Hope is the heart of ‘Lights’
“The harder I swim, the faster I sink,” Julien Baker sings on her sophomore album, “Turn Out the Lights,” which finds the 22-year-old Memphis native offering beautiful, low-key meditations on life as a queer Christian woman in the South. It’s the follow-up to her scrappy 2015 debut, “Sprained Ankle,” which went viral after Baker uploaded it to the Internet while studying audio engineering at Middle Tennessee State University. The new album was recorded in Ardent Studios, which is managed by Jody Stephens of Big Star. The singer and songwriter checked in with us from her recent European tour.
Q: How did you approach “Turn Out the Lights” differently than you did your first album? A: Going into recording this album with the knowledge that there was an established listenership I think was new for me. I had never released music knowing that anyone outside my small community of musical peers would hear it. I wanted to be very careful that in improving the technical quality of the song, the same authenticity and immediacy was preserved. Q: You recorded it at Ardent Studios. Did you have any connection with the history before you went in? A: Yes, I had spent time in Ardent when friends’ bands had recorded there. I think Ardent is this great monolith that’s very representative of Memphis’ culture. It’s right in the middle of Midtown, and while it’s had so many legendary artists come through there, it’s still very accessible and not intimidating or grandiose. Q: You were at school when the world discovered “Sprained Ankle.” Were you prepared for the attention that followed? A: I wasn’t prepared at all. I had always more envisioned music as a passion I would have to sustain with a more functional trade. Q: How did you deal with having to play these intimate, personal songs you never expected anyone to hear to crowds every night, especially on the festival circuit? A: I think that having to perform these songs so regularly actually helped me give them new context for the experiences I was singing about. Having to confront the emotions that I described in the songs every night I think helped me analyze why I was feeling that way, in being more aware of the kinds of things I’m communicating and why. I think it’s helped me develop healthier thought patterns and relationships to the songs. Q: People tend to comment on the hopelessness in your songs. Are you secretly an optimistic person? A: I am certainly an optimistic person, though I wouldn’t say it’s secretly. Inside of my songs there’s a lot of pretty candid discussion of pretty bleak events or emotions, but that’s because I think as people we owe honesty and candor to ourselves and each other. But that does not mean that the discussion of sadness or pain banishes the possibility of hope. Especially with this record, I try to make an effort to have a provision of hope, to explicitly address the need to allow for both hope and despair. I think we can honor those feelings and face them while maintaining a functional and realistic optimism.
Aidin Vaziri is The San Francisco Chronicle’s pop music critic. E-mail: avaziri@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MusicSF