Julien Baker doesn’t waste time with small talk. Within minutes of sitting down, she’s already dissecting survival, self-delusion, and the futility of expecting one clean answer to existence. Which is fine, because small talk was never really her strong suit anyway.
Her third album, Little Oblivions, was being billed as “songs of survival and reimagining a better self.” Baker almost laughs at that framing. “I really thought this was a very dark record,” she says. “But when other people reflect your art back to you, I’m like—oh wow, I guess it is about surviving and imagining a better self. Even if I think it’s pessimistic.”
The first single, “Faith Healer,” is the thesis statement: skepticism wrapped in a chorus that almost sounds hopeful. She explains: “I was willing to believe whomever when they promised healing. That’s what the song is. I kept thinking, okay, maybe if people just read this article, or listen to this podcast, or embrace this philosophy, we’ll fix it. And that’s not real. That’s a disappearing horizon.”
Her frustration comes back to snake-oil peddlers, political and otherwise. “It’s not always some guy at 3 a.m. selling holy water,” she says. “Sometimes it’s your friend telling you that being keto is going to heal you because they saw a documentary. They want that to be true too. Everybody needs the thing that gets them into the next day.”
That hunger for a “fix” is everywhere—in faith, in politics, in late-capitalist wellness culture. Baker compares it to finding out the Easter Bunny isn’t real. “You’re devastated your parents lied, but the candy’s still there. That’s the less sensational reality. And it’s workable. But we keep clinging to fantasies because it feels better.”
She doesn’t pretend to have the solution. “There’s no deus ex machina ending,” she shrugs. “No Wizard of Oz moment where we figure it out. The supreme being would probably just say, ‘I don’t know either.’”
Which, weirdly, she finds freeing.
Of course, there are politics in the subtext. Baker, raised in Memphis with roots in Christianity, has long wrestled with belief and nationalism. “I don’t think shitting on Republicans is useful,” she says flatly. “A lot of those people have been sold a lie. They cling to binaries that don’t even exist. Like, if we don’t stay exactly like this, suddenly we’re China. It’s absurd, but it’s fear. And fear makes people fight to hold onto what isn’t even real.”
If that sounds diplomatic, chalk it up to astrology. “I hate it, but I’m annoyingly diplomatic. It’s big Libra energy,” she laughs. “Sometimes I’m just like, ‘Well, who could say?’”
But don’t mistake that for passivity. Baker still carries a sharp political edge, just hidden in parables and weary humor. “Nationalism is a false idol,” she’s said before. “Like the Constitution as holy writ? Or the Bible? Or some manifesto you read in college? People keep clinging to documents as if they’ll give us moral clarity. But they won’t.”
The heaviness of those conversations makes the music itself feel even more cathartic. Little Oblivions was her biggest-sounding record yet, the first time she fully embraced drums after years of treating minimalism as a badge of honor. A strange step on the road there? A home-recorded cover of Blink-182’s “Adam’s Song.”
“That one was wild,” she says. “I made it right here at home. When he says, ‘Earth is dying, help me Jesus,’ I was like… oh my god. This is a deeper song than I remember. When I was a kid, I just heard ‘anti-establishment angst.’ Now it’s like—yeah, earth actually is dying. And kids are victims. It hit me way harder.”
For Baker, even pop-punk can turn prophetic when refracted through her lens of survival and skepticism. And if the record sounds bigger than before, it’s because she finally stopped pretending drums were off-limits. “I thought my skill was living in minimalism,” she admits. “But at some point you have to ask, what actually serves the songs? This time, it was percussion. It made sense to go bigger.”
She still tries to avoid Twitter, though she laughs when Jason Isbell tweeted a virtual high-five at her. “I love Jason. I guess I’ll have to log on and say what’s up,” she grins. “But really—I stay away as much as I can. It’s not good for me.”
And that’s Baker in a nutshell: deeply serious about the wreckage of the world, yet somehow still laughing at the absurdity of it all.
“There’s no single answer,” she says again, almost like a mantra. “And that sucks. But also—it’s freeing.”
Watch the interview above and then check out Faith Healer below.
