Why Julien Baker Wants People To Take Away Something Positive From Her 'Selfish' Songs

Despite her sparse, heartfelt music being tinged with tangible melancholy and despair, the road to young Memphis singer-songwriter Julien Baker's beautiful debut solo album Sprained Ankle was essentially a series of happy accidents.

A couple of years ago Baker left her indie rock band Forrister behind in Memphis, to attend university in Nashville. Alone in this new environment she inevitably started writing songs: some about the very travails of being alone, others grappling with faith, addiction, mortality and the perpetual quest for identity and contentment.

Despite these songs not being planned for public consumption, Baker must have seen some promise in them, because she put an EP's worth of demos on Bandcamp and before long it was getting enough traction for a label to ask her to take them down so that they could be mastered and expanded into a formal release. The resultant Sprained Ankle quickly garnered routinely positive reviews and Baker's hobby solo musings morphed into a full-time touring concern.

"We'd go on tours and eat gas station food, and then we had to go back to school or go back to work the next Monday morning."

"It's been surreal, completely," she smiles. "I never imagined that any of this would happen. In our society it's like if you're a creative person you always have a backup plan - it's not really a realistic aspiration to say, 'I want to be a full-time artist or musician - and then when it happens for you it's stunning. I almost can't cope with it, but it's great."

Despite being overwhelmed by the sudden success, Baker takes great solace in the fact that her songs are clearly connecting with a lot of people. "Oh man, it's beautiful," she gushes. "Sometimes I can't even believe it. Somebody will come up to me and talk about connecting with the record at a show and I'll think, 'It's not possible that little ol' me wrote a song and you have connected with it on this level!'

"It's inspiring and it reminds me daily why I continue doing it, because it's a trade off - the touring that I used to do was gruelling because we were playing in Forrister and we'd go on tours and eat gas station food, and then we had to go back to school or go back to work the next Monday morning and we did it in these brief stints. But now it's my full-time job and that means that you go on tour for over a month - I miss weddings and birthdays and things like that, and I send a lot of postcards which is kinda kitschy but it's something that I like. It's difficult but it's doable."

Fortunately, given her new predicament, Baker loves the aspect of sharing her music with others. "That's possibly the most rewarding part of being a musician to me," she continues. "I've made this art which is kind of a self-indulgent, isolated endeavour - I'm sitting in the studio thinking about how I can best craft the songs and doing them to the best of my ability - and what really assigns the meaning is when it's no longer just about me and my selfish need to create something that I think is beautiful. So when another person says 'I got something out of this', it takes any of the negative feelings that contributed to the lyrical content and assigns them a positive significance, and that kind of exchange is what I live my whole life grasping for."

Baker explains that despite their personal nature inspiration for songs can come at any time. "There's such beauty in our everyday lives that I think we pass right by," she reflects, "and part of the creative burden is to have the prescience to acknowledge our experiences as beautiful and meaningful, and when you have an interaction with your friend or at the grocery store or you're just walking around your neighbourhood that you're not just going through the motions of your life without recognising that these things are noteworthy. That's what comprises a lot of my songs, noteworthy events that happen at me."

And she's certainly not content to wallow in the apparent misery permeating her music. "People always ask me about the 'sadness' of my songs, and I always worry that when I explicitly be thoughtful or positive or spin a negative thing into a good thing that it will come off as sort of cheeky naivety," Baker chuckles. "I hope it doesn't, but at the end of the day I would rather a be a little bit quixotic - like a Don Quixote character who's a little bit too optimistic - because god dang the other alternative is to just live within that persona of sadness."