Bronxville, New York lies about 15 miles north of Manhattan, a small, prosperous community largely made up of professionals, finance-workers, lawyers. Growing up here, Chris Baio’s life followed the trajectory familiar to many suburban teenagers — a progression of piano lessons, bad pop-punk bands, getting drunk in the park, one eye forever trained on the city beyond.
It was years – not until 2009, in fact, by which time Baio was 24, that he learned that the iconic American author Don DeLillo was also a resident of Bronxville. Struck by the proximity to a writer he greatly admired, by the simple knowledge that there had been a great artist in my midst, over the course of three months Baio set about reading all of DeLillo’s books — among them Libra, Underworld and The Names, his 1982 novel about an American living in Greece, to which Baio felt a particular connection. And I just realized, he says, that if I were ever going to make a solo album I would want to call it The Names.