Happy 5th Anniversary to Julien Baker’s second studio album Turn Out The Lights, originally released October 27, 2017.
I first heard Julien Baker on a snow day—in the wake of a foot of blizzard, my workplace was closed and I spent the day in bed, cycling through Tiny Desk Concerts. After just a few notes, I was taken with Julien Baker’s voice, guitar playing, and terrifying honesty. I scrolled down to the comments and found similarly amazed viewers, and a few concerned ones: “who hurt her?” “Protect her at all costs.”
I felt the same way. While I admired the sheer gumption of recording a song like “Go Home,” the heart-stopping album closer from her debut album Sprained Ankle (2015), I too wanted redemption for the Julien Baker character. I wanted to learn, simply, that she would be okay.
2017’s Turn Out The Lights seemed to give me an answer. While Baker still struggled with mental health, as expressed on tracks like “Happy To Be Here,” and “Shadowboxing,” things seemed to be taking a turn. She was determined to maintain a commitment to therapy in “Appointments,” and the equally propulsive final song “Claws In Your Back” ends the record with a commitment to her life: “I take it all back, I changed my mind, I wanted to stay.”
Part of the allure of Turn Out The Lights is its return to Baker’s minimalist approach. Most songs on the album feature only her voice and a guitar or keyboard, sometimes with one or two additional instruments. But Baker’s sound on this album is not subdued, like most minimalist indie projects. It’s gigantic. This is not about small introspective moments; it’s about getting swallowed up in the totality of a sound and, by extension, a feeling. By the end of the record, then, she tells you that she has tamed this vast, dark space that she writes from.
The arc here is irresistible, makes me cry every time, and… not the whole story.
In a KEXP interview for 2021’s Little Oblivions, Baker said that she felt an urge to put out this progress narrative in the wake of Sprained Ankle’s unexpected success. She felt “intensely, not even obligated but just convicted to say something in my music that was ultimately positive, if honest and sad at times. … When I think of the song ‘Appointments,’ it’s just me telling myself that I have to believe that things are going to be fine, because I have no other option. And now I think that’s avoidance behavior that’s a little bit of a psychopathy and a little bit of wishful thinking.”
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If Turn Out The Lights is not a completely transparent representation of Baker’s feelings, then it is a little bit about what Baker thinks we need to hear about her now that she has a platform and the attention of many (perhaps vulnerable) people. And so Turn Out The Lights becomes much more about us than it is about Baker.
It offers relief: Oh good, this person who I care about (even if from the abstract position of audience member) is going to be fine. It reveals our impatience for mental illness. We do not know what to do with crises like Baker’s, so we just wish it away and feel catharsis when it is gone. All of the mess and confusion that Baker had to deal with to get to this place (if she even got there) gets packaged for us in the form of a few devastating songs and then it all goes away. That intense, circular work is given an artificial endpoint.
But even knowing what I know now, that final lyric feels just as powerful. Turn Out The Lights is still a masterwork, even if we know that its concept of mental health leaves us with a lot of questions. It might be because, even though Baker sent these songs out into the world because she felt that someone might need to hear them, it’s really not about me. It’s not about those YouTube commenters, either, and the sense of connection that we think we feel for her.
It’s really about her; these songs are vignettes, isolated moments in one person’s life. When we hear her hit that high note in “Claws In Your Back,” it’s a reinterpretation of one moment, fixed in time. Not every feeling means something: maybe the fact that it even happened is what gives it its staying power.
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