Whenever Julien Baker feels anxious on tour, she runs. The irony of this does not escape the Memphis-born singer songwriter, who is known for writing devastating guitar and piano ballads that explore topics like loneliness, self-destructive urges, sexuality, and religious faith. During Baker’s live shows, audience members often stare in rapt silence as she sings, her eyes squeezed shut. In some moments, she near-whispers as if confessing to her audience; in others, she full-on howls. Either way, she hardly retreats.

Yet usually, upon arriving at a venue, Baker likes to escape—if only for a few minutes: “I’ll just sprint as fast as I can,” the 22-year-old says over the phone, “Until I feel like it evens out my breathing and my thinking and gives me a lot of clarity.”

In at least one case, running also helped Baker write her latest album, this past October’s

Turn Out the Lights (Matador Records)—a record that expands on the diary-like intimacy of her first LP, 2015’s Sprained Ankle. On her debut, Baker chronicles her own despair with gutting intensity, both lyrically and vocally. On Turn Out the Lights she broadens her emotional range and is all the better for it. She lets herself be angry (“The harder I swim, the faster I sink,” she repeats in a strained scream at the end of “Sour Breath”). She also lets a bit of optimism creep into her sadness: “Maybe it’s all going to turn out alright,” she muses over sparkling guitars on “Appointments,” the album’s first single, “And I know that it’s not / But I have to believe that it is.”

And so, on a run before an August 2016 show at Mississippi Studios in Portland, Oregon, Baker penned the chorus of “Everything that Helps You Sleep,” a sparse and affecting piano ballad; the singer tells me it is about feeling like you’ve failed despite knowing you’ve done good things in the world. “I was kind of freaking out,” she says of that day in Oregon. “[The show] was in a big cap room! So I went across a [nearby] bridge, where there’s just a whole bunch of gas stations and weird diners, and I was singing into my phone—a voice memo of the chorus.”

"So I went across a [nearby] bridge, where there’s just a whole bunch of gas stations and weird diners, and I was singing into my phone—a voice memo of the chorus." —Julien Baker

This particular chorus is textbook Baker in that we see her wrestling with herself at a moment that feels both private and universal. Her vocal delivery is quietly expressive and almost hymnal: “’Lord, Lord, Lord, is there some way to make it stop,” she pleads, her voice fraying, “‘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.”