Roughly 40 minutes into our meeting, Julien Baker informs me we are having a “divine exchange”. Fixing my gaze and swirling a plastic coffee cup, she leans forward in the sun-drenched Nashville café where we’ve been talking about God and music, as droves of tourists in buses are dropped off outside. Perhaps taking my silence as discomfort, she retreats, eyes mildly panicked: “Sorry, I’m not saying that to be creepy and freak you out!”
At 22 years old, Baker is already one of the most acclaimed new singer-songwriters of recent years; her 2017 single “Claws in Your Back” was feted by The New York Times as one of the 25 songs “that tell us where music is going”, and the album it came from, Turn Out the Lights, was a fixture in best-of-the-year lists.
Her music has been described as “quiet and cool as a medieval cloister” and her eerily hushed concerts likened to church; attendees have been known to cry. She is sometimes called “emo” due to her sombre subject matter, but the music goes well beyond this, with almost hymnal vocals backed by simple guitar chords and the occasional piano. Think The National meets Liz Phair, or an early Cat Power.
So I’m not freaked out at all. Baker’s rise has been built on creating an intimate bond with her audience, and in real life she’s equally disarming. Discussions about her routinely centre on a series of apparently contradictory personal facts. Julien Baker is queer. Julien Baker is Christian. Julien Baker loves the American south (Memphis, she confides, is “mystical”). I’ve come here to ask her what it means to be all those things in a US conservative heartland, and about being an indie rock star in the age of Spotify.
Perched on a bar stool, wearing a light grey shirt and black high-tops, with a sea of books, pens and gum strewn across the counter, Baker looks more like a student than a rising music star. She tells me that growing up in Memphis was “like being in high school when there’s the tables for the cheerleaders, the nerds, the jocks…except there’s only one table”.
As I try to find a polite way to ask how it felt to be different, she answers the question for me. “My parents are sick,” she says, meaning sick in the positive way, as in “very cool”. They came from modest homes. Her father was in a bad car accident that left him with a prosthetic leg; he subsequently became a prosthetics designer. Her parents wanted more for her. They took her to museums every day and made a binder titled “Julien’s questions”, where she would make Venn diagrams to tackle questions such as “What is the difference between a spider and a fly?”
Years later, as a scared, pink-mohawked teenager battling an alcohol addiction, she came out to them as gay, and they lovingly searched passages in the Bible to show her she wasn’t going to hell.
Evangelical doctrine was everywhere, she notes. Each Sunday she put on a nice dress and went to a place that was “not quite a megachurch, but close”. Tennessee is the US state that boasts the highest number of megachurches per capita (one for every 100,000 residents).
After I slightly stun her by confessing I’ve only attended church “maybe three times”, she carries on. “God to me is not a punitive, Zeus-like character, or a magical genie that exists in the clouds somewhere.” Rather, the God she believes in “manifests itself in compassionate human interactions” — which is where our “divine exchange” comes in.
She says that coming out has only brought her closer to her faith, which she hangs on to even as the world offers up reasons to let go. In the US, 81 per cent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, an adulterous former casino owner, as their president. “It’s incredibly painful,” Baker says. “[The queer Christian community] are carrying, and I think for people of colour too, we’re carrying so much resentment for the manifestation of an ideology that purports to represent love and altruism, but is now the opposite . . . so I don’t really feel a need to defend the institutionalised church at all any more. Because I’m more concerned with defending humanity.”
Later, we relocate for a photo shoot to a large industrial loft, where Baker sings a cover of “Girl Crush”, the hit country song by Little Big Town, softly strumming her electric guitar, a bright rainbow strap hanging around her neck. Hearing her voice live for the first time is like stumbling upon a secret; smooth and even-toned, it echoes against the windows with the same haunting richness as through iPhone headphones. For her earliest fans, it actually was a secret. She was one of a wave of “digital-first” musicians catapulted into the public eye through mere word-of-mouth online. At 18, she made an album in three days and posted it on the website Bandcamp, where fans could buy it for $2.
Despite this, she insists, “Music was my plan B. Actually, it was just not a plan, at all.” If she wasn’t playing now, she would be “teaching Spanish at Smyrna High School, which is just down the road”, she says, gesturing out the window. (Smyrna, a 30-minute drive from Nashville, is home to the largest Nissan plant in the US.) The answer is so casually precise it feels true.
She began playing concerts at a “misfit church” and, after forming a punk band with friends, wrote a solo album, Sprained Ankle, that she describes as “bedroom songwriter stuff that wasn’t going to work”. When she landed a contract with Matador, the indie-legend record label behind bands such as Belle and Sebastian and Perfume Genius, she told them that “it wasn’t going to go well, and they said just wait six months and see . . . and then it did pretty well”.
In a frenetic post-streaming music business, artists are vying for our attention amid the 40 million songs scattered across thousands of playlists on our phones. Baker pleads a “privileged” ignorance when it comes to the dizzying statistics now available about exactly how and when and why people might listen to her songs. “Spotify stresses me the hell out,” she explains.
Does she mean the anxiety of trying to get featured on their playlists? “No, no, no, no, no,” she waves me off, seemingly surprised that she would be trying to do the thing that all artists are trying to do. “It used to be you would need a couple grand to make a record at a studio. Now, you can do it on freaking GarageBand. So everybody can get over that initial jump and the floor is higher, but the ceiling is also lower. There are so many more people creating music, small club tours that market to individualised genres, there’s whole worlds of stuff that I don’t even know exist. The more we can personalise, the more the market can fragment, because of all the availability that streaming presents. Things become old sooner. That’s terrifying.”
She insulates herself from the data-crunching that her label managers are surely doing. “I have no idea how any of that works”. Yet she can’t escape the industry entirely. In addition to the half a million monthly listeners Baker currently commands on Spotify, she has been courted by Amazon, which is trying to slice into Spotify’s lead by cultivating middle America, and Nashville in particular.
At odds with the introspection of her songs, Baker is easy to talk to, unfailingly articulate with a smooth, enthusiastic voice, darting around topics from Taco Bell to linguistic theory with a steady intensity. But she’s also self-interrogating, pausing and revising her answers, circling around before delivering a final verdict. She really wants to get it right. She agonises over a seemingly banal business question: what is the value of a record label in 2018? It is the only time over the course of the interview that she falls quiet, gazing out of the window. Just as I’m about to change the subject, she says: “Honestly, it’s a difficult thing to think about sometimes.”
In what way? “The more blessings or resources you have at your disposal, the more I become aware of…how should I steward this? It’s supposed to be an investment that I can turn around and create art that gives something to other people. Ugh, that sounds like the most Miss America answer of all time.” She rolls her eyes.
Themes of addiction, depression and redemption run through many of Baker’s lyrics. And she’s not the only one. Jon Caramanica, The New York Times music critic, described 2017 as filled with “wounded paranoid unhappy albums” for a “wounded paranoid unhappy year”.
Baker believes the flood of apocalyptic news headlines on social media has contributed to this aesthetic. “I have the news from all over the world, like a fire hose spraying in my face . . . so that giant ocean, the gulf of concerns, huge and small, keeps widening, and then we don’t know what to do other than to just say that we’re sad! And tweet that we’re sad.”
She says it felt “very bizarre” to put out an album about her personal heartaches during Trump’s first year in office; she had written it well before he won the election. But while the tone of her early records is dark, her more recent music searches for hope. “Maybe it’s all gonna turn out all right,” she muses on the chorus to “Appointments”. “And I know that it’s not, but I have to believe that it is.”
Indeed, these days she’s training for a half-marathon, looking for a new apartment in east Nashville, and paying more attention to her health. Nashville, which, like Austin, is a liberal exception in a deeply red state, is not exempt from religious dogma. A group of 150 evangelical leaders last year issued a document titled “The Nashville Statement”, pronouncing “that it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism and that such approval constitutes an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness”. “Just in case anyone forgot,” Baker quips. “I was like, ‘Thanks!’”
Still, she is excited about the progress she does see. There are traditional southern churches, for example — “folding chairs, lemonade from powder” — that have embraced the LGBT community. When she moved to Nashville, she googled “gay church” and found a tiny Episcopal church to welcome her.
Late afternoon is giving way to evening but the sun is still beating down on us; Baker rolls up the sleeves of her thermal shirt, revealing a tattoo that says “Dios Exists”. As we bid goodbye, she playfully roasts me about my first AOL instant messenger screen name. “Iced chai!” she jeers, grinning in the emptied hallway. “Mine was Camochick95. They should have known.”
A week after our meeting, she posts a rare personal video on Instagram. She’s driving a car, surrounded by flat leafy fields, screaming along to the stereo and genuinely beaming — Miss America, speeding down the highway.
Julien Baker plays the End of the Road festival in Wiltshire on September 1. Anna Nicolaou is US media correspondent
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