Julien Baker’s Reckoning
After two acclaimed LPs, Julien Baker slowed down and wrestled with sobriety
After two acclaimed LPs, the indie talent slowed down, went to school, and wrestled with sobriety.
‘Idon’t know why I’m telling you the footnotes of my thesis,” Julien Baker says, stopping herself to apologize midsentence. It makes sense that Baker has slipped into full academic mode, talking about jazz and “the subjectivities of language” — because, lately, the 25-year-old singer-songwriter has spent much more time in a classroom than onstage. In 2019, feeling worn out and struggling with some long-brewing personal issues after three years of nonstop touring, Baker decided to pause her career and complete her studies at Middle Tennessee State University. “We canceled Austin City Limits, and I went back to school,” she says.
Baker was relieved to attend lectures with students who did not care, or even know, that their classmate was one of the most heartbreakingly perceptive indie singer-songwriters of the past half-decade. “It made me use my brain in a completely different way, and return to a daily application of my mind to literature and the study of music and language — something that was not wrapped up in my ego as a musician,” she says. “That was really helpful. I am going to sound like a big old nerd, but I love school. . . . I was just, like, hanging out in the library.”
After graduating in December 2019, she headed directly to a studio in her hometown of Memphis to begin recording her third solo album. That record, Little Oblivions, is not only the most richly produced, pop-aware release of Baker’s career, but also her most unsparingly honest in its messiness. If Baker’s first two solo LPs — 2015’s spectral Sprained Ankle and 2017’s morose Turn Out the Lights — explored questions of faith, identity, and mental health, her latest work is much more directly rooted in the physical. Baker’s new songs are full of bodies and blackouts and benders and blood. Many of them take place in beds and bars. Perhaps most notably, the majority of them also have drums.
As the album’s sole producer, Baker uses her newly expanded rock palette to tell a story of the reckoning and renewal she’s undergone over the past two years. On “Relative Fiction,” she slowly builds on a typically sparse and moody arrangement before interrupting the doom-and-gloom ballad with a thrilling pop chorus: “I don’t need a savior/ I need you to take me home,” she sings as the band swoops in behind her.
Baker recalls that when her career began taking off in 2016 she was “reading compulsively, consuming theology and philosophy and political ideology. I was so obsessed with doing right. I thought so much about these huge things, like, ‘What is altruism?’ Just a bunch of Chidi-from- The-Good-Place questions.” Since then, she says, “things happened in my life that made my world smaller.”
Baker has not played a proper show since July 2019, and the last time she was fully in the public eye was in the fall of 2018, when she released and toured behind the successful Boygenius EP with her newly formed indie trio with Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus. “Gosh, two years, so much has happened in that time,” Baker says. “Man, it was not a good year — 2019 was not a good year.”
When she got off the road in November 2018, things quickly went downhill. “It was like riding a bike slowly,” says the singer, who had been sober for about six years at the time. “When you don’t have the momentum anymore, you start to falter.”
Baker prefers not discussing this time in detail; she is wary of the risk that her relationship to substance abuse, which dates back to her preteens, will become, as she puts it, “novelized.” Eventually, she adds, she dealt with her pent-up stress “in some very negative ways.”
“I just didn’t realize how much was there that I hadn’t dealt with,” she continues. “I re-examined a whole lot of things: my relationship to substances and my identity as sober or straight-edge. . . . It was something I had taken a whole bunch of pride in. Then, having to renegotiate starting over from the bottom with that.”
She began writing many of the songs for Little Oblivions in January 2019. “It’s so hard to be wrong about something you were so sure was right,” she says. “I feel like Turn Out the Lights, the whole premise of so many of the songs were the two parts of the self facing each other — the antagonistic part and the good, triumphant, idealistic part. It’s been a process of understanding those are the same person, and instead of overcoming and defeating this negative part, trying to mercifully assimilate that into your understanding of yourself.”
Baker played through her scheduled U.S. and European festival dates in the spring and early summer of 2019, but by early August she had canceled the rest of her appearances due to, as a statement put it at the time, “ongoing medical issues.” That July, she had written the second batch of songs that wound up on Little Oblivions.
To describe the record-making process, which, for the first time, involved several rounds of demos, shifting arrangements, and more than a year of tinkering before entering the studio, Baker — clearly a recent college grad — turns to a William Wordsworth quote: “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” If Baker’s first two albums represented the first half of that quote, Little Oblivions, she says, was motivated by the latter half.
By August 2019, Baker was driving out to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, to finish her degree at MTSU, where she had interrupted her studies back in 2016 with just one semester left.
When she graduated and entered the studio, she knew she wanted to make an album with a full band for the first time. But she also sprinkled several quieter, solo moments on the LP. “I didn’t want to put out this vibe of, like, ‘I’m in a band now! I have a reason to have distortion on my pedalboard!’ ” she says. “I mean, I am very happy to have a reason to have distortion on my pedalboard. But I didn’t want it to feel like a gimmick.”
On a strictly personal level, Baker found her time at home in 2020 to be somewhat of a blessing. “I’m retroactively grateful for things having been forced to slow down,” she says. But, as is often the case with the exceedingly reflective singer-songwriter, there’s a caveat: “That sounds romanticized, and I know there’s no ultimate thing that I’m going to find that’s going to be, ‘This is right,’ ” she says. “It’s been about moving away from the conceptual into the physical experience, trying to be more present.”
Baker stops herself once more. “I just made some ‘woo-woo’ hands when I said ‘present,’ ” she says. “I don’t know why I do that. It’s a perfectly normal, healthy thing to be present in your body.”