Julien Baker’s sold out show stuns Rough Trade NYC into silence.
“Wish I could write songs about anything other than death
But I can’t go to bed without drawing the red, shaving off breaths
Each one so heavy, each one so cumbersome
Each one a lead weight hanging between my lungs.”
I’m afraid to reach for my beer.
It’s 1 minute into Julien Baker’s 40 minute set and Rough Trade NYC has never, ever, been this quiet.
You can hear people type on their iPhones, shift their feet, swallow their drink, sneeze, breathe. The music from the record store side of the building crept in. Even the security guards were standing statuesque, enraptured.
God help you if you decide to come up the metal stairs.
At 19, singer-songwriter-all-around-electric-guitar+loop pedal-mastercontroller Julien Baker is just old enough for her music to not fall into “emo,” but lands as more of a challenge to adulthood. Her music immediately draws comparisons to Daughter and others whose work sustains on a few intentional beautiful notes. Understated in set-up and overwhelming in mood, her live musical catalogue demonstrates an elusive mastery of the smallest details. Each echo of the chords, squeak of a string, and the warm hum of her amp seem delicately and deliberately placed.
But unlike Daughter, Julien Baker’s work has the mystical ability to transfuse balance, not sadness; to share catharsis and emotional progress, not create turmoil. As one girl, one guitar, one amp, and a ton of pedals, Julien Baker led a sold out show that was part yoga class, part tandem bike ride; a paired experience and journey through someone else’s crafted musical pain just to come out on the other side more balanced. At no point on Monday January 25th did you feel that Julien was playing FOR you. She was playing with you. And that collaborative experience taunted you to ask those hard questions, the notes and echoes and effects somehow reaching out like smoke in the depths of your grey night to challenge everything.
In between songs, I held my breath. I didn’t dare move, like the beauty would shatter.
And yet there was one moment when we were surprisingly, and maybe unintentionally, shattered: when Julien launched into her song “Everybody Does.” It is one of her only tunes that, rather than composed of finger picking, echoes and harmonics, is driven by a strumming arrangement that is simultaneously painful and hopeful. Those strumming chords carried the sledgehammers; the concluding line carrying the final blow: You’re gonna run, it’s alright, everybody does.
And kind of like a failed pose you try out in the aforementioned yoga class, that experimental time when you inch closer and closer to getting to Crow… you fall over. You went too far.
Tonight, we wouldn’t be falling for long. In fact by the end of Julien Baker’s show, we weren’t destroyed or torn apart. We left with more balance and equilibrium. Like a successful yoga class.
Bolstered and balanced by those lengthy, haunting notes, we floated out of Rough Trade in a daze; like an inebriated New York City soundtrack; the echoes still working some magic after those 45 minutes together; the pieces of music, lyrics, and effects still braiding together.
At some point during her set, likely when I finally breathed and drank that beer, Julien stated “It’s an honor to share this time with you guys.”
Oh, Julien. You have no idea.