Julien Baker's new single, "Funeral Pyre", is filled with a despair that feels depressingly of the moment. As with all of the Memphis-based songwriter's songs, she sings alone while fingerpicking a reverb-heavy electric guitar. Her voice is honeyed in inverse proportion to the brutal directness of her lyrics:

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Baker uses precise imagery to capture the pain of watching something that you love self-destruct. It's a feeling that's all too easy to relate to right now on a national level. Baker concludes ambiguously, saying "And it's true / It's nothing that we could do", leaving the song in a state of total uncertainty. Even though the song was composed several years ago, the music takes on new new applicability, morphing to fit the new context. When it feels like the world is going crazy, works of art can take on new meanings. A song that's intensely personal can feel like it suddenly captures the spirit of a nation.

After the wide acclaim that met her first album, Sprained Ankle, Baker recently signed to Matador Records. Now she is playing shows around with the country, sometimes alongside the likes of of Ben Gibbard and the Decemberists, while working on her next album. To get ready for her show at the Accord this Saturday, I talked to Julien about struggling to figure out how music works in times of turmoil and how, even though her music may sound delicate, it draws more from emo and hardcore than from folk.

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Smile Politely: A number of your songs talk about facing down despair and grappling with tragedy and intense emotions. Do you still find new resonances when you play them?

Julien Baker: Absolutely. I think part of the challenge of playing those songs, in some cases three years after they're written, is assigning new meaning to them. I have to look at a song and say, "I used this as a tool to overcome a personal obstacle in my life, and I don't necessarily feel this way anymore." But what's important, especially in a live setting, in the sharing of music between artist and listener, is that that listener gets to imbue the song with whatever meaning they need it to have. I like permitting them that agency. I'll never tell a person that a song is not about that, because to them it is, to them the song is whatever it needs to be.

But to me, when I'm up there, singing the song, sometimes I have to think about it in context of where I was then and where I am now. Now I speak in a much more positive way and I try not to perpetuate those things that are pretty negative, but I think it's also important to acknowledge them as valid emotions. These songs are about me, Julien Baker, the single entity, and they're bordering on self-indulgent in their personal-ness. I place such a higher priority on things that are going on in our nation right now and trying to find ways to to open up a larger community dialogue about whatever it might be, queerness, mental health, religion. So it does something positive for others and isn't just me wallowing, and I can use that to politicize or employ my personal experience for something that could benefit other people.

If I didn't believe in that sharing aspect then I wouldn't want to sing those songs because they would just be about me. But if they could provide any comfort or solidarity for someone else then they're worth singing.

SP: It feels like music can be a force for both expression and social change. What do you think music can accomplish in turbulent times like this?

Baker: What do I feel like music can accomplish in turbulent times like this...

SP: Or what would you like to see it accomplish, say.

Baker: Oh, no no, okay. I'm gonna give away a little of my dorkiness. That's an AP-kid ingrained behavior, to repeat the question so that I'm clear on what's being asked. So I wasn't mocking, I just always repeat the question, for me.

I've been grappling with that a lot recently. I feel like, if the current political situation has shown us anything, it is that you cannot create change passively. So you cannot simply pay lip service to ideals without backing them up with action. I felt this way on election night, I was on tour with Kevin Devine and I was in Texas. It was like, of all the places, this the best and worst place to be. And what do we do? Your guitars and instruments and songs as tools start to feel really frail when you think about the actual physical violence and systemic injustice that is out there, that is so big, and you feel so small.

But I think what music provides that is so valuable is that, at the same time that there are political organizers, and organizations like the ACLU out there that are doing tangible work, music and musicians create a platform for discourse. We keep these things at the forefront of the public's mind by talking about them and discussing how they're wrong, they're not okay, we can't normalize injustice and we can't normalize oppression.

It also provides a levity and a bit of a respite from what would otherwise be a really bleak world. I think the thing that will absolutely cement defeat is when you get into despair. When one gives into despair, you lose all possibility for victory. Because then you're admitting that there's nothing we can do, there's no way to ever stand up against the powers in place and it's just not going to work. I think what music does is empowering listeners and trying to create some sort of solidarity and hope, which is a valuable way to recharge that energy. So you can bear to go out every morning and be the kind of person you want to be, and fight the good fight that you want to fight without it becoming overwhelming.