JULIEN BAKER
"It’s a conundrum, isn’t it?” Julien Baker is reflecting on how she chose to approach the follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2017 album Turn Out The Lights, a fragile yet unflinching exploration of addiction, faith, sexuality and mental health. Accompanied primarily by her crystalline reverb-drenched Telecaster, Julien’s voice features additional depth only from occasional piano, violin and organ. It’s a magical, intimate, heartbreaking record but one that created its own issues down the line.
“I didn’t want to go back over similar ideas. That’s obviously a fear of people who put out small instrumentation records,” says Baker from her home in Tennessee, musing on the denser and more layered production on the forthcoming Little Oblivions. “If you had been doing something for four years, you’d want to do it differently. I feel like it’s always going to be one way or the other, right? It’s like Springsteen putting out Nebraska or Dylan going electric. People are like, ‘What’s going on!?’ Well, they’re just musicians doing something different – but I felt tortured about it!
“I WANTED TO BE THE BEST SOLOIST, IN NO SMALL PART BECAUSE I WAS A GIRL. I WANTED TO SHOW UP TO JAM IN MY BUDDY’S GARAGE AND SHOW THEM THAT I COULD BE GOOD AND BE A GIRL”
“I really wanted to have percussive elements on the record, because I wanted to broaden my sonic palette and find more ways to serve the songs. But at some point, I just stepped outside of these crazy fears and was like, ‘But you’re not Bob Dylan, though… it doesn’t matter! Why are you freaking out about this? Just put drums on the record. Calm down, it’s not a huge deal!’”
These expanded options Baker allowed herself add a strikingly different dimension to but this is still very much
