These are times of happiness for Julien Baker. If you already don’t know who she is, Julien is a 21 years old singer-songwriter from Memphis. She has released her first album Sprained Ankle back in 2015 and words can’t even describe how heartbreaking her songs can be. It was just announced that she has signed with Matador Records, one of the most respectable homes for great, independent artists (Pavement, Spoon, Car Seat Headrest, Savages are just some examples). I firstly came across her work about one year ago, shortly after her debut album was released. She was highly regarded by many relevant publications like Stereogum or Consequence of Sound and Baker quickly caught my attention.

As we live in the bandcamp era, it’s not easy to stand out in the middle of so many individuals. The amount of music released every week is freaking gigantic and it’s almost overwhelming for a casual listener to catch up every Friday to dozens of new releases. So, what does an artist have to do to get your attention? Maybe it’s with a surprise release or maybe it’s all about a video-album. Sometimes, it’s even both! Julien Baker doesn’t need any of those tricks to surprise you as she mostly uses her guitar and, most importantly, her breathtaking voice to do that (and not even a full band is needed). She writes songs that are hugely relatable to the listener’s life experience. One can say that Baker only writes sorrowful and depressed songs and those are absolutely right as even herself hasn’t denied that, not even once. Watching her appearance on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert from last year, we realize that she presents us with a new song, which she jokingly calls Sad Song 11. After playing the track throughout her shows from the past months, it has now been officially released as Funeral Pyre. I could try to explain what the song is about but I will let a quote from Baker (from this new NPR interview) speak for itself:

Obviously, drinking gasoline incurs bodily harm on you, but also, being an accessory to that kind of behavior and having to decide — it incurs harm upon you, too. And then, are you responsible for permitting that? If you stay, are you responsible for permitting it? And if you leave, are you responsible for not intervening? If you intervene, are you out of your bounds? Everything about the song is figuring out how you should act in your level of responsibility for your own health and to others in the dynamic of a relationship, which is a difficult lesson to learn.

You don’t need to be drowned in emotional suffering to be able to enjoy this or any other Julien Baker songs and that’s because she sings about persisting problems on our lives. Whatever are the reasons for our problems, she makes us feel welcomed and, at least for me, there’s sometimes a sense of relief when I finish listening to one of her songs. It’s like she totally embraces those pains and instead of letting the disappointment and fear eat herself alive and destroy her, she decides to share it with her audience because that will be the first step for the heal and to finally be in peace with herself. She basically uses the songwriting activity as a cathartic experience and she doesn’t want to leave anything unsaid.

Julien is just one of the most transparent songwriters out there and I really liked her explanation on how she can’t separate the personal perspective from the artist’s voice (taken from this amazing Audiotree performance):

Host: Are you able to separate stage persona and human person, at all?

Julien Baker: Interestingly I have this conversation quite a bit in a more vague way… I try actively to refute the idea that I have a persona, that I have a persona of sad, brooding, broken artist and I say that a lot in interviews and stuff and I do what I can to not come across as, you know, self-indulgent artist… because I don’t want it to seem not genuine and so… whatever awkwardness or whatever doesn’t align with people’s perception of how someone who wrote the record would behave on stage, like how I am all goofy and weird on stage. I think is good because maybe lends a little bit more honesty and I know that there are performers that I know that intentionally compartmentalize and they say: this is who I am, this is my job as a musician and this is me as a normal person. But I want to fuse the two because I don’t know… I have this microphone to say whatever and I want to make myself accountable to the person as I am as an artist, so yeah, in some ways I just try to unify the two. (…) Not to say that there are people out there that are really fake, but yeah, I want to be as much of Julien Baker the person on stage and interviews as I am when I’m like around my house. (…) I think all art is infused with the artist’s personal intent.

And she exposes herself to the world in a quite complex spectrum of themes: death and loss in general, substance abuse or faith crisis are common matters discussed throughout her songs on Sprained Ankle.

The album’s closer, Go Home, represents the story of how the narrator (supposedly Baker) hit rock bottom. On the beginning of the track, she emotionally sings:

I’m just drunk on the side of the road in a ditch when you find me

I wanna go home, but I’m sick

There’s more whiskey than blood in my veins

More tar than air in my lungs

Over the next lines, she desperately calls for a ride home. But that call is really a cry for help as she can’t continue to live through the pain and misery that the substance abuse brings to her life. As the song goes on, she shows some signs of struggle to keep away from what made her sick and she regrets some of the things that triggered her bad vices, like some previous harmful love relationships:

But I’ve kissed enough bathroom sinks to make up for the lovers that never loved me

And as the song reaches its conclusion, she screams in hope from the top of her lungs:

God, I wanna go home

She just wants to be at peace again and hopes to find the answers to that on a spiritual level, through her faith in God. After that final line, the song’s instrumental shifts to In Christ Alone which is a modern Christian song and along with that we can hear a preacher delivering some speech (the speech part was apparently put up in the song by accident, as Baker told in an interview with Stereogum). There are other songs on the album that describe her relationship with her religious faith, like on Rejoice where she sings more than once the following line:

But I think there’s a god and he hears either way when I rejoice and complain

Baker describes, in an interview with the Observer, her troubled relationship with Christianity, saying that she was skeptic during her childhood due to the fact people always told her that if something was wrong, the solution was “pray about it and you’ll feel better”. Now, as Julien sings in Rejoice, she believes there is a God listening but also thinks that “we owe it to ourselves as people who believe in love and compassion to do more than a trite ‘God is listening'”.

Ever since I started listening to Julien Baker and get to know her a little better through publications’ profiles or interviews, I was impressed by how she is proud of who she is and how she embraces the other’s differences. Being a queer Christian living in Memphis, Tennessee it wasn’t/isn’t certainly an easy task, unfortunately. Even as we finally begin to live in a progressively tolerant society, the USA’s southern region is still known to be quite conservative. Instead of trying to get away from her original region and go to a more metropolitan area, Baker prefers to embrace the southern area and do some proactive stuff to not only get people to do out-of-the-box projects but also to accept all kinds of differences. I also read somewhere on the web (I can’t find the sources, I’m sorry folks) that she came out and is accepted within her church and she regrets that the religion-sexuality theme is still a taboo in most places. That definitely shouldn’t be a taboo, nowadays. Neither sexuality or religion is one-sided, so there should be a place for both in everyone’s life and I’m so glad Julien is a young artist that uses the stage and, I hope, future spotlight to stand by these and all kinds of important causes to the modern society.

Well, to say that all Julien Baker writes are complex lyrics about religion or death is kind of an overstatement. The first track I ever listened to from her was Something and I immediately noticed that it’s a song the majority of the listeners could identified themselves with. Basically, it turns around the problem of overthinking when it comes to relationships. She had something to say to someone significant in her life but she couldn’t think of the perfect way to do it. And she knew from the very beginning that their connection was doomed, as she sings:

I knew I was wasting my time

Keep myself awake at night

Cause whenever I close my eyes

I’m chasing your tail lights

Even with that knowledge, she just “can’t think of anyone else” and continues to chase the impossible. The way she constructed the quasi-chorus is heartbreaking as well, specifically this one part:

And I know I meant nothing, nothing to you

But I thought I meant something, something, something

But I just said nothing, said nothing, said nothing

Sat and watched you drive away

She lost someone who was very important in her life but, deep down inside, she knew the feeling wasn’t mutual and that’s what probably breaks her the most. It’s also interesting she realizes how it’s so difficult to deal with the inability to speak our minds to significant ones in major moments.

When I listen to new albums or songs, one of the first things that usually gets my attention is how the sound is constructed through its instrumentation and textures. That wasn’t the case with Julien. Although she always has very nice instrumental pieces on her songs, her best quality is in her lyricism and how she can sing beautifully about a wide range of themes. She can write the most lovely and most sorrowful lines in just one short song. To write such pretty clusters of words at such a young age shows how talented Baker is and makes me wonder what she will bring to the table in the future. I hope this semi-new track is just the kick-off for what will be an awesome year for her with maybe the possibility of having a new album later in some months time. She was already being recognized as a promised young artist (I just remembered that Brand New have been covering Sprained Ankle on their most recent tour) and this new Matador signing will surely provide a great evolution platform for her. I will be patiently waiting for an amazing Sad Song 12.

Listen to her debut album:

Listen to her new single Funeral Pyre: