by Jonathan Chandra
We hear a door creak open and shut, shoes scuffling over the floor, the sound of a seat being pulled back. Then a piano, which is soon joined by the violin. Together they shift between major and minor keys, filling the room with a vague sadness.
Above the closed door of Mark’s room there are four small lights, the kind that brighten or dim at the turn of a dial. They’re at their dimmest, and they’re flickering a little. I ask the others, gesturing:
“Guys mind if I turn those off?”
“Go for it,” they say.
I go for it. The only light left in the room comes from a desk lamp, and it illuminates a couple boxes of tea, green and chamomile, and some packages of digestive biscuits that have already been torn open.
It’s just three of us in this dark—Mark with his legs crossed on a chair, me and Michael on the edge of the bed, hot mugs in hand. It’s nine-fifteen on a Friday night, and we’ve gathered to listen to a record that came out today: Julien Baker’s sophomore release Turn Out the Lights.
The momentum that’s been building for the past minute or so, the instrumental sadness of “Over,” peaks in a seamless transition, where the ending piano melody is continued on the strummed guitar of “Appointments”.
We’re familiar with this one. It was the album’s first single, released a few months ago. But “Over” puts it in a new context, and after a prolonged buildup the introduction of Julien’s voice is all the more welcome.
A word on her voice: it’s something else. It’s soft but not quiet, bright yet uncomplicated, and very powerful. There are times in her music where she’ll deliver these repeated lines of intense emotional weight, where her voice increases in volume with each successive repetition until she is almost shouting. But it’s always controlled, never harsh or cracking.
“Appointments” ends with one of these repetitions, and it’s heart-wrenching.
“Maybe it’s all gonna turn out alright,” she sings. “And I know that it’s not but I have to believe that it is.”
“I have to believe that it is,” she repeats. And again, and again, like a reassurance. It’s a desperate and impossible hope, full of contradiction. But it is her own, and she speaks it to herself like a mantra.
Some songs later, we hear another one of these crescendoed repetitions, this time in “Sour Breath,” which narrates the breakdown of a toxic relationship with an alcoholic lover.
Julien is yelling, and for the seventh or eighth time she sings “The harder I swim the faster I sink,” and by this time the backing instruments have cut out. The words fill the room and hang in the space before the next song.
Someone, maybe me, says “Wow.”
And then “Televangelist” plays, an exercise in self-deprecation. Here Julien condemns the parts of herself that she hates, just as a televangelist might condemn her person.
Julien Baker is a devoted Christian, and unashamedly gay. There is no dissonance between these aspects of her identity—she makes this clear in interviews. Her deeply religious parents were supportive when she came out to them, and she attends an affirming church. Still, it seems that the idea that there are televised preachers exist who sound vitriolic condemnations of queerness seems to have had some effect on her. In this song, at least, it is a ready analogy for times of self-hatred.
Sometimes she wishes she were someone else. In “Happy to Be Here” she imagines herself as an electrician, able to enter into her own brain and rearrange its wiring. She’d give herself a normal life, with a regular job and a two-car garage. “And I would go to church on Sunday,” she adds.
As the song progresses, we see her attend group therapy on the first of April, self-aware of the situational absurdity of it all. In the midst of her issues and her yearning for normalcy, though, she finds a grudging solace in her faith, singing
“I know there is nowhere I can hide from your humiliating grace.”
“Hurt Less” comes next. For an artist whose music is often leaves her listeners with a sense of complex inconclusion, it is a satisfying instance of narrative wholeness. At its beginning, we encounter a Julien who doesn’t care if she dies, and so never wears seatbelts. By its end, the support and care of a loved one has led her to a healthier emotional space.
“This year I've started wearing safety belts,” she shares in the final verse. “When I’m with you I don’t have to think about myself.”
This transition from darker to healthier space is echoed in the final track, “Claws in Your Back.” After running through haunting metaphors for mental illness—a blackness in the throat, a strange monster tearing through flesh and clothing—it ends with Julien accepting that though she has her issues, she has an earnest desire to live a flawed life in a complicated world.
“I think I can love the sickness you made” she admits to God. “I take it all back, I change my mind, I want it to stay.”
And then the album is over. Those last words linger, and we sit for a while in solemn silence, trying to collect our scattered thoughts. I fall back on the bed, hands on my head, still processing. Mark speaks first:
“I don’t know about you guys, but I thought a lot of the album was about dealing with mental health issues.”
We learn that this is something his girlfriend has been dealing withthis past year. He’s been supporting her through it, and it’s something that’s on his mind a lot. Unexpectedly, he’s found it mirrored in the music he has listened to with us for the past three-quarters of an hour.
“Some of that was, like, word for word things she’s said to me.”
We dwell on this for a while, and then talk about other things. How confessional the album is. How the added instrumentation is a development from her stripped-down debut, Sprained Ankle, but still refreshingly simple. We talk about Southern queerness, Christian music. The conversation becomes tangential, and I feel a strange absence—Julien was here, and now she is not.
What is astounding about a record as deeply personal as Turn Out the Lights is that listening to it might easily have felt like an intrusion, a violation of a troubled space belonging to Julien alone. Instead, we’ve emerged from it feeling like close confidants, having heard her deepest struggles. We have empathized with the depths of her pain, and rejoiced in the heights of her hope.
It is telling that the album begins with the sound of an opening door, with Julien taking a seat at a piano. In a very real sense, she had entered the room, had communed with us and shared our space as we drank our tea and munched on digestives. It was incarnational, in a way.
We’ve all got things to do tonight, so the three of us part ways. And as I think back to what we’ve just experienced, I don’t want to mistake the experience for a sacred one. Tea and digestives are hardly bread and wine, after all. But I think it was very nearly spiritual.
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NOTE TO LISTENER
Don’t listen to Turn Out the Lights casually. It contains the confessions of a human being who is complex and troubled, who lives a life that isn’t always—maybe isn’t ever—neat. It’s a heavy listen, but you’ll find gritty spirituality in the midst of it all, and a God who gives humiliating grace to the undeserving. And listen to it in dim lighting or in the dark, on your own or with some friends, if you want to be sad all together.
Jonathan Chandra is fond of faithful journalism, good rap music, postwar literature, bad rap music, and morning crosswords. He is studying abroad in Oxford this year, where he is writing lots of papers and having a fun time. His favorite thing about England so far is that they call pulpy orange juice “orange with juicy bits.”