JULIEN BAKER

When

Under the Radar

first spoke with Julien Baker in the spring of 2016, it was a few weeks after her headline-grabbing round of performances at that year’s South by Southwest festival and less than five months since her debut album,

Sprained Ankle

—a dazzlingly intimate album made over two days and with zero expectations of an audience—had become one of the most out-of-nowhere breakthroughs of 2015. Only 20, she was reportedly at the center of a bidding war between just about every notable major indie rock label, leaving her with the decision to shelve her nearly completed teaching degree from Middle Tennessee State University in order to devote all of her energies toward touring. Friendly and fast-talking, often drifting off into philosophical tangents and then apologizing, she was a blur of energy and anxiety. She was already fretting about the prospect of making album number two.

“I worry because the logic you could follow is that if I can make an album in two days, then maybe I can make a better album if I have all this time and resources and pieces of equipment and can rent out a studio,” she told me then. “I’m worried that it will be crippling. I think being conscious of this will prevent it from happening,” she continued, rallying some optimism. “I’m not going to have eight-piece string arrangements and get all crazy with it.”

A year-and-a-half later, Baker’s fears appear to have been unfounded. On a balmy mid-September morning, she is back in Murfreesboro, TN, where she went to college and has returned after spending much of the past year back in her hometown of Memphis. It was there that she recorded Turn Out the Lights , her sophomore album where she had more time, more resources, more equipment, and, yes, even string arrangements. And, yet, it is a natural extension of everything she did on Sprained Ankle , taking the straightforward arrangements and emotionally raw songwriting of that album and deepening the textures and focusing the sentiments. Where her debut was an accidental breakthrough, an album that was humbly and simply constructed, Turn Out the Lights, which is being released by Matador Records , is an album of considerable ambition—something Baker seems eager to downplay.

“It was sort of like I made the best macaroni sculpture in the whole kindergarten class [with Sprained Ankle ],” Baker says, “and when I got brought into a studio with all of the paint and canvas and fancy equipment I could ever need, they said, ‘Let’s see what you can do!’ I said, ‘I hope it’s a masterpiece,’” she continues, then laughs. “Now that I had these resources and have been made aware of the audience and the support that I have in listeners, as well as in support from a label, I wanted to make something that would make all those people proud and feel like they got something that was gratifying and worth it,” she says, before trailing off self-consciously. “Which is interesting, because I feel like it’s a taboo to admit knowledge of the audience as an artist.”

“I’d rather stay in this world and try to identify the beautiful