Julien Baker

Turn Out The Lights

5.0

classic Review by Kirk Bowman STAFF

October 27th, 2017 | 308 replies by

Release Date: 2017 | Tracklist Review Summary: hope

"'cause Lord, Lord, Lord, is there some way to make it stop

'cause nothing that I do has ever helped to turn it off

and everything supposed to help me sleep at night

don't help me sleep at night, anymore"



I shift my head on my pillow again, listening to Sprained Ankle for the third time tonight. I haven’t been able to sleep lately. I try everything the therapist told me. I’m using “I want to” instead of “I should,” I self-affirm, my friendships and relationships are the best they’ve ever been, but the darkness still persists. I constantly live my life trying to get past it, but it’s gotten to the point where nothing I do really matters. I still have my episodes. I drift off uncomfortably, frowning, listening to Julien singing, “God, I wanna go home,” wondering if I’m broken. The pain of Sprained Ankle is dull, aching, and almost lethargic. It’s helped me a million times over to recognize that I’m not alone, soundtracked my painful nights, but it’s not exactly encouraging. Turn Out The Lights is the album that helped me wake up from that.



"Happiness is something where I imagine if I’m this successful, make this amount of money, drive this car, if I had a partner that loved me in this way, if I felt more physically attractive, then I’d be happy. But if those things were to be achieved, there’d be new deficits we’d continue to discover, until we realise that we are eternally chasing something that’s beyond us…Achievement or possessions may never make us happy, whereas I think joy is something that you can apply to your present circumstance. I try not to think, ‘If only I could stop having panic attacks I could be happy,’ because I might never – that’s a real possibility."



TOTL is the sound of someone who has done more than move on – it is the sound of someone who recognizes that she can’t. The slow guitar and dark lyrics of yesterday have not been abandoned, but expanded on. For those in enormous pain, realizing that someone is listening is perhaps the most important thing to help them become their best self. This is true for Julien as well as any of us. Her music, and, more importantly, her life has become fuller and more hopeful and meaningful. New voices are everywhere – from helping harmonies from past bands, to the piano and strings that gorgeously fill in the emptiness, to the newly expansive vocals from Julien herself. This album sounds big, grandiose, and yet never oversteps, always aware of just how much the small need lifting.



“…I thought, ‘This record’s just about me.’ But it’s not, and I’ve had to teach myself that. I can choose to shape the narrative. I could sit here and tell you all of the stories about all of the songs, and those are real stories that happened to me. But I could also just offer this thing I made into the universe and hope that people can inhabit the songs in whatever way that they need to. That they can feel less alone.”



She puts to words everything that we cannot say. Every track covers an important topic, flowing into each other. “Appointments,” the importance of hope in seemingly unbearable circumstances, “Turn Out The Lights,” the pain of being alone with yourself, “Shadowboxing,” self-hatred, and so on. It all rides out like a train of thought. More than that, though, she understands that she is the engineer, she has the power to veer off course or stall to a stop, but she always keeps going forward into the future. In this way, she helps us along the way, reminding us that life is more than our pain.



“‘Why am I me?’ Because from my perspective I am unhappy with my disposition or my temperament or the anxiety I experience, and I think something must be wrong with my brain, because this is abnormal and I need help trying to fix it. But articulating it in that way, saying that I’m broken and I need to be fixed, makes an assumption that there’s something wrong that needs to be reconciled. That’s in direct opposition with the belief that if I was made, instead of just coming into being haphazardly, that I could be made intentionally broken and so cosmically flawed that there was not a way to salvage those parts of myself. And I could not support that belief. I could not continue to think I was purposely created in the way that I am and that that is irrevocably a failure, I started to entertain the possibility that if one of these things is false, then what if the thing that’s false is that I’m broken. What if, in fact, that’s not a mistaken part of my identity that makes me the way I am but rather that’s just another part of me, period, something I can repurpose and transform to use in whatever way I can. What if the parts of myself, the ugly parts, the parts that we are told are ugly, are something that can be just as useful, if not the most useful and valuable, tools that we have in connecting with other people and becoming who we are.”



Like all the best art, TOTL lifts up, communicates with something bigger than itself. When she yells her final “I wanted to stay!” Julien is both talking to God once again and now moving on to more than just herself, but the people around her, and those she reaches through her music. While it does get better, it also gets worse. But when I listen to her, I hear her telling me that doesn’t mean it’s not worth it. I hear her transcending ideologies, discovering the emo in Christianity and the religion in punk. I hear her, a person who kept going even when the harder she swam, the faster she sank. I hear a person who found beauty in terrifying panic, a person who gave back when everything she had was taken from her. There’s an ideology in music criticism that people can only make quality art when they are hurting, when they can’t see a way out, when they give up on life. Julien is certainly hurting, and is self-aware to know there might never be a way out, but she hasn’t given up on her music, on us, on God, and most importantly, not on herself.



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Recent reviews by this author Jessy Lanza All the Time Arca KiCk i James Ferraro Live at Primavera Sound 2012 Peter CottonTale CATCH Sophie Product Hot Tub Boys What's Your Damage I shift my head on my pillow again, listening to Sprained Ankle for the third time tonight. I haven’t been able to sleep lately. I try everything the therapist told me. I’m using “I want to” instead of “I should,” I self-affirm, my friendships and relationships are the best they’ve ever been, but the darkness still persists. I constantly live my life trying to get past it, but it’s gotten to the point where nothing I do really matters. I still have my episodes. I drift off uncomfortably, frowning, listening to Julien singing, “God, I wanna go home,” wondering if I’m broken. The pain ofis dull, aching, and almost lethargic. It’s helped me a million times over to recognize that I’m not alone, soundtracked my painful nights, but it’s not exactly encouraging.is the album that helped me wake up from that.is the sound of someone who has done more than move on – it is the sound of someone who recognizes that she can’t. The slow guitar and dark lyrics of yesterday have not been abandoned, but expanded on. For those in enormous pain, realizing that someone is listening is perhaps the most important thing to help them become their best self. This is true for Julien as well as any of us. Her music, and, more importantly, her life has become fuller and more hopeful and meaningful. New voices are everywhere – from helping harmonies from past bands, to the piano and strings that gorgeously fill in the emptiness, to the newly expansive vocals from Julien herself. This album sounds big, grandiose, and yet never oversteps, always aware of just how much the small need lifting.She puts to words everything that we cannot say. Every track covers an important topic, flowing into each other. “Appointments,” the importance of hope in seemingly unbearable circumstances, “Turn Out The Lights,” the pain of being alone with yourself, “Shadowboxing,” self-hatred, and so on. It all rides out like a train of thought. More than that, though, she understands that she is the engineer, she has the power to veer off course or stall to a stop, but she always keeps going forward into the future. In this way, she helps us along the way, reminding us that life is more than our pain.Like all the best art,lifts up, communicates with something bigger than itself. When she yells her final “I wanted to stay!” Julien is both talking to God once again and now moving on to more than just herself, but the people around her, and those she reaches through her music. While it does get better, it also gets worse. But when I listen to her, I hear her telling me that doesn’t mean it’s not worth it. I hear her transcending ideologies, discovering the emo in Christianity and the religion in punk. I hear her, a person who kept going even when the harder she swam, the faster she sank. I hear a person who found beauty in terrifying panic, a person who gave back when everything she had was taken from her. There’s an ideology in music criticism that people can only make quality art when they are hurting, when they can’t see a way out, when they give up on life. Julien is certainly hurting, and is self-aware to know there might never be a way out, but she hasn’t given up on her music, on us, on God, and most importantly, not on herself. user ratings (498) rate it Awful - 1 Very Poor - 1.5 Poor - 2 Average - 2.5 Good - 3 Great - 3.5 Excellent - 4 Superb - 4.5 Classic - 5 3.9

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