Julien Baker on What Gives Her Hope

Julien Baker does not deal with light subjects. She made that known on her 2015 debut, Sprained Ankle, which tackles loneliness, anxiety, depression, overcoming addiction, and questioning her faith, all with a light voice over minimal guitar-led tracks. The topics are deep and harrowing, but weightiness is what makes the music worth listening to.

“I guess my desire for releasing those songs is that it robs the subject matter of its heaviness, when it puts it in the perspective of others, you know?” says Baker, who is 22, queer, Christian and a Memphis native. “I think it helps for me to contextualize what I'm feeling inside of a song, and allow it to be released into the world for other people to take it and make it mean what they need it to mean.”

Her sophomore album, Turn Out the Lights, which released in October, revisits those themes. She questions her self-worth, knowingly calls herself “evil,” and doubts her ability to change. In the track “Shadowboxing,” she likens battling mental illness to fighting an opponent no one can see or understand. In “Happy to Be Here,” she sings, “Well I heard there's a fix for everything … Then why not me?”

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But through all the dejection, Baker finds a glimmer of hope in the darkness. The closing song, “Claws in Your Back,” concludes with: “I think I can love / The sickness you made / 'Cause I take it all back, I change my mind / I wanted to stay.” She literally ends on a high note, belting out those last lines and proving hardships are worth fighting through.

Baker says of Sprained Ankle, "Maybe there is an implicit statement of hope because the songs are very bleak, but you have to be willing to admit those things to yourself in order to heal." Turn Out the Lights is "a more explicit attempt to make space for hope amid the very dark realities that are perpetually confronting us."

Baker wrote most of the songs on the road over the year and a half she spent on tour. But some compositions, like “Televangelist” and “Claws in Your Back,” were written on her home piano in Tennessee. There’s more instrumentation on this record—she added strings for a bigger sound—and the creative process required “a lot more forethought." Baker had the whole album planned on a spiral notebook before hitting the studio.

Turn Out The Lights, like its predecessor, wowed critics and earned spots in several Best of The Year lists. The praise is relieving for Baker, but that's not why she makes music. “As long as there's still people who enjoy it, I think it's done its job as a record,” she says. “It's accomplished the task of music, which is to bring comfort to someone, or provide them with a little bit of joy or help them in some way.”

Before taking off for the holidays (and right after hiking Mount Shasta with her band), Baker spoke to BAZAAR.com about making TOTL, and finding happiness in her moments of darkness.

She recorded the album in six days.

“I had more of a conceptual idea of what I was going for with this album. We didn't spend much more time in the studio, it was still just like six days, but I felt more liberty to try and experiment because I wanted it to be a little bit more dynamic than the last record.

"We were only physically in the studio for six days and we just knocked it out. We would show up and just stay there for 12 hours. I guess the time goes by really quickly when you're piecing together something you care a lot about. And it was just five minutes from where I was living at that time, in Memphis, so, literally close to home. It was great.”

She was in a different headspace while writing this record.

“After touring the Sprained Ankle songs for so long, I was a lot more self-aware and tried to have more perspective on the subjects I was writing about. As much as being in a different place musically, I was also in a different place personally and emotionally, where I was still in the process of learning how to be more proactive and vocal about healing and be more mindful of those around me, which I suppose is a constant process for all human beings."

She’s aware that her songs make people emotional.

“People bring that up to me at shows. The way I wanted to approach talking about the record is to try to shrink my ego, the persona of the artist, in comparison to the music itself and the listener. So when people tell me those things about a song, it's incredibly moving.

“But I try to just remember that in the setting of a live performance, my goal as an artist is to create an environment in which people can allow themselves to feel those things, but it doesn't mean that I am responsible for that feeling. I think that those people are in control of what they're feeling and I'm glad that we can experience that very intimate exchange together using the channel of music. I feel very fortunate that I get to be in that position. But hopefully it feels less like a performance and more like an exchange.

“Sometimes I feel bad, or I used to feel worse, when they say, ‘You made me cry.’ I just think maybe it's important that those people get to feel those things.”

Her track “Even” is just a demo recording left as-is.

“I think the songs that require the least refinement, or that go through the least restructuring, often end up being the ones that are the most accurate depiction of exactly what I was feeling at the time. ‘Even’ just ended up being me sitting in a room for 30 minutes writing out that song. Then we recorded a demo of it, and that's the only track that we didn't record anything on top of. We just did the demo, and then left it how it was.”

But other songs took more time.

“Songs like ‘Everything To Help You Sleep’ or ‘Claws in Your Back’ took a little bit more grappling with the actual poetry for me to feel comfortable with the song. And there's a little bit more song crafting going on, and I had a specific idea in mind of the imagery I wanted to evoke. So those songs end up being a composite of many different feelings instead of just a very dialed-in specific instance of me recounting an emotion. But they're both equally weighty to me. I have equal personal investment in them because they're all anecdotes from friendships and relationships.”

Her lead single, “Appointments” is based on a hyperbolized internal dialogue of self-doubt and insecurity.

“‘Appointments’ is largely just derived from pieces of dialogue with another person, and then also what's going on inside of my own mind, or a person's own mind. They're intended to be a little bit exaggerated and a satire of things that we're not sure are entirely true, or maybe biased. For instance, knowing that you disappoint a person, or knowing that you're failing someone and you're not what they wanted, these are all examples of self-deprecating and skewed self concepts. And then, hopefully, the rest of the record is learning how to be aware of those things and mitigate them.”

The song swells as she transitions from the chorus to the bridge. "Maybe it's gonna turn out alright. And I know that it's not, but I have to believe that it is," she sings. Then she repeats the last seven words, like a self-assuring mantra.

“Saying that ‘you have to believe that it is,’ is just forcing a provisional hope when it doesn't feel like there's a realistic hope, which I think is a mechanism of the human mind. When there seems to be no answer, I think we just provide ourselves with some kind of motivation to persevere. Because I guess the only inevitability is that things change. When I say I believe that it's going to turn out alright, well maybe things turning out alright doesn't look the way I envisioned it. Or maybe I have to learn how to recognize a different kind of alright. Or maybe it'll take longer than I thought. Or things will get alright again, and then they'll go bad. That negotiation is something I wanted to explore with the record.”

Baker finds hope in the little things.

“Often, small things give me hope when big things feel so oppressively bleak. Or when it seems that we, as a society, are constantly confronted with new horrific events every single day. I think that what helps to combat the macro hopelessness is being willing to recognize small instances of positivity, because the things that happen in our immediate sphere are sometimes the most tangible. So, honestly, the reason why this record is so much about other people, and friends, and relationships, and my family is because those things are increasingly more precious to me. Just a person-to-person human interaction of kindness is something that makes me feel so certain that there has to be hope."

She recently read Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark and writings by Angela Davis and learned that victory isn’t always definitive.

“Especially in the sphere of social activism, I think we tend to unwittingly conceptualize progress or revolution as black and white and having a clear beginning and end. But an interesting thing that got brought up in Hope in the Dark is that victory can be partial. And it can include some failure. And it can include some ugliness. Or maybe there will be large-scale defeat, when corporations continue to do evil things and poverty continues to be a horrible epidemic that affects so many. But then there can be small victories of people choosing to act graciously and with compassion, and those things should not be discounted. I don't want to say that it is a choice, because often times, especially in the realm of mental health, your mood is not always a choice. But I think there's a difference between physically feeling happy, feeling stable and feeling okay, and then how we confront those things.”

For Baker, healing is rooted in the belief that things will change.

"A lot of recovery or healing, to me, is equipping yourself with the tools to confront hopelessness and sadness. To me, that's choosing to believe that we can be certain that things will change, and that our circumstances will be different tomorrow, and in the next hour, and in the next year.

“I don't think that is the singular method of getting through this life. Maybe cynicism is somehow helpful to you, and that is your mechanism of getting through a world that is often times harsh, and I'm not judging you because there's much to be cynical about. But, in my own experience, choosing to exert hope as just a force of will on your surroundings is something that makes you a more compassionate person.”

Nolan Knight

Baker's had several interviews on TOTL, but she doesn’t find it exhausting to repeatedly discuss the deep, personal themes in her music. She actually finds it “quite useful and positive.”

“Having to talk about the songs, the experiences that comprise the lyrics, and my relationship to those emotions forces me to be quite self-analytical and I think that's made me more able to process and articulate emotions. I think it's helped me consider the motivations behind the songs and recognize things about myself that were maybe only subconscious admissions in the writing process. I think it is incredibly powerful to know yourself and understand what's going on within you."

Stream Baker's Turn Out The Lights below.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Erica Gonzales is the Senior Culture Editor at ELLE.com, where she oversees coverage on TV, movies, music, books, and more. She was previously an editor at HarpersBAZAAR.com. There is a 75 percent chance she's listening to Lorde right now. 

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