At Work: Julien Baker
Nolan Knight
Julien Baker is a few hours away from stepping onstage at Madison, Wisc.’s Majestic Theatre, but she’s about to slip out the door.
“I just found out that Every Time I Die is playing down the street an hour before my set,” she admits, copping to loving the band’s thrashy punk. On the surface, her own music— gorgeously melodic, sparse torch songs—is decidedly un-metal. But in between the pretty moments, Baker works up goosebump-inducing intensity that’ll leave you shaken up. And her second album, Turn Out the Lights, out on Matador this past fall, is full of them.
Baker’s 2015 debut, Sprained Ankle, was a stripped-down, almost painfully personal affair, released when she was only 19. With Turn Out the Lights, she’s layered her sound to match the same punch as her lyrics. On the meditative “Sour Breath,” she’s looking at a crumbling partnership, realizing, then howling, “The harder I swim, the faster I sink.”
However, clarity doesn’t mean simplicity, and Baker’s writing on Turn Out the Lights captures the push and pull—and the wandering and doubting that people go through when hashing out the tribulations of their relationships with themselves and with others.
That honesty has struck a chord with fans, critics and artists. “The ability of an incredibly specific story in a song to resonate with other people has been amazing to me,” she says. “It’s much less about the details of that song, and more about the emotions that I felt.”
Baker wrote and produced the album herself, recording the 11 tracks in her hometown of Memphis. Arcade Fire and The National associate Craig Silvey mixed the songs, creating a wide, expansive sound, even when it’s just from Baker and her guitar.
Spending the fall working her way through the States and Europe, she took her brutal expulsions to crowds full of proven fans and newcomers alike. It’s a daunting task when your songs contain admissions like, “When you watch me throwing punches at the devil/ It looks like I’m fighting with me/ But there’s a comfort in failure/ Singing too loud in church/ Screaming my fears into speakers/ Till I collapse or I burst/ Whichever comes first.”
Then again, they won’t fall on deaf ears. These are the types of thoughts that everyone has. It’s just that this time, they’re brought into the light.
