Song Exploder - Julien Baker - Appointments

Episode Date: June 14, 2023

Julien Baker is from Memphis, Tennessee. She released her second album, Turn Out The Lights, in October 2017, on Matador Records. The New York Times called her music "devastating" and Pitchfork gave the album Best New Music. In this episode, Julien tells the story of her song "Appointments," and how writing it helped her work through her thoughts around addiction, depression, and relationships. Julien also takes apart the track “Over,” which was written as part of “Appointments,” but then split off as a separate track.For more, visit songexploder.net/julien-baker.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. This week, I wanted to go back and revisit an older episode. I recorded an interview with singer and songwriter Julian Baker in 2018. It was a few months after her second album came out. Since then, she's put out another solo album called Little Oblivion, which was critically acclaimed. And now she's also a member of Boy Genius, which is the supergroup made up of Julian, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dakis. They've put out an EP, and then earlier this year they put out their first full length.

Julian Baker's a really interesting artist, and I think her songwriting is just heartbreaking, especially the song she takes apart for her episode. Here it is. Julian Baker is from Memphis, Tennessee. She released her second album, Turn Out the Lights, in October 2017. The New York Times called her music devastating, and Pitchfork gave the album Best New Music. In this episode, Julian tells the story of her song, Appointments, and how writing it helped her work through her thoughts around addiction, depression, and relationships.

Julian also takes apart the track over, which was originally written as part of appointments, but then was split off as a separate track. I'm Julian Baker. Do you ever think to say something and then you know that you should not say that thing out loud? When that happens to me or I know that a thought is irrational, I'll just save it and explore it in a song. Like I've felt an inadequacy and like an imposter syndrome when, I would talk to my friends or when I would be at a party just standing around, I would just have this bizarre paranoia that like I'm not what any of these people wanted and I'm disappointing

and I'm letting everyone down. And that recurring thought was I think probably the first idea that cropped up in my brain for the lyrics. I know that I'm not what you wanted. I know that I'm not what you wanted. Appointments materialized around the weeks in which I was starting to figure out ways to be more proactive about dealing with recovery and mental health, like actually going to therapy and actually taking care of myself. I was sitting on my couch in my apartment in Tennessee and creating a chord progression and improvising. on top of it.

This is the voice memo I made in my house. You can hear me stepping on the looping pedal. It's just a continuous loop of that. And then I place all the chords on top of it. So I play a chord progression, and then as they're getting recorded to the loop, they build on top of each other. And I just noodle around in this reverberant landscape.

Improvisation is a very special and therapeutic place in its own way. To just sit with a guitar and play for 45 minutes of uninterrupted sound just transports you to somewhere else. It's a really nice refuge from constant consciousness and thought that's bombarding you always. The lyrical content is derived from actual conversations that I had with loved ones about feeling, the immense isolation that results from living inside your own head and fear that you'll always feel isolated and not being able to express that to another person was thinking over the conversations that I had had in the last week,

allowing myself to confront thoughts that I'm having that I know are irrational. The line, you should try not to miss any more appointments, was something that was said to me, I should just try not to miss anymore. Having someone say that, and that being the only thing that can be offered in the way of comfort or encouragement felt like empty and very fragile. And I remember being disappointed in that phrase and thinking it's so detached and sterile. has nothing in the way of empathy attached to it. It was intended to be caring, but I think also when you're in that isolated mindset,

it's difficult to not view things as a personal attack. And of course, now that I'm two years removed from that, I understand how nuanced and delicate those situations are and how no one really knows what to offer another human being. And that's the crux of the whole record. But for this song, it's still in a place where neither person is being understood. So I have the raw material of my thoughts. And then I go back and just let the thoughts kind of tumble over until they settle into where they're supposed to go.

I ended up recording it at Ardent Studios in Memphis. The engineer Calvin Lobber, as a longtime friend of mine, I ended up being most comfortable with the idea of recording with Calvin because it seemed like the most conducive to the creative process was going to be the environment much more than the equipment that I felt ease with the person who was recording the record. I play a Fender Telecaster. We tracked all the parts separately. The reason why we did it is so we could manipulate all of those separately instead of just having one chunk of guitar. Appointments is the second track on Julian Baker's album. The first is an instrumental called Over, but there's no gap between the two tracks.

Over acts as the intro to appointments. So originally, Over and Appointments were all one song that I then chopped up. So for the purposes of this episode, I'm considering the two tracks as one composition. So I asked Julian to tell me about Over as well. The very first thing that you hear where the studio door closes is an attempt to place you in the experience of sitting down to create these songs. You hear me and my carabiner walk over and sit down at the piano. Over begins with a version of the opening lead part of appointments.

But in the relative minor, this minor piano riff, darker, more brooding. And then one of my friends, Cameron Boucher, came down to play Woodwinds, down to play woodwinds. It's clarinet and then sax. And then Camille Faulkner plays violin, crystalline, like all these sounds just floating around you. Camille and I just sat down at the piano and I played the chords and the riff and we worked out this turnaround that would take the chord progression in the minor and have it end up in a major key. I wanted it to feel like there was a lot of tension and then for it to resolve and dissipate into the very first notes of appointments,

which is in the major key, a negative emotion into a positive emotion. And so I wanted for that tiny arc that occurs within Over to indicate how the rest of the record would flow from despair into provisional hope. Maybe it's all gonna turn out all right and I A lot of how it's not, but I have to believe that it is. A lot of how we processed the vocals was also based on mimicking emotion being told in the verbal lyrical part. The record is all told in first person, but is an attempt to locate the self in relation to

where you are inside your own head. So in the a cappella part, there's multiple harmonies singing different lyrics. The lyrics are, maybe it's going to turn out right, probably not. I know that it's not. You've got affirmation. Yes, it will be okay. No, it won't be okay. And then you've got uncertainty.

All of those things being spoken simultaneously, they're all located at different places. The speaking voice changes its location in the mix to give you the sense that all of these thoughts are happening. concurrently, fighting for attention and competing to be heard. The vocals are being executed in this desperate and almost erratic way when I'm admitting that to say to someone, everything's fine, everything's going to be fine, is more for my benefit. That's something that I'm pretending to be more confident about, and so I want to convey it in a dramatic way. Turning a cyclical negative thought pattern in

to a refrain or a chorus is liberating. Writing songs was part of the healing process itself. I mean, for a while, I felt like I was in a fish tank because I was just experiencing this sadness and constant anxiety that I wasn't dealing with, but I was just living inside of, and it felt like I could do nothing else but inhabit it. and the music is supposed to be a vehicle for expelling those things from my mind,

or at least just admitting them. I don't purport to have everything figured out, and that's why singing about hopefulness on this record is very tentative. It's like a provisional hope. No matter how small the pinhole of light is, it's entirely possible that within the next day or the next week or the next month, we could feel closer to something like joy. Coming up, you'll hear how all of these pieces and ideas fit together in the full song.

I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishi Kesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists. And it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby,

Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Weinrobe. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April. and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzukas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage,

and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In The Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. And now here's Over and Appointments by Julian Baker. Visit songexploder.net.

You can find links to buy or stream appointments, and you can watch the music video. This episode was originally produced by me, along with Christian Coons, with help from intern Olivia Wood. This reissue was produced by me, Craig Ely, Kathleen Smith, and Mary Dolan. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX,

a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at Radiotopia.fm. You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Rishi Hereway, and you can follow the show at Song Exploder. You can also get a Song Exploder T-shirt at SongExploder.net slash shirt. I'm Rishi K. Sherway. Thanks for listening. If you liked this episode and you're looking for another Song Exploder episode to listen to next, check out the episodes from Julian Baker's bandmates in Boy Genius.

Both Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers have also been on the podcast. You can find their episodes at Songexploader.net slash episodes or on whatever podcast app you might use.