start would be the beginning. I know you've just started gaining a lot of attention and I was curious about your backstory. Had you been making music for awhile before making it as Cloud Nothings?

Dylan Baldi: I've always played in bands, but never tried to make it anything more than playing around Cleveland. Basically, I've always recorded my stuff on my own and put it up online under different names. I play a bunch of instruments because I get bored of waiting for people, so I do it on my own. With Cloud Nothings, I just made a myspace and added a couple of blogs as friends and it all just kind of took off.

IYS: Like you said, you wrote, played and recorded all the music on Turning On yourself. Did you just record it in your bedroom?

DB: In my basement, same kind of deal, yeah. When I was recording the record I only had one microphone, but luckily that's what people want to hear right now so it worked out okay.

IYS: Turning On is pretty raw-sounding—still awesome, but very raw. Do you want to have a better quality recording of your music for future releases?

DB: Oh yeah, definitely. There are a couple of 7” records that are coming out soon that will hopefully sound pretty good, less lo-fi.

IYS: Most people are familiar with you through Turning On, but there are other Cloud Nothings releases that have, or will soon, come out on labels aside from Bridgetown. Are you going to continue to release stuff on different labels? It can be hard to keep track sometimes!

DB: Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff going on. Basically, a bunch of people asked me to do stuff and I just said yeah, so that's what's going on. I haven't really picked a specific label to work with yet, so I've just been releasing stuff everywhere. There are certain labels, like Bridgetown, that I really like. But then there are labels, labels that everyone knows, that I like a lot and I probably wouldn't mind working with exclusively.

IYS: Since you are from Cleveland, I was wondering how you hooked up with the California-based Bridgetown Records.

DB: Yeah, it was internet magic. Just through the Cloud Nothings myspace. I had only two songs up at the time, “Hey Cool Kid” and “Whaddya Wanna Know,” and I added a band I really like called Baby Birds Don't Drink Milk, and I found out they were on Bridgetown so I friended them—it was all just a myspace friend-adding spree.

IYS: Bridgetown released Turning On on cassette initially. That's been sort of a big deal lately, with the re-emergence of cassettes as a medium for releasing and listening to music.

DB: Cassettes are kinda – I'm only 18, so even when I was little people were mostly doing CDs and stuff, so cassettes weren't really anything I listened to, but now that people are putting music out on cassettes I'll buy them and listen to them. However people put their music out, I'll buy it and listen to it.

IYS: When I first heard the album, I thought that it seemed like a good album you could listen to while driving long distances, sort of like Pavement and Silver Jews in a way—I think both those bands made albums that are good for long drives. Is that something that you were influenced by?

DB: Hmm. Well, I like Pavement and Silver Jews, I was influenced by them, not so much by the idea of driving [laughs], I don't know. That's interesting though, I hadn't thought about that.

IYS: Speaking of long trips with friends, you just got back from a pretty long tour. How did you meet your touring band members TJ, Jayson, and Joe?

DB: They're friends of mine just from playing in bands and knowing people around Cleveland. They're all older than me, but I couldn't find anyone my age because they're mostly going to school so they can't tour around with me. TJ, Jayson, and Joe were all down to go on tour with me.

IYS: I read that your first show was in Brooklyn just last year in December, and only three months later you've toured across the country and even to Mexico. Was that overwhelming at all? Have you ever been on a trip like that before?

DB: I never did before now, because I was in high school. I really liked it. I mean, playing shows every night and driving so much got to us a little. But I love playing, and my friends and I went around meeting a bunch of cool people and playing with bands we like a lot, so yeah.

IYS: Did you catch any cool shows at SXSW?

DB: I saw a bunch of stuff. Some of my favorite ones were, I really liked Pearl Harbor, they played a set down there, and I really liked Beach Fossils. Those were my favorites.

IYS: Your tour itinerary states that you played a show in Mexico on this tour. There's all this confusion now over whether or not it's dangerous to travel in Mexico now - did you have a good time there?

DB: Well, we didn't actually didn't end up playing in Mexico, not for those reasons but because our guitarist Joe lost his passport while we were traveling around so there was no way all of us could get down there. It wouldn't have made sense if we played with just three people so we had to call it off.

IYS: Gotcha. That's too bad then, but that adds to fun touring stories I suppose.

DB: Yeah. [laughs]

IYS: Cleveland isn't exactly known for its indie rock scene. Were there any bands you enjoyed in Cleveland? Obviously you met everyone you toured with through friends and shows, so I was wondering if there was anything you were into there.

DB: I guess I'm biased, but our drummer Jayson is in another band, Swindlella, that's really good. All my friends are in bands, but there are a couple bands like The Dreadful Yawns, Afternoon Naps, I don't know, all of this sort of happy, sunny, poppy stuff that's pretty big around here. They're just friends of mine and they kind of took me under their wing a couple years ago and helped me out. There's definitely a scene here, it's just very insular.

IYS: That's about it, but I was just wondering: I know you mentioned to me that you had more plans to tour this year, like that you'll be playing Boston again soon. Are you going to go to the west coast as well?

DB: The plan right now is to do a small east coast one over the summer, and in the fall I think we'll do a big cross-country thing. That's what the plan is now, so hopefully it will work out.