HAPPY TO BE HERE: ON JULIEN BAKER

Photo from Unsplash.

“There is a comfort in failure, singing too loud in church”. —Julien Baker, ‘Shadowboxing’

Julien Baker plays stripped down folk-rock that sounds like burned-out hymns. She’s a singer-songwriter from Tennessee, a gay Christian who brings up theology in all her interviews, young enough to be considered a wunderkind but an old soul, talking about Kierkegaard and Kant in interviews because they’re what she reads on tour. She’s tiny but her voice scrapes against the rafters—ripped the air right out of my lungs when she howled I think there’s a God and he hears either way / So I rejoice, and I complain.

I probably heard Julien Baker for the first time in the basement of the house in Seattle. I’m not even sure how I heard about her—maybe on Twitter, or on a Spotify playlist. What I remember is the silence and then the sound. My cold fingers in the unheated basement and my racing heart. After I listened to Julien Baker for the first time, I didn’t stop for months.

What hooked me was the first line of the title song on her album Sprained Ankle: “Wish I could write songs about anything other than death.” 2017 was the year I thought about death more or less constantly, a low hum like a computer fan behind everything else. I’d spent most of the previous year trying to save souls across three continents, and then I moved to Seattle. I was working at a church and living for free in an old house owned by a different church, driving into the suburbs every day to talk to teenagers about Jesus. It was easy to think about death, driving across the bridges between Seattle and the East Side every day, with the wind dragging my car across lanes and waves from Lake Washington threatening to jump the low barriers

Sprained Ankle is unashamedly earnest. It makes all of the talk about death a little more palatable, because the album is just Julien on guitar or piano and that voice rasping about death and grace and a God who is just close enough to be terrifying. When she sings the lyrics, “I know my body is just dirty clothes / I’m tired of washing my hands / God, I want to go home,” her voice rises from sweet, church-choir-thin to nearly a scream, and the unexpected metaphor is almost lost, the blistering sadness of such a disposable body almost drowned out—but not quite.

Julien came up in the straight-edge punk scene; the shows where kids in black jeans mosh and punch stone-cold sober, house shows with no beer cans littering the front lawn. These are the kids who have been to rehab before graduating high school, the ones who have lost friends to almost-literal self-immolation. Julien herself dealt with addiction and recovery before she was out of her teens. Her music seems to purposefully seek the blade-thin line between burning faith and oblivion, the place where belief in God and humanity’s knack for depravity seem most at odds.

Sad girl folk-rock like Julien’s is made for people like me: progressive lesbians with depression and a vocabulary for faith that’s been chopped and screwed, pieced together from a thousand unlikely sources and still too shallow to encompass the God we’re grasping for. Julien Baker doesn’t try to overcomplicate the language of faith. Her lyrics are ruthlessly simple; in a New Yorker interview, she says she sometimes considers making her lyrics more vague, in order to hide. But ultimately she always bares her bruises.

To listen to Julien Baker is to absorb her theology of depression, her deep belief in the humiliating grace of God. To Julien, grace begins in the gaps in the drywall of a burned-out apartment, in the back of an ambulance after a night of drinking, in the nicotine-stained lungs of a girl in an inpatient mental ward. “It’s not that I think I’m good,” she sings, “I know that I’m evil / I guess I’m just trying to even it out.”

Some violin and organ accompaniment adds sonic depth to her second album, but the main thing is still her voice, low and clear, singing lyrics that rip and gut. Turn Out The Lights is what pumped through my speakers as I drove across the I-90 bridge into the setting sun every winter afternoon, what kept me company at night. I spent a lot of time curled in my bed or hunched in my driver’s seat, crying as a different lyric bit into me.

In the video for her song “Appointments,” Julien goes about her day somewhere in rural America with a blank stare on her face. At first, she sits in a white room and sings, and a dancer flits just out of her vision, like a ghost in a movie. 

I know that I’m not what you wanted, am I?

Eventually more dancers arrive as Julien leaves the house and drives away. They jump over railings and contort their bodies in unison. 

You don’t have to remind me so much how I disappoint you. 

They dance in complicated circles around her as she gets coffee at a Citgo station and stares straight ahead as she pumps gas. The syncopated dancers become eerie, twirling across oil-slicked concrete under gas station lights.

At the end, as she stares out over a lake, the dancers writhe around her, the music swells, and she sings, “Maybe it’s all gonna turn out alright / Oh, I know that it’s not, but I have to believe that it is.” But finally the dancers leave her alone, standing on the shore, watching the setting sun.

“Appointments” is the first song on Turn Out The Lights, and the first single released from the album. When I watched the video, alone in my kitchen in Seattle, my eyes started playing tricks on me. I thought I saw movement flicking in the corners of my vision, that of dancers or demons.

In October of 2017, I took the bus to the UW hospital late on a Saturday night, with Julien Baker playing in my headphones. I was on the bus because I didn’t trust myself not to drive my car off the bridge en route. When the nurse asked why I was in the emergency room, I spoke so low I almost couldn’t hear myself: “Well, I was going to kill myself, and instead I came here.”

“I’m glad you came here,” the nurse said. She seemed sincere, but the lyric I heard in my head was Julien: And I’m not fooled when you tell me that you’re glad I came.

Two weeks later, I was driving across the country with my dad, trying to navigate through back roads in Oregon because all of the interstate passes over the Cascades had already been closed by snow. “Put on some tunes,” my dad said. I started playing Sprained Ankle, from the beginning, and sang along to “Blacktop” about a bad night and a car crash while my dad drove slowly around hairpin turns.

I don’t think Julien would balk at the claim that her music is worship music. In an article for Oxford American, she writes, “I have found that most worship exists outside formal ceremony: it is the way we spend our time, its object is the object of our attention, the things in which we find slivers of the divine.”

I grew up believing my heart was a brush pile, ready to ignite and burn if only the right spark caught it. I thought having a heart burning for God would make me happy, would burn the sadness out of my skin—my metaphors were about fire and water, light and darkness. But the metaphors in Julien Baker’s songs are about dirty clothes and wreckage, about car crashes and whiskey-drunk prayers, and they gave me language for God when I lost all my other metaphors.

I bought tickets to her concert as soon as they went on sale. I didn’t really have the money, because it was December 2017 and it had been just about a month since I had left my church job in Seattle, but I bought them anyway. 

Julien was mostly alone on stage. She had lights behind her, incandescent bulbs in black wire cages, and she sang from her toes, throwing her head back and screaming notes. This was not singing pretty like I’d been taught in choir—this was survival.

Other people started crying almost as soon as Julien started singing. I’m not a public crier; I tried so hard to play it cool and sway along with the rest of the crowd. After her first song some guy yelled, “I LOVE YOU JULIEN,” way too loud, so she couldn’t ignore it, and she sort of chuckled and played it off. He kept yelling, though, in between every song, and it was as jarring as someone yelling in between liturgies. Maybe if he hadn’t been yelling I wouldn’t have cried, but it just felt so clichéd, to have some asshole killing the vibe at a show full of queer women, yelling “I love you” at a woman who didn’t even like men. It made me mad and tired, left me feeling like frayed copper wire was scratching inside my veins.

Maybe this is why I cried when Julien started “Happy To Be Here,” the song I heard in the back of my head in the emergency room. I swayed with a room full of strangers and sobbed as she sang, “If I could do what I want / I would become an electrician, / I’d climb inside my ears / and I would rearrange the wires in my brain. / A different me would be inhabiting this body, / have two cars, a garage, a job / and I would go to church on Sunday.”