Jake Cunningham
Julien Baker is alarmingly upbeat for someone who crafts the kind of music she does. Sprained Ankle, her 2015 debut album, could be described as melancholy, and her sound resembles early Bright Eyes in its lo-fi intimacy and deep-dredged feelings.
“When I was performing the songs and they were freshly written, [the dark material] was really rough to do live over and over again,” says Baker, a 20-year-old Memphis native who plays the High Noon Saloon on Jan. 16 as part of FRZN Fest. “But I was ruminating on the content of the songs, and I had to just decide how to move past it.”
Move past it she did. Sprained Ankle popped up on a huge number of year-end best-of lists for 2015, and many critics consider her an artist to watch. Nobody’s more aware of this than Baker. “I don’t want people to walk away thinking I’m only creating music that’s self-indulgent and sad, like wallowing,” she says. “I’m not pandering to an audience, but [now] I’m aware that they’re there.”
Baker grew up in the spastic, artsy mid-’00s hardcore scene — she’s name-checked bands like Circa Survive and mewithoutYou in interviews — so experimentation is something she’s been open to from the start.
“The particular scene I grew up in was very artistically inclusive,” she says. “It respected the individual, inherent integrity of creation as process over product. If it’s not exactly suited to your tastes, it doesn’t matter as long as it’s honest. If you see a performer offering something genuine, that’s more important than it being perfectly executed or sounding like whatever’s popular.”
“I don’t want to accidentally restrict whatever’s ahead,” she says.
For now, Julien Baker is content with the success that Sprained Ankle has brought her, both professionally and personally. She’s far removed from the situation that inspired such a wonderful downer of an album.
“Someone came up to me at a show and was like, ‘Don’t be sad!’ and I was like, ‘I’m not!’ I have these songs so I don’t have to be sad, so I can just get it all out and be a well-adjusted human.”
