“That’s the one thing about healing that’s so important for improving your mental health. It’s being in touch with what you are feeling, being honest about those feelings in the moment and not being afraid of them.”

For Julien Baker, music isn’t just a profession, it’s therapy. On her excellent sophomore record ‘Turn Out the Lights’, she channels her deepest insecurities, crippling anxieties and most self-loathing fears into gorgeous arrangements built off of glistening guitar riffs, placid piano chords and her own achingly earnest vocals. Her tracks may sound pretty, atmospheric and light yet the lyrics she sings carry all the emotional weight of a juggernaut. She has an inner strength that trumps all other kinds because this is the kind she needs to get through the day.

At the embarrassing-for-the-rest-of-us age of 22, the Memphis-born musician sounds as wise as someone whose been weathered by life’s bitterest truths and has come out the other side. The term emotional intelligence can sometimes sound like a patronising one, but on her album, Baker makes a case for it being the one we need the most in these trying times. ‘Turn out the Lights’ is not a depressing album. In fact it’s a reassuring one that just happens to face up the harshest realties of mental health struggles.

As she explains in this interview, Baker is not glossing over what it’s like to stare down into the abyss but she is determined to find the pinhole of light no matter how close she is to falling in. On the devastating closing track ‘Claws in your Back’, she describes her anxiety as the “Violent partner you carry around, With claws in your back, ripping your clothes”. It’s a haunting representation that she has had to make peace with and accept. It is, in her words, “the only way she thinks we’ll make it”.

Baker will be opening for Belle & Sebastian in Vicar Street on March 26 and 27. She spoke to Mark Conroy over the phone ahead of those gigs.

Your music is so intensely personal. Does it get easier to share these stories with others the more you play them?

Yeah, I think it gets easier. I think playing the songs live helps me see them more as a healing or a coping mechanism. It’s part of a process. To have to revisit those thoughts all the time helps me assign a positive purpose to them. So, it’s actually kind of helpful in giving me some perspective on the personal details that I’m describing.

I heard that you’re father lost his leg at 19 and afterwards went on to build and sell prosthetic limbs. You once said of him that he repurposed his trauma into a profession. Is that how you seen your own music?

Yeah, I do. That’s an interesting detail about my dad. I know that I’ve talked about that in interviews and to me it’s really fascinating but it never seems to come up. He lost his leg in an accident and the way that he tells the story is that he took this tragedy and used it as an impetus to do something good, to benefit other people, to help those that were like him. And I think that’s what I want to do with music as well. I want to open up this conversation for people who have had similar experiences as I have and sort of invite a conversation around it in where we can maybe start healing.

Which do you find more therapeutic? Writing and recording the songs or performing the songs live?

I think performing them live. I love writing, poetry, creative writing and I think whenever I’m experiencing something complicated or troublesome, I tend to turn to music. I’ll sit down at my guitar and sing whatever comes to mind or I’ll just play the piano for a while. Often I’ll use meditation but the thing that really captures my heart is live performance. Since I was a kid I’ve thought there is just something so beautiful about it. You can make a beautiful thing, leave it sitting in your bedroom, look at it, admire it and be proud of it but it’s so much different when you permit it to be in the possession of a crowd. So now it’s a shared thing, it’s no longer your property. It’s no longer just your feelings and there is something quite beautiful about that exchange and about that interaction

Those people you mentioned who turn up to your gigs, do they often come up to after your set to tell you how much your music means to them?

Sometimes they do. That’s a question that I actually get a lot and I never know how to answer because I don’t want to sound like a person who goes around saying, ‘people are always coming up to me and telling me how important I am’. Every once in a while someone will come up to me and tell me a story about their life or they’ll tell me how they interpreted the songs or about a certain point that they felt comforted by them.

It’s so encouraging for me because it reminds me that these songs are not about me. They are written about my life experiences but my job as a musician and the reason that I love my job is not because it brings me recognition and proves to people how wonderful I am but because I want to have that exchange with people. We give something to each other and it ends up giving me as much as it gives the audience.

You’ve mentioned before that your lyrics include the irrational thoughts that have been brought on by your anxiety. Does it give you a sense power over them to put them in your songs?

Absolutely yeah, when you can articulate your feelings like that. So many times the things we do are motivated by fear or anxiety but we don’t take the time to name the fear, we just react to it. When we can sort of deconstruct as to ‘why I’m feeling this way’ like what am I actually saying about myself? Do I really believe that I’m a burden to all my friends? Do I really believe that I’m not loved or that I’m utterly alone? When we articulate these feelings that might not be entirely rational, it can be hard and painful to be honest with what we’re feeling sometimes but I think that’s why it’s difficult to get there because first we have to be honest before we can realise that it’s irrational. It’s comforting to find out that maybe everyone doesn’t hate me but we have to admit that fear is there first and it’s not easy.

Do you think it’s a myth that artists make their best work at the depths of their depression? Do you think you need to be a bit removed from it to create the art that best represents your anxiety?

Hmm, for me it’s always been process of both. When I’m feeling it very intensely, I will write a lot of verses and I’ll write a lot about exactly what I’m feeling. I’ll identify the emotion and then when I have time removed from it, I can revisit it and sort of dismantle why I did that or what the motivations were behind me writing that. I can like look back at something I wrote a day ago and say, ‘why on earth did I feel that way?’ or ‘what do I need to change to learn from this?’. So I think it has to be both, you know? I think it takes us being self-aware as well. That’s the one thing about healing that’s so important for improving your mental health. It’s being in touch with what you are feeling, being honest about those feelings in the moment and not being afraid of them.

‘Turn Out the Lights’ doesn’t sugar-coat the harsh realities of mental health struggles but it’s also desperately determined to remain hopeful about a grim situation. Do you set out to be a cautious optimist as well as a realist?

Yeah I think that’s the way you have to be in order to preserve hope. We have this idea or maybe rather the rhetoric around hope is that it’s a lofty idea and optimism is kind of chided as foolish because cynicism is easy, right? It’s so easy to point out the pain, suffering and all of the injustices in the world that we live in. We will not be able to withstand it or improve that without hope. This thing about making hope accessible and functional is that it has to accept the reality of sadness and suffering.

I think the reason why people become disillusioned and cynical is because people have these romantic ideas of ‘it’s all going to get better’ or ‘It will get work out in the end’ and that’s a lie. There are many times where the way that it ‘works out’ will not be the way that you want it too. Maybe it won’t get better or maybe it won’t get better for five years or 10 years or for most of your life. In the meantime we need to just accept that instead of thinking that one day everything will be fixed, we can just start to say that things may be in disarray right now but that does not mean that we have nothing to be joyous about. We have to willing to acknowledge the things that are good and that bring us joy in the present, right now. We have to allow ourselves to be happy about them or I don’t think we’ll make it.

That was really bleak. I’m sorry [Laughs].

No it’s not really, I think that’s a healthy outlook. I think the line that sums up that outlook the most is on ‘Appointments’, “Maybe it’s all gonna turn out all right / And I know that it’s not, but I have to believe that it is”. Is that line emblematic of the album as a whole?

Oh yes, I think so. The crazy thing about ‘Appointments’ is that song reminds me of a time where I felt like that suffering was inescapable, that the bad things of life, whether they be the personal anxieties that I experienced and have trouble coping with or the large scale, global injustices.

Those things were inescapable and there is no way to change them and I was trying to mitigate them. I was asking myself how can I try to be better while knowing that many things will not turn out ok and the answer that I got is that it’s in the trying. It is in the small victories of being able to extract some compassion or to communicate some small good and put that into the world. This gives us the ability to withstand the grandeur of all that.

‘Turn Out the Lights’ the title is ,for me anyway, a metaphor for shutting yourself off from the world when you need to heal. Do you find you need a lot of solitude?

Yeah, I think I’m a person who does need a lot of solitude. I think I reflect stuff and process things better when I’m alone writing or when I’m a alone on a run. I just need that time to be inside of my head and for me that makes me better company when I’m actually around people too. But I think the whole purpose of that song and that title is that when we choose not to reflect or ever be alone with our thoughts then we never process them, we never give an honest appraisal of our emotions and that’s so necessary.

Like I said earlier, self-awareness is really important and when you finally turn out the lights and you’re in bed alone, that’s the time when there’s nothing left, there are no distractions, there are no more barrier between your memory and your thoughts. There are no more barriers between who you are and the mirror of your own mind. It’s scary sometimes, but to be vulnerable like that is really, really important.

Julien Baker will be opening for Belle & Sebastian in Vicar Street on March 26 & 27.