Julien Baker Can Run Away, But She Won't

By Danielle Chelosky


“I go back and forth about whether that could be the correct thing to do,” singer-songwriter Julien Baker says about running away and making music in the woods. On this 10 a.M. Phone call, Baker is doing what she seemingly routinely does — weighing the morality of a situation. “If I isolate myself from this world that I am confused and saddened by, the confusing sadness of the world doesn’t stop existing. I just get to distance myself from it.”


The 25-year-old artist has reason to contemplate it all. Right after playing in bands from a young age, she took off with her striking solo debut Sprained Ankle in 2015. The impressive follow-up Turn Out the Lights came two years later and only heightened her fame. In 2018, she joined forces with fellow emotive musicians Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus to form Boygenius and release weak, collaborative songs. Most recently, the three of these were invited onto Hayley Williams’s debut solo record Petals for Armor on the track “Roses/Lotus/Violet/Iris.” And right now it’s time for Baker to return to her organic role of standing alone, with her third solo album, Little Oblivions, out February 26 by way of the Matador Records.


“I feel like The Grinch,” is one of the opening things Baker tells me, calling me from Tennessee, “but I hate Christmas.” By asking how her holidays were, I’ve unlocked something deeply enthusiastic and also a smidge nihilistic from within her. Suddenly, she is ranting about the transactional nature of it all: “You have to assign a value, a financial range, to how you’re going to creatively tell people you love them with a gift,” she says. And people often pester her for this — why can’t you just like it? — and response The reply is one that’s inevitable: “I overthink each and every thing in the world,” she announces with a laugh.


It isn't that she chooses to be this way. Cynicism is hard to break out of; Baker understands this, calling herself a “grump.” It may be hard being companions with a grump, although it’s even harder to live indoor in the brain of one. It seems like music is one of the few places where Baker can avoid complications and messiness and overthinking — and not in the words, nevertheless in the instruments.


For this record, she got a musical group on it to give the songs more movement. “Instead of me in my room meticulously constructing poetry over really beautifully reverb-laden guitar,” she says, “I would write a song and record it on an acoustic with super dead strings that didn’t sound particularly good, and then [producer Calvin Lauber and I] would attempt to find subtleties to prepare it interesting. We put little crushed things in — lo-fi drums and sounds that were the direct antithesis to the group kind of customary, pretty [nature] of how I made the last record.” It feels as if Baker is letting go a little and changing the way she expresses herself. “Hardline” starts the record with abruptive, harsh chords that quiet down to let Baker’s earnest vocals make confessions. She immediately strips herself of expectations and responsibilities: “Start asking for forgiveness in advance for all of the future things I'll destroy / That way I can ruin everything.”


During 12 songs that play with this tension of abrasive noise against peaceful silence, Baker reckons with accountability, redemption, punishment, mercy. It captures a sole in the midst of accepting the past and figuring where to go next. It does not feel like someone trying also hard or attempting to fulfill expectations; it feels like someone of course extracting meaning from intense personalized experiences.


“There’s something amoral about hearing music and hearing sounds,” she explains. “You can assign an agenda or a meaning or a value system to lyrics, nevertheless music itself — the corporations of sound — is really comforting to me. It’s a place where I can either play the notes or I can’t. I can either arrange them in this certain way or I can arrange them in some other way. There’s nothing right or wrong about that.”


She has mastered the art of using songs as a form of communication, nevertheless the hard part is then having to then explain herself in interviews. “There’s so much to extrapolate from the lyrics, it then becomes a discussion not even about the music or the music’s purpose yet about my life and why my ideologies have changed. I want to prepare ensure those are represented accurately and then those can never be because they’re gonna be told through somebody else’s words.” She is tangibly stressed about this, out of breath by the time she finishes that sentence. With a laugh, she adds: “That’s why I love talking about gear. I’m like, Yes, good, I’m so glad I don’t have to postulate about what God is right now.”


At the same time, she remembers struggling in the music industry at 17 years old, begging anyone to care about or perhaps just notice her art. Right now 25, she recognizes that there really are millions of artists who are still attempting to get people to care about their art, still attempting to create a living off of their art. “It’s such a cruel paradox,” she says. And thus this is why she some days considers running away to the woods.


Yet, she hasn’t however. She made Little Oblivions, her junior effort that began taking form in 2019. In the past, Baker has put a lot of pressure on herself. “I was balancing guilt and attempting to create these timeless songs. I stripped drums and synthesizers and everything away because I wanted it to be in the fashion of the Woody Guthries and Leonard Cohens of the world who somehow can set poetry to music with just three lame chords and make it universal and philosophical and true.”


Before she started making Little Oblivions, though, she asked herself, What’s the worst-case scenario? “Eventually folks are gonna not care,” she realized. “Eventually I’m gonna be not even a footnote in musical history. Or human history.”


Baker noticed comfort in the fear of being forgotten, which allowed her to move more freely through her music. “It almost makes me cringe a little If I hear people talk about legacy,” she says. “You want people to think you’re nice, you want your coworkers to think you’re nice, you want your family members to think you’re smart and hardworking, you want your spouse to think you’re attractive. We are usually managing people’s perceptions of us and it’s impossible.”


Unfortunately, being aware of this doesn’t make someone immune. That’s piece of the appeal of going off the grid and living secluded from the general public. However there may be something selfish about saving ourselves while each person else is burning. “I would make it a lot better for myself and I could go grow squash in the Appalachian Mountains,” Baker speculates, “or I could recognize that this is my job and I have a chance to contribute something considerate that might change how another individual thinks. I can really only hope for individual change. I don’t know if structural chance is possible without that.”


Every Christmas, Baker tells herself she won’t be participating — it will finally be the year she detaches herself from the tradition. “And then I just be feeling like: Do you really wish to be that asshole at the family member gift giving ceremony?” she says. And then she gets last-minute gifts for each person. Little Oblivions isn't a last-minute gift, nor is it given under pressure. It is just a gift from her heart, for the sake of it.