By: Amy O’Donoghue
Being blessed with the experience of hearing Julien Baker’s live performance was transcendent, and I don’t mean that hyperbolically. The combination of her powerful vocals and melancholy instrumentals is already able to provoke deep emotion through earphones. Hearing them coming from right in front of you, surrounding you, amplified that intensity to an unfathomable degree.
The crowd was a little restless after the support acts, with some of the audience sitting on the venue’s floor as anticipation turned to impatience. But when Baker appeared on stage, that feeling dissipated instantly and people jumped to their feet for “Appointments”, an immensely beautiful song about the impact of mental health on relationships and the need to believe things can change for the better—an anthem of both misery and hope. Hearing the opening chords of Appointments, the physical effect was instant. The few repetitive notes, striking in their simplicity, evoke such a sense of devastation, of trying every day again and again to outrun a feeling that just keeps chasing you. By the time she sang “I’m staying in tonight”, I was already sobbing.
The punchy “Ringside” injected a manic excitement into the atmosphere, counterbalanced by the equally passionate but somewhat more somber “Relative Fiction”. ”Tokyo,” a deeply metaphorical ode to self-destruction, was a personal favourite. Voices were lowered for soft, confessional pieces from “Sprained Ankle” and “Turn out the Lights”, particularly for “Claws in Your Back,” which details the shift away from suicidal ideation through some of the most breathtaking vocals I have ever heard. These feelings of awe and respect persisted as Baker chose to share an unreleased track, a slow and reflective song of her typical style.
The final song on the setlist was the intense “Hardline”, with guitars and anguished vocals consistently building to the final crazed instrumental break—the climax of the song, and therefore of the concert as well. As the crowd yelled “What if it’s all black, baby?” the despair evident in the studio version turned into something like freedom. Life may be hopeless, yes, it might really be “all black, all the time”, but screaming it in a dark room with strangers made it seem less suffocating. The clanging of the drums kicked in and a sense of catharsis flooded the hall.
Truthfully, I’m not quite sure how exactly I was reduced to tears so quickly. But there is something inarguably powerful about hearing somebody sing words that resonated with you instantly when you first heard them years ago. Listening to sad music can be a melodramatic, self-deprecating pastime. But it’s also a very real outlet for feelings of paralysis, of loneliness. There’s a case to be made for sad music dragging you down into a self-curated pit of despair, but in my case, it’s highly comforting. So to hear those same lyrics I have carried with me for so long, the soundscape they were built upon echoing through my entire body? Of course, emotions overflowed. Music can pluck things we keep deep inside of us out and bring them to the forefront, as is the case with Baker’s discography. She returned to the stage for one final song, a track from early on in her career: “Everybody Does”. In it, she laments her own perceived defectiveness, calling herself “a pile of filthy wreckage you will wish you never touched”. Hopelessly nihilistic, lyrically creative, and deeply moving.