It’s impossible to assess Julien Baker’s sophomore effort, Turn Out the Lights, without acknowledging the considerable shadow of its its predecessor, Sprained Ankle. released two years ago, the debut snuck up on all but a handful of people. Turn Out the Lights hopefully will sneak up on no one. It sounds lush and meticulously made. Sprained Ankle was stripped to the bone, sonically speaking, but its followup features lots of keyboards, plus string sections, vocal harmonies and more atmosphere.
From the new album ‘Turn Out the Lights’ out October 27th on Matador Records.
With a new album due out next week I just wanted to reflect on Julien Baker’s release of last year and this perfect session for the “Tiny Desk Concert “ series
There are nine spare, simple songs on Julien Baker’s debut album, “Sprained Ankle”, and every one of them is sad. In fact, she came to the Tiny Desk with an untitled new one — since given the name “Funeral Pyre” — and she appropriately introduced it as “Sad Song #11.” But Baker’s shimmering electric-guitar picking, the purity of her voice and the yearning way she sings make each of her songs lovely and memorable rather than merely somber. She takes raw emotions and weaves them into perfect bits of memorable poetry like this, from the song “Good News”: In the thin air my ribs creak Like wooden dining chairs when you see me Always scared that every situation ends the same With a blank stare For fans of Torres, another Tennessee musician, there’s a similar intensity to that electric guitar and lonesome sound. But unlike the intensity Torres unleashes with her voice, Baker lets her words carry the volume. It’s a tone that lulls you into her world and has me eagerly anticipating “Sad Song #12” and beyond. Sprained Ankle was released last year.
Set List: “Sprained Ankle” “Funeral Pyre” “Something”
Sometimes I feel like this record is one of the biggest risks I’ve taken in my life. But it’s the kind of risk that’s a necessity, so it doesn’t feel risky at all. From the moment the album appeared in my mind, it knew where it was going – my job was just to clear the path.
In a time of intense uncertainty, it felt good to harness a spirit of recklessness, which sometimes is the only thing that can stand up to the anxiety you would otherwise feel.
This record is about staring down dark things and seeing them fully, which isn’t the same thing as acceptance. It’s just a necessity in and of itself, and something that can empower.
It’s also about playing music with my friends, love, ideas, and everything else that chose to tumble onto the page over the last year and a half.
I’m so proud to be able to bring it to you today. Tamara Lindeman The Weather Station.
Julien Baker’s 2015 debut Sprained Ankle earned her spare, intimate songwriting a passionate following. The title track is as close to indie classic status as a song that’s hardly two years old can be, meaning fans have eagerly awaited new material since Baker announced she’d signed to Matador Records earlier this year. She’s announced her sophomore album and first full-length for Matador, Turn Out the Lights, which arrives October 27th.
Alongside the album announcement comes “Appointments,” the album’s second song and a slow, twinkly setting for Julien Baker’s signature confessional hush. listen to the song below,
L.A. singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers’ debut LP is a collection of songs about intimacy, documenting how our relationships affect the way we view ourselves and interact with others.
Phoebe Bridgers’ career has been propelled by fellow musicians. Ryan Adams, Conor Oberst, and JulienBaker have all sung the praises of the 23-year-old Los Angeles singer-songwriter, leading up to her full-length debut Stranger in the Alps. Fittingly, the album itself is also populated by other artists: Bridgers writes about lost legends like Bowie and Lemmy down through the local hobbyists who haunt their hometowns like ghosts in faded band tees. In “Scott Street,” she reads into how an old flame tells her his drums are “too much shit to carry.” In “Motion Sickness,” one of the year’s most exquisite breakup anthems, she lands her harshest jab in the chorus: “Hey, why do you sing with an English accent? I guess it’s too late to change it now.”
Stranger in the Alps is a collection of songs about intimacy, documenting how our relationships affect the way we view ourselves and interact with others. The crux of Bridgers’ writing arrives in small details: a casual exchange of words, a song played on a long car ride, the moments we relive in our heads once we get back home. Bridgers’ voice has a breezy, conversational flutter that helps her stories of heartbreak and loss avoid morbidity. She sounds best when she double-tracks it in layers of light falsetto: an effect that, depending on what she’s singing, can sound sweet and soothing or scalding like feedback
With Turn Out The Lights, 21-year-old JulienBaker returns to a much bigger stage, but with the same core of breathtaking vulnerability and resilience. From its opening moments her chiming, evocative melody is accompanied by swells of strings —Turn Out The Lights throws open the doors to the world without sacrificing the intimacy that has become a hallmark of her songs. The album explores how people live and come to terms with their internal conflict, and the alternately shattering and redemptive ways these struggles playout in relationships. Baker casts an unflinching and accepting eye on the duality of –and contradictions in –the human experience, at times evenfinding humor and joy in the midst of suffering. She ultimately calls on her listeners to move beyond “good” and “bad,” or “happy” and “sad,” to embrace more complex truths.
The album was recorded at the legendary Ardent Studios in her hometown of Memphis, TN, and mixed by Craig Silvey (The National, Florence & the Machine, Arcade Fire). This evolution from her previous album Sprained Ankle’ intentionally sparse production allowed greater scope and freedom for Baker,who is still the album’s sole writer and producer. Strings and woodwinds now shade the corners of her compositions, and Baker takes to piano rather than guitar on several tracks. In songs like the epic “Claws In Your Back,” these new textures push Baker’s work to cinematic heights of intensity.
As always, the real draw is her songwriting and lyricism. Turn Out The Lights is more expansive in sound and vision than Sprained Ankle and illustrates significant growth, yet the album retains the haunting delicacy of her heart breakingly confessional style. Where her debut focused inward on Baker’s life and aspects of her identity, Turn Out The Lights reflects on not only her own experiences, but also the experiences of those closest to her.
The album is book ended by “Appointments” and “Claws in Your Back,” two songs that deal with the precarious balance between nihilism and realism. “A lot of stuff happened in my life that was rapid change, and it felt like it could not get any worse,” Baker says of “Appointments.” “I was like, I have reached critical mass for this amoeba of sadness and it cannot possibly turn out all right. But for the sake of my continuing to exist, I have to believe that it will.”
The resulting song (“I think if I ruin this, then I know I can live with it,” Baker sings) cuts to the core of Baker’s uniquely clear-eyedtake on human suffering. On “Claws In Your Back,” she turns her own hard-won determination to thrive into a rallying cry for her friends(“I think I can love the sickness you made. I take it all back, I change my mind.I wanted to stay”).
Even as Turn Out The Lights explores broken relationships (“Sour Breath”), the search for a cure that may not exist (“Everything To Help You Sleep”), and the impossibility of ever truly understanding each other (“Shadowboxing”), Baker continually returns to the possibility of joy. “I don’t believe in the ‘fixing’ part, where what healing means is that you no longer get sad or experience grief or have panic attacks,” Baker says. “Happy is kind of a fleeting and transient emotion. It is not a destination that you can get to by exerting enough mental effort. I believe that joy is something that you can invite into your present circumstance. Whereas happiness seems to be this horizon that’s eternally getting further from you, joy is something that you can inhabit.”
It’s this call to joy even in moments of otherwise total darkness that makes her music a refuge for her fans. Turn Out The Lights is ultimately a healing experience, and it’s impossible not to feel Baker’s unyielding compassion for the messy and beautiful human experience. “When I talk about things in myself I find ugly and unlovable, they are the most effective tools for connecting with other people, for helping other people heal,” she says. “And that helps me heal.”
From the new album ‘Turn Out the Lights’ out October 27th on Matador Records
After blowing us away with the release of Sprained Ankle, her debut full-length in 2015, singer Julien Baker is back with a follow-up called Turn Out The Lights. The first single, “Appointments,” is an inward-looking meditation on disappointment and doubt in the wake of a failed relationship. Turn Out The Lights is due out October. 27th on Matador Records.
Those of us who fell in love with her debut album, Sprained Ankle, have been hungering for more of Miss Baker’s sparse, confessional songs — brutally honest and cripplingly insecure, self-deprecating but laced with just enough hope to keep you hanging on — since the album’s 2015 release (only briefly sated by the release of “Funeral Pyre,” a one-off single, in January).
Baker is back with “Appointments,” the moving first single from her upcoming sophomore album, Turn Out The Lights. It gently treads over well-worn ground for Baker: hopefulness and hopelessness, mental health, emotional estrangement. The song is suspiciously optimistic, in Baker’s way: “Maybe it’s all going to turn out alright / And I know that it’s not / But I have to believe that it is,” she cries out over piano and twinkly guitars in the song’s climax.
This quiet compassion undergirds Baker’s music and allows her to write songs that are incredibly sad, without ever becoming maudlin or overwrought. You can trace hints of its source in Baker’s frequent invocation of the divine, and her deep faith in the holy sound of rock ‘n’ roll; regardless, it makes both her self-loathing and her moments of stability infinitely believable. “Appointments” is this way, too; it’s rooted in pain and the fear of failure, but it sounds like driving late at night, trying to convince yourself — and maybe whoever else is listening — that the small steps towards healing are worth it.
Turn Out The Lights will be Baker’s first album for Matador Records.
Julien Baker’s music is poetic and intensely personal, written from her perspective as a young, gay, Christian from Memphis, Tennessee. The surprising thing is how well her music resonates with a crowd of all ages, genders, religious beliefs, and sexual orientations,
From the album “Sprained Ankle” out via 6131 Records. Perhaps part of the appeal of Sprained Ankle is the liberating feeling that comes from hearing someone tackling these subjects with such eloquence,
Recorded at Spacebomb Studios in Richmond, VA
Julien Baker continues to rise thanks to the strength of her 2015 debut album “Sprained Ankle” and her mesmerising live sets . It’s now been announced that she’s signed to the wonderful indie label MatadorRecords So big congrats to Julien, its awesome news and gives hope for some UK festivals or shows this year. .
Her first release for the label is the new single, “Funeral Pyre” a song that you may remember she debuted in an Tiny Desk Concert last year. The studio version is just as gorgeous as the version she played on NPR. Here’s what she tells NPR about it in a new interview:
Obviously, drinking gasoline incurs bodily harm on you, but also, being an accessory to that kind of behavior and having to decide — it incurs harm upon you, too. And then, are you responsible for permitting that? If you stay, are you responsible for permitting it? And if you leave, are you responsible for not intervening? If you intervene, are you out of your bounds? Everything about the song is figuring out how you should act in your level of responsibility for your own health and to others in the dynamic of a relationship, which is a difficult lesson to learn.I feel like I would have put myself into an unfavorable or unhealthy position for this person and maybe recognizing from an outside perspective that that destructivism is a more healthy thing to do than to stay in it for the sort of, romantic, admirable belief that subjecting yourself to this kind of sacrificial, fatuous love would be more of the right thing to do.
“Funeral Pyre” won’t be out until March with “Distant Solar System,” an unheard song from the Sprained Ankle sessions, on the flip. Matador Records will also reissue Sprained Ankle, originally released on 6131 Records, that day (but not in the US or Australia).
Julien Baker has contributed a new song to Punk Talks’ holiday album, “Jingle Yay! Punk Talks”, an organization that provides musicians and industry workers with free mental health services, was founded in 2015.
Baker’s new song, “Decorated Lawns,” is the perfect song to get you in a reflective, somewhat nostalgic mood just in time for the holidays. It’s slightly more upbeat than her debut album, “Sprained Ankle”, but remains characteristic of the singer-songwriter. (It wouldn’t be complete if someone didn’t crash a car!) The album is available for purchase now via Bandcamp
Middle Tennessee State University student/songwriter Julien Baker came to the Paste Studio last january to play us some music off of her debut solo album, “Sprained Ankle” (which was featured in our best albums of 2015).
Baker, who released the album last year, has been through more in her life than the average 20-something, and her experiential maturity is evident in her songwriting. Her lyrics are intimate, sometimes cautionary, and completely from the heart. She’s doesn’t just sing and play guitar. It’s much, much more than that. Stay tuned: this young lady has a big future ahead of her. I;m hoping she tours the UK this forthcoming year , she would be an excellent addition to the End Of the Road Festival.
Watch Julien Baker’s performance of “Everybody Does” above, as well as “Sprained Ankle” and “Something” below from her Paste Session in the beginning part of the year.
Sprained Ankle – 21/1/2016 – Paste Studios, New York, NY
Something – 21/1/2016 – Paste Studios, New York, NY
Everybody Does – 21/1/2016 – Paste Studios, New York,
Julien Baker is only 20 years old, but the songs on “Sprained Ankle” sound like the stories of someone who has lived hundreds of lives before this one, which is to say: It’s an impossibly sad album. Fortunately, Baker’s heartache runs as deep as her faith, and that dichotomy is parsed over the course of these nine songs, all of which stand alone in their beauty but offer a sense of relief when bundled together. “Sprained Ankle” might make you melancholic, but it will also remind you of the lasting, saving power of music. It’s one that you will return to when you find yourself in crisis. It’s impossible to worry about the future when a 20-year-old college student effortlessly produced one of the best albums of the year. Well, even if it wasn’t effortless the stark effervescence of Sprained Ankle is as gripping as a single candle burning in the dark. Each song flickers, frisson and fear dance in shadows, but Baker herself never wavers. As perfect a debut as I’ve ever heard.
Recorded at Spacebomb Studios in Richmond, VA
Mastered at Bonati Mastering in Brooklyn, NY, these guitar notes that enter here just blew my mind. incredible vocal performance, and the restraint in the instrumentals / production is just perfect for this. amazing track.
Memphis-born singer-songwriter Julien Baker has gained a lot of traction online blogs from her emotionally honest tracks, which detail near-death experiences, substance abuse and spirituality. Though the 20-year-old artist originally self-released her heart-wrenching debut “Sprained Ankle” on Bandcamp while studying at college, she later signed to indie label 6131Records for an official release .
“Sprained Ankle” begins with gentle pin drop-like guitar plucking and it’s lent additional weight by her burning lyrics (“Wish I could write songs about anything other than death”), rather than additional instrumentation. In fact, the line isn’t even true, the 20-year-old singer songwriter from Memphis has many other subject matters, although they aren’t exactly light hearted. The album, released towards the end of 2015, was inspired by the loneliness felt whilst at university, finding herself for the first time away from family and friends. The result was nine songs, beautiful in their simplicity, brave, honest, tackling subject matter including car crashes, depression, substance abuse, and anxiety.
Onstage with just a microphone and her telecaster, the singer’s presence is just as unassuming as her songs. A loop pedal allows for a bit more depth in sound, and it is clear from the outset that Julien Baker is an accomplished guitarist. Singing a long way off the microphone, the resulting breathy vocal delivery adds to the ethereal quality of the songs. Subtle and simple, yet beautifully melodic, her music is devastating in its honesty.
Careful, Julien Baker could easily become one of your all time favorite artist.
In June she played her unreleased song Funeral Pyre , Somewhere In Munich. Live…
Watch singer-songwriter Julien Baker perform “Sprained Ankle” the title track off her debut album, during soundcheck at the Drake Hotel on Exclaim! TV. April 19, 2016.
The Fat Angel Sings 