Jill Riley and I'm very excited to be joined by our guests

today. Julien Baker is here, we're having a face to face via

Zoom. Of course, on the radio, you can just hear our voices.

But this is exciting because we've been talking about new

music for the year 2021 and these kind of highly anticipated

records, and Julien Baker--new record coming out Friday,

February 26. Third studio album called Little Oblivions, and

we're looking forward to hearing the whole thing, Julien, how are

you?

JULIEN: I'm doing well. How are you?

JILL: Not bad. Great to be talking to you. Yeah, always

nice when I can--you know? Just to stay connected with

musicians. We can't do traditional in-studios. Well

know that because you can't go on tour right now. So this is

kind of a nice way to to get the info on what to expect from you.

So Little Oblivions, just to jump in, when did you start

working on the record?

JULIEN: I started working on the record, I guess I had collected

songs and been writing songs. But I made the first round of

demos in January 2019. And then I worked, like, I would go down

to Memphis or go to a studio here to tinker with the songs

over the course of that entire year. And then, in the beginning

of 2020 made all the final re-recordings and did all the--I

believe the term is "sweetening".

JILL: I haven't heard that term before!

JULIEN: Yeah, I don't know, that's what I got taught. When I

was briefly an audio major, that was one of my vocabulary words,

and then I was just like, what am I doing here? But no shade.

No shade. Yeah.

JILL: So you said "going to Memphis" and then you said

"here"--are you in Nashville?

JULIEN: Yeah. I'm sorry, I didn't give you any context for

that. Yes.

JILL: No, that's okay.

JULIEN: Yes I am here in Asheville. Yeah, I've been here.

I was up here for school. I mean, I was living up here. And

then I stayed up here to go to school at Middle Tennessee. And

then shortly after I graduated, quarantine began. So I just

chose to shelter in place here rather than try to move during

the craziness.

JILL: So you grew up in Tennessee, right? But you didn't

grow up in--not Nashville proper. Where did you grew up in

Tennessee?

JULIEN: I grew up in Memphis. Yeah.

JILL: Oh! You grew up in Memphis, okay.

JULIEN: Yeah, that's where I spent my entire childhood

basically.

JILL: I've never been to Memphis. What is it like there?

What's it like to grow up there?

JULIEN: Wow. I love Memphis. I think people from Memphis have

an exaggerated loyalty to the city because at least during the

time I was there, and when I was getting into music, and going to

local shows, and playing in bands it always felt like there

was a semi-hostile, semi-funny, sibling rivalry between

Nashville and Memphis. Just because Memphis while it has a

super rich cultural--like, a music history about it, I think

that for some reason, it was a city that often got skipped, you

know? I remember we used to have to drive to St. Louis, or

Nashville or Atlanta, to see big tours, because we were like a B,

or C city. But I think that that really engendered in me a sense

of making music cooperatively, just out of a sense of

necessity. When resources aren't being funneled to you because

your town is a particularly lucrative place to play or

particularly like, significant music business hub, then you end

up having to make do with the resources that are available

just in your local community. I think that bred a real reliance

on other people and a conceptualization of music that

is more communal than individual.

JILL: I think people listening in Minnesota right now can

relate to that, especially any musician because Minneapolis,

St. Paul is just considered this flyover country, right? And

while big artists tour through Minneapolis, we can get skipped

in the same way that Memphis could get skipped over. I really

get what you're talking about with that kind of communal, kind

of supportive, like we're kind of--it's almost like--

JULIEN: It's insular. It's insular in a way. And I

mean--it's crazy because we played there, we've played there

several times and I always have such a great time in

Minneapolis. And of course, like, you know, I've been to

your radio station before. There's a lot of lore around

Minneapolis, I don't know, with Prince and all these various

musicians. And I feel like cities like that--and Detroit is

another one that I feel la cultural kinship to because they

are cities that exist right outside of the categorization of

a Chicago or New York or something like that. It's a

place that, in being looked over has carved out a very special

identity for itself. So yeah, I get that.

JILL: I'm talking with Julian Baker here on The Current. The

new record, Little Oblivions is on the way. Is this the kind of

record where you wrote it, you recorded it, ya sweetened

it--and then did you have to just kind of sit on it for a

while because of the pandemic?

JULIEN: Yeah, it's always a difficult thing to create a

record and have it done, and then turn it into the label and

wait, while the whole rollout process is happening. But it

seemed especially tedious this time, because I wasn't touring,

I wasn't playing new songs at shows. And yeah, I don't know.

But maybe it's been good to have time just to focus on the

content of the record and sort of mine through the details of

it so that I can have a more cohesive idea of how to talk

about it, you know? I feel like there's so many--this press

cycle is interesting, because usually, this would be

overlapping with tour and travel, and the sort of grind of

doing my job as a performer, while promoting my music as a

musician I've been fortunate enough to have time at home,

where I can soak into the music and the process of creation. And

think about it, hopefully, and be a little bit more articulate

about it.

JILL: I'm glad you brought that up, because--I won't say who it

was, but I had a musician in the studio once and we were talking

specifically about the songs on the record. And she was having a

really hard time articulating what the music was about because

it was so personal. She was kind of tiptoeing around what the

song was actually about. When we finished, she pulled me aside

and said, I don't know why I couldn't talk about my own

music, I have to really think about that. I just think that's

interesting that you get so caught up in the, "Okay, we're

done with the record. Now we have to tour. Now I have to run

around to various places to promote this thing," that even

though you've been able to process your life experiences

that have gone into the song, but then to process how to talk

about them. I love that you brought that up right there.

JULIEN: Yeah, no and it's very interesting. I think so much

about this, because I want to be able to speak about my music in

an articulate way. But it is very challenging when you create

something that has this level of emotional immediacy when you

create it. It's an outpouring of your thoughts or a medium that

helps you process events in your own life. Then it is turned so

quickly into it's like, very quickly commodified in the

public sphere, and then you have to figure out how to negotiate

the boundaries between what you're comfortable talking

about, because as you say, like if this artist wrote extremely

personal things, I'm sure that she and I feel the same way that

is--sometimes I find myself tiptoeing around things, or

doing a whole bunch of verbal acrobatics to avoid saying

something that I'm sensitive about, because it is a lot to

disclose with full honesty. Your feelings about songs, that sort

of--it's already difficult enough to write the songs

themselves and it's hard. I think for me, talking about my

songs is always as much of a learning process as writing

them, I feel like in the discourse that ends up evolving

around them and interviews and stuff--I learn, or am revealed

more things about my motivation or my mentality around a song

than I even was aware of when I wrote it, you know?

JILL: Yeah it's almost like reading a book for the third or

fourth time or watching a movie for the third or fourth time,

and then you realize that there was something about it that you

maybe you missed the first time around. That's really

interesting to hear how that can be revealed. There are certain

artists that will release a song and say that now it's up to you

to interpret it. There it is, it's out there. But I often find

myself wanting to know more, or, people that are super fans of

any songwriter or you in particular, maybe they relate to

it so much that they want to know--they want to know the

meaning because they want to feel like, "Am I relating to

this? Is this person going through the same thing as me?"

JULIEN: It's interesting, because that's also a balance

that's difficult to strike as a musician, talking about her own

work. Me. I don't know why just speaking in the third person.

Because there is a level I think of disclosing so much in the

interest of endearing people to your music with this idea of

like emotional capital, like giving away this thing that

makes your music more readily understood by people who listen

to it. But I think that there has to be at least a little bit

of mutability around songs. That way people can interpret them in

the ways that they need. I don't want to be so literal, and

explicit about the way I talk about my songs that they stop

pertaining to anybody else's story.

JILL: Like you can't relate to this song unless X, Y or Z has

happened to you.

JULIEN: Yeah, like now, I've been so explicit about whatever

event, you know, precipitated this song that people imagine it

as a like a vignette in the story of my life as a performer.

I think the whole point of making music and leaving things

unsaid or saying things in a metaphorical or representative

sense is to allow them to be grafted on to another person's

lived experience. Or at least that's just how I feel. That's

how I make myself comfortable with being seen like that.

JILL: Sure. I'm talking with Julien Baker, a virtual session

here on The Current. Now, with all of that said, with that

conversation that we just had, I would like to talk about the

song Faith Healer a little bit here, because this is the one

that we've been playing here on The Current. And I think just to

start on a very basic level, when did you get into the

studio? What studio did you go to to record this?

JULIEN: Oh, man. So I originally recorded it at the home of my

friend Collin Pastore, here in Nashville. And we recorded it in

a much much different arrangement and worked with that

demo version at a studio here called Trace Horse, run by a

couple of my friends. Then when I rewrote the song in Memphis,

that's what ended up becoming the version that was on the

record. I'm glad I did because there was something, I was super

attached to the lyrics, but I just felt like the arrangement

was not good. So, I don't know. So much of the job of a musician

is just tinkering patiently, you know.

JILL: So when you talk about rewriting, I mean, you're

talking about the arrangement not specifically about the

lyrics, because you wanted to keep the lyrics?

JULIEN: Yes, yeah. I feel like most of the changes that I will

want to make with songs are arrangement based. Every once in

a while, I'll find like two half songs that have a similar theme

that I'll try to cobble together. But almost inevitably,

those sound--you can hear the disjuncture, so I don't like to

do that if I can avoid it. But who knows, songwriting is a

evolving practice.

JILL: I think it's really interesting when artists will,

you know, just kind of for their own sake, they'll take a slow

song and kind of flip it into a fast song or take a fast song

and just try it out as a slow song. That's something that we,

just as the people who listen to the end product, I don't think

at times we realize just how much goes into it that we don't

know about.

JULIEN: Sure. Yeah. And I think a lot of that is because we

either think of music in the in the pop realm or in the