Julien Baker makes enormous music for enormous feelings. Live, the most impressive thing about her—aside from the “ouch ouch my heart” sensation you will feel—is witnessing how much noise she can create as just one person with two instruments and a loop pedal, with the occasional strings accompaniment. Writers often comment in dramatic tones on her diminutive stature, but we’ve seen short people scream before. Short people are great at screaming. Just look at a toddler. Baker jumps gracefully from small to large sounds and back again, from gentle longing into high-pitched catharsis. And then there are the heaps of silence. They take up more space than any scream could.

Baker's second solo album, Turn Out the Lights, came out this past fall. It’s a slightly more hopeful—and more produced—extension of the shaky, white-knuckled vulnerability of her first album, Sprained Ankle. Both records deal with addiction, recovery, mercy, grace, and a faith she maintains despite the great temptation of giving up; Baker grew up in Memphis in a very Christian home, came out as a teenager, struggled with substance abuse, and is now sober. Her current vices are chewing gum and caffeine: If she walks into a room with an aeropress machine, she will immediately flock to it, seek to bond with you or whoever is there over her love for the tiny and portable coffee-making device, and then continue talking about coffee until she switches to talking, just as joyfully, about music again. For a person who loves sad songs, she is really fucking enthusiastic about the nice parts of life.

This past February, GQ spoke with Baker at a coffee shop in Nashville, TN, an hour or so away from her home in Murfreesboro. She was home for a full month—a rarity these days, given her touring schedule—and had mostly been running, writing poetry alongside a group text that posts a poetry prompt every day, and recording some demos. Baker talks with a pointed thoughtfulness, pausing often to collect her thoughts or drag herself for being too self-serious. She seems to want to get things right.

GQ: You’ve been touring for years, first with your band Forrister and then as a solo act. Has playing bigger venues changed your perspective on the songs that you’re singing?

Julien Baker: If 1,500 people are gonna see me and they each pay $20, I want to give them everything that I possibly can. They just made an exchange that allows me to live a dream of mine since I was a child. And that’s not lost on me. So I want to expend every ounce of power and energy I have.

But also, the songs that took shape and the musical sensibilities I was given from the intimacy of a living room or house show or a basement are the kind of tools that I still think can be used to fill up space in [a larger venue like New York City’s] Town Hall. You just have to be willing to confront that amount of vulnerability. It’s scary sometimes, right? Not even just the fact that it’s less instrumentation, like just a piano, or just a guitar, but it’s scary to just scream in front of a bunch of strangers. But what moved me when I was a kid was DIY bands coming through and just screaming at strangers. Because they just want to be heard, and they want strangers to hear what they have to say so badly, because we have such a hunger for communication and connection and relatability. That’s, like, the fundamental human craving, a need for understanding. And I think there’s something very beautiful and precious about that.