× Expand Photo credit: Nolan Knight Julien Baker

Few musicians can conjure the physical sensation of sadness quite as viscerally as Julien Baker. An account of medical, emotional and spiritual crisis, the Memphis, Tenn., songwriter’s harrowing 2015 debut, Sprained Ankle, captured not only the painful numbness of depression, but also the raw, nauseating terror that comes with watching your life spiral out of control. Listening to it can feel an awful lot like weathering a panic attack.

Baker’s latest album, Turn Out The Lights, released last year on Matador Records, isn’t exactly easy listening, either, but her new songs cut the pain with glimmers of hope. For all its sorrow, it’s a concertedly more reassuring record than its predecessor.

In conversation, Baker is upbeat and cheerful, even when the topics she’s discussing are anything but, and though she answers questions about her music with deep contemplation, she’s quick to laugh at herself whenever she fears she may sound overly serious. Ahead of her return to Milwaukee for a concert at Turner Hall Ballroom on Monday, April 9, Baker spoke with the Shepherd Express about the responsibilities that come with writing about mental health and the secret to performing such heavy songs night after night.

One thing that can seem like a contradiction to audiences is you write songs about being anxious or insecure, then you go on stage and perform them so confidently for big theaters. What’s the secret to doing that?

It’s interesting when people say “You perform them so confidently,” because I feel so much trepidation and stage fright. I used to just run down the stairs on the side stage of the venues we would play because I’d get so nervous before shows. But I think there’s something powerful and liberating about the moment you step out onto a stage, and you accept that the only thing you can give is the songs you’ve written. That’s all you have. I don’t know how to accurately convey this. [Pauses] Give me a second, because I got distracted by myself. [Pauses] I don’t think it’s necessarily confidence. I think it’s that I try to trust the audience. Then when I do something that I find embarrassing or humiliating, like if I break a string on stage, or if I strike a completely obviously wrong note, I start trusting the audience to be merciful. Then I will say into the microphone, “Mistakes are just something that happen to human beings; thank you for being kind and gracious,” as a way to verbally affirm to myself that what’s happening here is not all the people in the seats are judging me with a clipboard. What’s happening is us exchanging our humanity—me in the form of art, them in the form of internalizing that art and responding to it. So I just try to focus more on that process.

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I remember seeing you at a small club in Madison, The Frequency, and the crowd seemed in a way almost terrified. They didn’t want to move much, they didn’t want to make any noise. It was almost like they didn’t know how to respond to the set, and there was a tension because of it. Have you ever felt that from the stage?

I think it’s difficult for me to read the barometer of the room… Wait; is The Frequency kind of a shotgun venue with concrete floors? It’s straight back and very narrow?

Yeah, it’s very narrow. You played on a very hot day.

Oh my gosh it was so hot that day. That show was amazing! And I think venues like that put me a little more at ease, when they’re smaller and I’m closer. Like in a theater I’m very far away from everybody, and it seems like the crowd is such a looming mass that’s sort of imposing. But in those venues it’s like I could reach out and touch an audience member. They’re five feet away. But I was surprised by how quiet that crowd was. And I think I misinterpret that as boredom or apathy, because that’s how my brain works, and I have to remind myself that that’s not the case at all. Like when it’s very quiet, I feel like I shouldn’t disturb that for people, you know? I also try to make jokes with a crowd or engage with a crowd, but sometimes I feel like that’s too much. You know, for me to put some very silly humor sandwiched between two of my songs, sometimes I feel like people are like, ‘I’m not going to respond to this; I’m not going to laugh. I’m just going to stand here.’ And I think that’s OK. I just try to not inhabit the trope of the brooding musician as much as I can.

I feel like that’s pretty common for artists who write sad music to lighten that mood between songs. They often try to project some levity, as if trying to assure the audience, ‘It’s OK; you can relax. I’m fine.’

Yeah, I think so. I go to a lot of shows, and when I see a performer who looks as if they feel like they’re being scrutinized or uncomfortable on stage—and this is so bizarre of me—I try to stand close to the front of the stage and make encouraging eye contact as if I’m like a family member at a soccer game. Like, “We’re all here rooting for you!” … When I see a performance like that, I just think “That person is really working through some things,” and that’s painful as an audience member. And I don’t want people to be in pain at my shows, to hear me sing these very sad, confessional songs and feel uncomfortable about it.

I feel like the question on a lot of people’s minds is how do you go out on stage every night and perform these songs without it taking a serious toll on your wellbeing?

I love answering that question, because it’s a question that I get all the time, and I get to supply the fortunate answer that those songs are not sad for me anymore. Just like anything, like the way when we say a word too often we forget what it means, when you do anything with regularity, you’ll build up a tolerance to it. That’s true of how food tastes and how cigarettes feel. But it’s not merely that I’ve built up a mental callous around the sensitivity of these subjects. It’s that analyzing them and performing them and talking about them in interviews and thinking about them for years has sort of unraveled them and stripped away the mythos that I think memories can accrue in our recollection. Like, if we have a painful memory or we have trauma and we allow it to rest unfettered in our memory and we never confront it, we never work through it and we never talk about it, they’ll fester and take on these other forms of aggression and resentment and bitterness. And when we confront them over and over again it’s as if we rob them of their power. And once they’re stripped back to just factual events that happened to us, we can apply whatever meaning or significance we want to them. And so for me songs about death of close loves ones, or songs about my friends or heartbreak are like a collection of lessons and experiences that have ultimately helped me grow into a stronger and more balanced human. So they’re triumphant to me. They’re victories over that situation. Had I had no power over them I wouldn’t be able to face them and make art about them. I would still hide them in shame or anger or sadness.

Is that something you’re aware of when you’re writing these songs, that this is a way of helping you cope with these experiences, or are you more in the moment and just documenting a feeling when you write them?

I think it’s both. Like, when something happens or when I have an emotion that is like, sitting on me and I need to process it, I’ll just write about it, like scribble thoughts down in my notebook or sit at my guitar and play nonsense for six minutes and do a voice memo. And then later, after mining all of that ore of thought you go back through it and sift through it and try to find what is relevant and what is meaningful and what can I glean from all of these raw, unprocessed emotions, and how I can sort of mitigate what I’m feeling with understanding.

I remember that I first heard Sprained Ankle during a difficult time in my life, and I connected with the songs so deeply. But the more I listened to them, the more I realized you weren’t writing at all about what I was going through. The specifics of your songs and your challenges were so different from mine, and yet there was something universal about the emotions in the songs. When you’re writing songs, are you more focused on capturing the autobiographical specifics, or are you more focused on the overarching feeling?

[Long pause] Man, it’s hard to say, especially with Sprained Ankle. Because on Sprained Ankle, I feel like I focused even less on the overarching, common, human feeling that my personal experiences reflect. I feel like I was specifically documenting how I felt. And it wasn’t until Turn Out The Lights that I started to think, “OK, here’s a song that I’ve written about a very specific conversation with a loved one about a very specific kind of loss or an argument or a feeling, and what can that tell me about just how people are? Or what can I sift through and find out about just the human animal from what I am experiencing in this relationship?” So it might not have mattered what I was discussing. I think the act of divulging personal experiences is almost like, that’s the comforting part. The content doesn’t seem to matter, at least with the music that I love. And from talking to other artists, it’s like I can talk about a situation someone else has never experienced, and the beauty of art and music is it gives us this medium where we can insert our story into the story we’re hearing, and use it as a mirror for our own lives. So just being willing to share the ugly or the painful parts of yourself sort of opens the door and puts people at ease to do that.

About five years ago emo artists started having a conversation with themselves about whether the music the genre was making was constructive or whether it was glamorizing sadness and unhealthy thoughts. Is that something you’ve ever wrestled with?

I think so. And I think that’s something I became really aware of when I had toured and when music became what I was primarily focused on. That increased consideration for my place in the musical arena—or arena’s not a good word, but just the typography of music: Where do I lie? What am I contributing to it? It’s such an integral part of our society and our culture, and I have to steward the opportunities I have in a responsible way. And I wanted to make more of an effort to make sure that the necessary and healthy and useful discussion of our emotions did not fall over the edge into stagnation and apathy, or just ambivalence about changing it. Because I think there is a romantic quality to the trope of a suffering poet. And it’s been that way for all time. Poets just writhing in anguish and writing very emotional, romantic verse are a staple of so much of the literary and poetic cannon. But what makes those artists great is it comes with self-analysis and it comes with an awareness of the larger implications of that person’s life. [Laughs] That sounded like nonsense. I’m sorry.

No it makes sense. Sadness can be a trap, because in a way it can feel good to wallow in it, which I think is why your music can feel a little more painful than other artists’. Lots of people make sad music, but your music, specifically your last album, is about trying to take action.

And interestingly, I was listening to this podcast. It was a conversation between two thinkers I like, DeRay Mckesson and Brené Brown, and they were talking about how sadness, specifically anger when you think about it in terms of activism, anger or hurt or resentment toward a person—and this is also true of sadness—all of those emotions not only feel justified but they feel safe, because cynicism allows us to take our expectations and bring them further down so we will be no further disappointed and so we won’t have to deal with fresh hurt. We can just nurse and existing hurt. What is terrifying is beginning to cope and improve and establish a modicum of happiness or healthiness, because if we are to establish that, then we’re vulnerable, and we have something we could lose. Because what if our circumstance changes? We overcome chronic depression for a little while then it comes back and we’re sad again, or we think if I had just stayed angry and not forgiven a person, then I wouldn’t have been hurt again. But I think that’s why sadness and anger feel good. Because they feel safe. But happiness is the most vulnerable of all emotions.

Don’t answer if this is too personal, but are you feeling better these days than when you first started writing your solo songs?

The short answer is yes. But I’m very careful with how I discuss mental health recovery because it is not useful to give people answers or aphorisms like “It gets better” or “Just hang in there,” because maybe it won’t get better, or at least not better in the way you think better should be. Maybe the things we wish for as human beings, like, “Oh, if only I had this, or if only this situation was resolved, or if only this person loved me, then I would be happy,” but that’s not true. Because happiness is this fleeting, transient state … So with anxiety or depression, I don’t think it is useful to say there is ever going to be a time when all of the sudden those chronic illnesses or those difficulties evaporate. I think it’s more about learning how to use positive coping mechanisms and how to train ourselves to engage with those parts of ourselves more healthfully. And honestly that’s a lot of what the last record is about, trying to put a rest to the binary that we have that these behaviors are normal, these behaviors are abnormal; these behaviors are healthy, these behaviors are unhealthy and sad, and saying that maybe my brain will never be like somebody else’s brain. I can stop thinking of the particulars of my mind as an enemy and an affliction to be overcome, and I can accept them as character traits, and then I can learn how to utilize them in a positive way without trying to fault myself for struggling with them. So I will not say, “Oh I’m happy now.” Because that’s not true of anyone. Something is going to happen to you that will make you unhappy. That’s just the human condition. But you can have more peace than you had before.

[Laughs] Now I’m worry that what you’ll glean from this is that what I told you is that no human being will be happy ever! Which is not true! I just think we kind of, like, we’re forced by society to…

It’s not an on-and-off switch.

Yes! Exactly.

Having gone through depression and anxiety for the first time in my life as an adult, I feel like I don’t know if I’ll ever kick it. But you do eventually reach a point where it feels manageable, and that alone feels like a victory.

True! You know, I think of it a lot of times like a sine wave. Do you know the Kurt Vonnegut quote just try to notice when you’re happy? We are moving forward in this endless sine wave of things will feel good, and inevitably they’ll feel worse, and then they’ll feel better again. Or it’s like Shakespeare’s original wheel of fortune, you know what I mean? It’s going to spin us back down to the bottom eventually, but we cannot stay there for too terribly wrong. There’s no endless suffering. And I think that a lot of managing depression and anxiety is just learning to remind ourselves that the hurt is finite, and the sadness is finite, and then when we’re happy just learning to identify what’s making us happy, even if it’s just like, “This is a really nice meal with my friends.” It’s not always a grand solution. It’s just these nuggets of pureness that we can hold onto.

On this album you telegraph that your songwriting may be heading in a slightly brighter direction. Do you think future albums will be a little more uplifting than the ones that came before?

I don’t know. I don’t think that there’s ever going to be a record of mine that is just bubblegum pop and fun, happy lyrics, because I think to me one of the most liberating and powerful things you can do is look sadness and hurt and anger right in the face and give it a name. So while I think they might change sonically, it’s not as if… Well, I’ve gotten the question before like, [laughs] “Now that you feel a little heathier and you’re not as a sad of a person do you think your songs will still be as good?” And I’m like, “Let me be clear: We live on Earth and there will be no shortage of suffering for anyone!” It’s not going to go away, but what I hope for the songs is that they become more astute in observing and offering something meaningful and workable, that they offer something significant to finding the small truths that give us comfort amid that suffering. The endless search as it were. [Pauses, then laughs] Gahhhhhhhh, I’m sorry.

Julien Baker headlines the Turner Hall Ballroom on Monday, April 9 at 8 p.m. with opener Tancred.