JULIEN BAKER

Julien Baker doesn’t hide her excitement. At the end of the first of two 75-minute interviews, I mention that

Under the Radar

is pleased to feature her on our cover, not realizing that this is news she is hearing for the first time. “Woah! Really?” she replies, her voice filled with incredulity. “Oh, my goodness. Wow. Okay! Cool. That’s super cool,” she says, pausing as if to give me one more chance to reveal the prank. “My goodness.”

Given the disarmingly unguarded nature of her songwriting, such a response probably shouldn’t be a surprise. Baker is anything but circumspect. Two years after her Sprained Ankle became one of the most-acclaimed debuts of 2015, Baker is still getting accustomed to the fact that she has listeners, let alone enough of them to justify appearing on the cover of a national music magazine. In those two short years there have been sold out shows, interviews with The New York Times and The Washington Post , and a contract with Matador, but the 22-year-old remains remarkably grounded. (Though she is a solo act, her heart remains in the scenes she grew up in, so much so that she still uses “we” instead “I” when talking about her work.) She has told her story many times by this point—about how she grew up gay in the South, how she struggled with addiction as a teen, how she learned her chops in Memphis’ Smith7 punk scene— but she still replies to questions as if she’s doing so for the first time.

With Turn Out the Lights , her dazzling sophomore release, Baker has a lot more to talk about. Broadening her sonic and thematic palette to include colors and sentiments only hinted at on Sprained Ankle , Baker has proven herself to be the rare songwriter who can craft simple arrangements that sound expansive, using expansive sentiments that feel intimate. Here, Baker explains how being both gay and Christian informs her work, how her unlikely breakthrough came about, and how she is still trying to figure out where she wants to go next.

Matt Fink (

Under the Radar

): Why’d you decide to record in Memphis?

Julien Baker: I recorded the new record in Memphis, because at the time I was living there. I moved away from Nashville, and I lived in Memphis for a year-and-a-half, because that’s where I’m from and where I consider home. I have a really strong attachment to Memphis, so I wanted to record the record at Ardent Studios, which is an interesting and meaningful piece of local lore. The guy, Jody Stephens from Big Star, kind of runs the studio, and it’s a big deal for local artists but also for on a national level. We just worked six days in a row and stayed in there for 12 hours.

You did the whole album in six days?

Yes. This is the first record that I made demos for. I used to only make voice memos and use my antiquated laptop