On “Claws in Your Back,” the last song on her second record Turn Out the Lights, Julien Baker pulls out the stopper from all the tension that’s mounted in her solo music to date. The Tennessee songwriter’s first album on Matador wrestles with many of the same demons that populated her chilling debut Sprained Ankle in 2015. In her cracked but steady voice, a voice trained on pop-punk in her band Forrister and later subdued to spare, acoustic rock, Baker appeals to God. She asks familiar questions: Am I enough? Do I deserve to be here? Will I ever be OK? In the album’s final moments, she at last settles on something like an answer. “I think I can love the sickness you made,” she sings. “I want it to stay.” She thunders out the last syllable in an unbridled belt, the kind that sparks full-body shivers no matter how fortified your guard may be. Her voice echoes into what sounds like a cavernous space, and then you hear her close the lid of the piano, the heavy work of catharsis behind her.
If that “stay” stuns beyond anything Baker’s ever recorded, it’s only because she fought so hard to get there. The fragile, gentle songs on Sprained Ankle played like an open diary of mental illness and substance abuse, with an ember of faith flickering at its core. “There’s more whiskey than blood in my veins,” Baker sang over sparse piano chords on that album’s closer “Go Home,” “more tar than air in my lungs.” On Turn Out the Lights, Baker reckons with the ghosts that follow her even into sobriety. Though the album still centers on her voice, guitar, and piano, she’s got more company this time, both in the form of additional personnel (Sorority Noise’s Cameron Boucher plays woodwinds on “Appointments” and “Over,” and Camille Faulkner lends strings to five tracks) and new characters in the lyrics. The “you” Baker sings to is sometimes God, like before, but also sometimes a romantic partner or friend she feels she’s disappointing. Whomever she’s addressing in a given moment, she dreads their rejection constantly—even on the title track and “Shadowboxing,” where the only person she’s struggling with is herself.
Baker often sounded defeated or apologetic on Sprained Ankle, couching her dejection in the language of physical injury—a metaphor she extends through “Televangelist” with the couplet, “I’m an amputee with a phantom touch/Leaning on an invisible crutch.” Elsewhere, though, she begins to sound defiant, as though with enough rage she could finally beat back her sadness. “The harder I swim, the faster I sink,” she repeats toward the end of “Sour Breath,” her voice building to a scream she throttles through a distorted microphone.
On “Happy to Be Here,” she confronts her maker directly: “I was just wondering if there’s any way that you made a mistake… I heard there’s a fix for everything/Then why/Then why/Then why not me?” Her voice climbs each time she repeats the question, until it breaks and hangs in the air around her. By the end of the song, she ameliorates her frustration by opting to “grit my teeth and try to act deserving/When I know there is nowhere I can hide from your humiliating grace.”
A direct thematic line runs from the album’s first full song, “Appointments,” to “Claws in Your Back”’s riveting finish. On “Appointments,” Baker grapples with the apparent futility of her strained optimism; at the song’s coda, her multi-tracked voice sings to itself, “Maybe it’s all gonna turn out alright/I know that it’s not/But I have to believe that it is/I have to believe that it is.” That innate contradiction, that faith against all reasonable odds, resonates behind the chain of confessions that follows. By the end of the album, she’s landed on another cluster of paradoxes: “I’m better off learning how to be/Living with demons I’ve/Mistaken for saints/If you keep it between us/I think they’re the same." The way she sings it, you’d believe she’s telling her secrets to you and you alone, all evidence to the contrary. You’d believe that loving your demons—not banishing them—might just be the secret to that evasive grace.
