Happy 5th Anniversary to Julien Baker’s debut album Sprained Ankle, originally released October 23, 2015.
I think the word I’m looking for is “croak,” but I’m not sure if that’s right. I’m talking about the way Julien Baker’s voice sounds on the word “home,” the last word she sings on Sprained Ankle, which somehow barely makes it out of her throat. Whatever the best descriptor for it is, the croak is one of the most vivid vocal performances I’ve ever heard on a record, somehow resolving the tension felt throughout the entire experience that Baker’s just put us through. Thirty minutes of searching get their response in that one syllable.
To feel the croak, you have to be fully invested in Baker’s story, which means that you have to feel the songs as an expression of her humanity, and not just as things you listen to. Most albums don’t get that far. It’s a lot to ask.
I think it’s a mistake to say that Sprained Ankle is about depression, faith, addiction, and love. I think it’s about Julien Baker specifically and the depression, faith, addiction, and love in her life. It doesn’t seem like she’s trying to universalize; investment in her is what matters.
The open space behind her, supported mostly by her guitar, is a big factor here. Anyone familiar with Baker’s work in boygenius knows that she can rip a solo better than most, but on Sprained Ankle, her chops help her create subtle, artistic backing tracks that loop around each other. Still, she hasn’t been pegged as One Of Those Guitar Players Who Loops A Lot because the sound is so well-suited to her songwriting. The guitar part for a song like “Vessels” is not about showing us how talented she is; the song simply needs to be that way.
Her song structures would suit a full band well—Baker tends to start out quietly, building narrative tension and raising the volume over a few minutes, until she’s at full voice at the very end of the song. A less fearless songwriter would let a drummer hop in at the second verse, with the whole thing building up to a polite and cliché crescendo—but Baker resists. There’s never any backing. You have to take the totality of a song like “Rejoice” all on its own, without ornamentation. Just you listening, and her almost screaming.
It’s not as if the lyrics give you anywhere to hide. The album’s very first verse recounts Baker crashing her car into a tree. The title track opens with “I wish I could write songs about anything other than death.” “Go Home” features “I know you’re still worried I’m gonna get scared again / and make my insides clean with your kitchen bleach.” There’s no lyrical obfuscation—she’s not one of those singer-songwriters who’s weaving you elaborate smoke-and-mirrors yarns to eventually get around to an idea. This is as direct as it gets. It hurts. You want out—and so does she.
But there is no out, and that’s the point. Everything that the record throws at you—the swirling darkness of “Vessels,” the repeated abandonments of “Everybody Does” and “Something,” the self-harm in “Brittle Boned,” the addiction in “Good News”—are not things you just get out of.
Which brings us back to the croak.
“Go Home” feels like it’s sung to someone who’s been trying to help Baker all this time, maybe since the car crash in “Blacktop.” For whatever reason, they haven’t gotten through to her until this moment, when Baker reaches a breaking point and asks to be taken home.
It’s so difficult to ask for that help—which is why it barely makes it out of her throat—but anyone who’s been listening along has this immense feeling of gratitude once she does it. Only when you reach that one syllable do you realize how much the fear in the songs have accumulated inside of you, and how much release asking for help can offer.
I’ve never met Julien Baker. But when I hear the croak, I hear someone who I care about, who I want to be a friend, who I want to be safe.
Which, actually, is a big thing to ask a listener to do: to get us to consider every messy or far-gone or misunderstood person we’re thinking of casting out of our lives, and envision a whole Sprained Ankle inside of them. If we do that, we know that we have an obligation to help them get home. And if that too-messy, too-sick, too-dark, too-drunk person is us, then we’ve got to let out our own version of that last note.
I wanted to end this tribute there. I thought it was a nice reading of the album, that it highlighted the parts of it that were powerful, and about how I think it can make us better people—like the best art can do.
But then I was walking down the block after dark, listening to it one more time, when I hit the end of “Go Home” again. The last thing we hear, of course, before the record breaks out into a startling silence, is the preacher: “He sits on the bench as a judge. He was always a judge. He is, now, a judge.”
It changed things for me. Because even though I do still think that Baker is telling us to help and be helped, she’s reminding us that this help may come with lasting fear or shame. It might be shame from yourself, or your friends, or from God. It might not be something that you ever outrun. He is always a judge.
Even though Sprained Ankle is telling us to give and ask for help in the most generous way possible, it is also asking us to realize that there might not ever be such a thing as complete healing. But that’s a question for a different day.
Good thing she wrote Turn Out The Lights (2017).
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