Julien Baker writes and sings with such a devastating depth of feeling on her debut album, Sprained Ankle, that it’s no surprise to feel her fierce intelligence radiating through a telephone connection between Toronto and somewhere on the highway between Philadelphia and Grand Rapids.

What is mildly surprising, however, is how upbeat, dryly funny and completely over herself the young Memphis singer/songwriter, who’ll turn 21 at the end of the month, turns out to be. Not quite the self-consciously serious soul one might expect from someone who wishes on Sprained Ankle’s wrenching title track that “I could write songs about anything other than death,” and whose small solo catalogue to date is populated by unflinching accounts of loneliness, self-destruction, and crises of identity and faith drawn from her own experiences growing up queer and Christian in the American South.

Heavy stuff. But since Sprained Ankle’s release, originally just through Baker’s Bandcamp page then later through 6131 Records late last year, Baker — who also fronts the band Forrister — has suddenly found herself with a burgeoning career in music. Sprained Ankle has been enthusiastically received by critics on both sides of the Atlantic and allowed her to suspend her university studies and tour pretty much consistently since it came out, although she hopes to “pull it back quite a bit” and start composing new material after a trip to Australia later this year.

Before she disappears into the studio, Baker returns to our city to play the Toronto Urban Roots Festival at Fort York on Saturday. Here’s some of our chat.

So I take it you had no real plan for everything that’s happened when you made the record, eh?

I didn’t make it with the intent to shop it to labels or to pitch it as a primary project or a priority of any kind. I was just making music with Forrister and had an opportunity to record some songs for free in Richmond because I was in the audio program at Middle Tennessee State where I went to college and one of my friends who was an engineer kind of opened that door for me. When someone approached me about putting it out I decided, you know, I would be all right with that and everything that’s happened since then has kind of been a surprise to me.

Well, it must be cool to know that the record has reached an audience primarily through word of mouth and succeeded on its own strengths.

I hope so. I hope so. That’s what I appreciate most, is people saying that they connect with the record, and it’s not feeling like I had a scheme or an ulterior motive with the record. Having not had those purposes in mind for it kind of removes the pretence of being overly concerned with its reception. I just always assume that people are not gonna care at all and that allows me to be pleasantly surprised at anything beyond that. I never want to approach performing or touring with an attitude of entitlement and so I’m just trying to remain grateful for whatever’s happening, you know?

How did the songs bubble out?

I moved away from Memphis to Nashville and I had, like, no friends in college. I moved there and seriously didn’t know a single person at a school of thousands of kids, so I would just sit around making voice demos of songs. I sent some of them to the band and with some of them, it was like ‘This is too intricate’ or ‘We’re not really behind this vibe’ . . . So the discarded songs, I had just kind of accrued; not even to perform, just to have as my own songs for no purpose other than to be creative and to have that creative outlet, not intending to release them for posterity or what have you.

How much of you are we getting on the record, or are you the sort of writer who likes to inhabit different characters from song to song?

I’ve never been able to do that, but I admire that ability and I think it’s a cool creative process. But for whatever reason, I just have difficulty with it, so all the songs are just real things that happened. The songs on the record are completely autobiographical and all of my writing on whatever project I do is autobiographical. In a certain way, it’s difficult to have songs that are entirely true or that pull imagery from actual occurrences in life and not invent scenarios. That’s difficult because it demands you to be vulnerable with an audience, but it’s also easy because the subject matter is given to me by merely existing.

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Do you worry that people will confuse the “real” Julien Baker with the one they hear on record and think you’re just, like, a walking puddle of tears?

I try to be explicit at shows and in interviews and in every aspect of my daily life that these songs that entail the most difficult parts of my life are just tools to cope with those things and then they allow me to be a well-adjusted individual. I would hate to kind of promote this image where I am defined by the emotions expressed in the songs alone. I don’t want to romanticize that kind of sadness. I think it should just be a logical step between acknowledging something negative and overcoming it. When I started performing live in front of people who weren’t just my friends or a group of folks I’ve known who . . . have a context for the kind of person I am, or a larger cultural context of why kids make aggressive music with sad subject matter, being more intentional about explaining those things became more important. . . . The people who make some of the most emotionally difficult, wrenching, visceral music who I know and have become friends with are, like, the goofiest people in my life.