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Indie star Julien Baker on vulnerability through music and safety in queer communities
She released her third album Little Oblivions to critical acclaim in February, along with singles and several remixes in collaboration with other artists.
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Emotional: Baker credits the emo scene around her hometown in Memphis, Tennesse, the United States for her signature voice of vulnerability. (Courtesy of Julien Baker management) (Julien Baker management/Courtesy of Julien Baker management)
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merican singer-songwriter Julien Baker is excited about going back on tour, to once again play and watch live shows. But she also looks back to the days of not touring, due to the pandemic, as a time of creativity and mental rest.
“Me and my [romantic] partner have been staying safe, gearing up for a tour, doing as many tests as we can, so fingers crossed that everything’s good,” she told The Jakarta Post during a zoom interview on Aug. 25.
The 25-year-old singer said she had been enjoying the quiet and peace of self-quarantining, spending most of her time in her room exploring scales on the guitar and piano, and only getting out of the room to cook for her partner and to walk her dog. Now that concerts have returned in some parts of the world, Baker found herself catapulted back into an intensive schedule of touring across the United States, Canada and Europe between September and May 2022.
“I’m thrilled, I’m so excited,” she said. “We’re talking to promoters about requiring vaccines, negative tests for entry into the show and you know, with everything, it’s still a little bit spooky.”
Baker has reasons to be especially nervous about her upcoming tour, besides the obvious horrors of the pandemic.
Before the coronavirus stopped the live music industry, Baker took a year off touring to focus on her schooling. The prospect of performing live in front of an audience after taking a very long break churned the butterflies in her belly, filling it with excitement and anxiety alike.
“This year I cried and I freaked out, but I also had a panic attack… [I became] so sensitive to being around a big crowd of people like I have a bad stage fright, and it’s been so long since I’ve been with eight to 10 people at one time.”
This will also be the first time she'll tour with a more elaborate live band.
“I just usually tour by myself, maybe with one other musician, a violinist — never had drums, never had bass. It’s just a big jump. And everyone that’s playing in my band is my friend from my childhood, so it’s just very meaningful and loaded,” she added.
Despite not performing throughout the pandemic, Baker managed to stay productive. She released her third album Little Oblivions to critical acclaim in February, along with singles and several remixes in collaboration with other artists. Baker considered the album to be “a wonderful process and highlighted how much I enjoy production.”
The album was made in a more lengthy and elaborate process compared to her earlier works Sprained Ankle (2015) and Turn Out the Lights (2017) when she simply wrote the songs in a spiral notebook and recorded them within 10 days.
“But this record, Little Oblivion, that’s the first time that I have ever taken months and months to make [a record], but not because I was creatively blocked; I just [...] had time to ruminate on the idea and I honestly liked it more,” she said. “I made [her debut album] Sprained Ankle in three days, [but] later in my life when I had more resources, I took the time to sit with the production choices and be a little bit more discerning. I didn’t feel like I had to make every decision there at the moment.”
Crowds of vulnerable people
Prior to gaining success with her current introspective and melodic sound, Baker was enamored with the more aggressive hardcore, emo and screamo scene around her hometown in Memphis, Tennesse, the US, from which she credits her signature voice of vulnerability.
“I just remember the first time I saw somebody screaming on stage and I just like, ‘That’s what I feel like inside,' but I don’t know how to express it,” she said.
When she was 14, she joined an emo-core band for which she was the vocalist in charge of the screaming parts.
“But that didn’t really work out, so I just decided to sing.”
Being in contact with a variety of Southeastern emo acts encouraged Baker to utilize the unpleasant emotions from her daily life as an ingredient to writing songs. Listeners resonated deeply with her sadness, and many shared with Baker stories of how her songs have helped them survive their own hardships. Baker, however, feels that she doesn’t deserve the credit.
“I think my music was just a catalyst for you to understand yourself a little bit better. I make art about a very common human feeling,” she said. “How many people have made songs about heartbreak? I mean Justin Bieber to Touché Amoré to Converge has written songs about heartbreak. And I was the thing of all the things that resonated with you. And that doesn’t mean that I have some special wisdom or experience. I just wrote those songs when I was in such a dark place.”
Baker, who sang with Californian post-hardcore unit Touché Amoré on its 2016 single “Skyscraper”, said that not only did the emo scene teach her about turning vulnerability into creativity, but it also showed Baker the camaraderie of the do-it-yourself (DIY) community, and how someone’s creative endeavor thrives when it is supported by a network of people who love music regardless of genres.
“In any scene, there’s a lot of conflict and gossip, but that is because everybody is relying so integrally on each other […] It's really great for teaching you how to communicate with people and how to be a member of a community,” she said. “You trust your friends to book you a show, and you trust somebody at that show to let you sleep at their house — you trust whoever to give you some food or money for gas, and it’s like you opt into a community of people […] who are reliant on each other, in this clandestine infrastructure, and I think that’s such a great model of alternative like a support system.”
Finding the right community is also important in her survival as a lesbian growing up in conservative Memphis. Growing up, she saw many of her childhood friends suffer traumatic experiences that altered their personalities forever after being admitted to gay conversion centers.
“The most beautiful thing that helped me grow is finding a queer community, finding other queer people, finding people that are allies, that aren’t this kind of destructive or judgmental conservative. Establishing a queer community is so valuable because it helps you to lean into each other,” she said.
“I think maybe the greatest gift that I have been given despite all of my failures as a performer, socially correct person, is to be a queer person on a stage, saying that I’m here, and having other queer people come up to me and talk to me about it. It’s like the most meaningful thing I have ever done with my life.”
