In October 2020, indie rock singer Julien Baker released “Faith Healer,” a single that explores the fragile line between belief and disbelief, likening religious experience to a drug: the emptiness of getting clean and the desperation in scrambling to fill the void left behind. “Faith healer, come put your hands on me,” Baker sings. “A snake oil dealer, I’ll believe you if you make me feel something.” On Feb. 26, Baker followed up her single with the album “Little Oblivions,” which delves even deeper into that crisis of faith. “Little Oblivions” is for believers and non-believers alike — or, better yet, for the person who doesn’t know what they believe in, just that they want to. That person who, lying awake in bed too late at night with too many thoughts rushing through their mind, suddenly realizes they’ve been praying.
Baker was writing music about religion long before “Faith Healer.” In a cathartic finale to her debut album “Sprained Ankle” (2015), a record marked by anxious spirals and thoughts of self-loathing, chords of the Christian hymn “In Christ Alone” sound on a rickety, out-of-tune piano interwoven with static and a preacher’s sermon about the end of the world. Her second album, “Turn Out the Lights” (2017), features tracks like “Televangelist,” in which Baker sings about how all her prayers are just apologies.
“Little Oblivions” sees Baker question her faith more than ever — not whether she believes in God, as she openly identifies as Christian, but about what faith is and why anyone needs it in the first place. Perhaps, Baker forwards, we believe in God as a coping mechanism. It’s an anxiety that anyone who has grappled with their religious beliefs will recognize well: What if my faith is just my drug of choice, so I don’t have to face the world? What if it’s just some means of not feeling alone? “Little Oblivions” forges a through line between addiction and holding on to a higher power, and explores how these two things might be the same.
“There are so many channels and behaviors that we use to placate discomfort unhealthily which exist outside the formal definition of addiction,” Baker said about the song “Faith Healer” in an interview with Under the Radar magazine. “I (and so many other people) are willing to believe whomever — a political pundit, a preacher, a drug dealer, an energy healer — when they promise healing.” As real as her faith crisis is, however, so too is her crisis of addiction, and the album explicitly portrays the ups and downs of alcohol and drug dependency.
Given the thought spirals, references to substance abuse and heaping amounts of existential dread, one might expect an album like “Little Oblivions” to have a mopey, indie-acoustic sound, similar to her “Sprained Ankle” debut. But even her earlier work, while more contemplative and forlorn, has always had this restrained electricity to it, a strangely upbeat pathos tensed and ready to spring. In “Little Oblivions,” Baker finally lets this energy loose. After a long stretch of meandering piano and a guitar heavily doctored with reverb, track “Relative Fiction” suddenly breaks into a syncopated rhythm, building relentlessly until Baker declares, “I don’t need a savior, I need you to take me home.” Songs like “Faith Healer” and opening track “Hardline” seem to short-circuit under the immensity of their own instrumentation, their driving rhythms cutting in and out. “Ringside” is powered, beginning to end, by an unrelenting electric guitar. Add to all of this how often and unapologetically Baker switches between time signatures and musical textures mid-song, such as in “Bloodshot,” and the album becomes intoxicating in its instability. At any moment, new riffs might intrude out of nowhere. Just as suddenly, the instrumentation might collapse.
Memphis-based singer-songwriter Julien Baker released her third album, ‘Little Oblivions,’ on Feb. 26. (Sub Pop Records/Nolan Knight)
Some tracks on the album find Baker wondering if we use religion or abuse substances just so we don’t have to deal with ourselves. In “Relative Fiction,” Baker captures how questioning your system of morality also means questioning all the metrics you once used to evaluate whether you were “good” or not. “A character of somebody’s invention, a martyr in another passion play,” she sings, “I guess I don’t mind losing my conviction if it’s all relative fiction anyway.” And in the track “Hardline,” Baker’s addiction lets her escape from nothing other than herself. After crossing that “hard line” she drew for herself and relapsing, she finds that her own reflection has vanished. “Say my own name in the mirror,” she sings, and “nobody appears.”
Baker is at her vocal best in “Crying Wolf” for her characteristic fragile vibrato and in “Repeat” for her straining, even harsh, reach to the top of her register. Her vocal style has never been about perfection — Baker doubles her own voice in pointedly imperfect, out-of-sync unison in “Favor,” a track where fans of boygenius can also hear Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus lend backup vocals — but rather about authenticity, singing plainly to get her point across. Without a doubt, Baker’s music is charged and full of emotion. But at the same time, there still remains another opposing and measured side of her, where those rawer edges meet up with careful restraint. As a result, Baker sings not like she’s about to cry, but rather, like she already has. She sings as though she has entered into the sharp-eyed, clear-minded state of calm that comes after breaking down, from where she can see everything with clarity and precision, even herself. Maybe even God.
But if religion is just an addiction, only a vice or simply some way to avoid having to look at the messiness of who you truly are, then what is Baker supposed to do with all the evidence to the contrary? The most affecting moments of “Little Oblivions” are when Baker stumbles upon unexpected grace, encountering forgiveness for herself and her shortcomings that continually unfolds. “I wish you’d hurt me,” Baker states, point-blank, in “Song in E,” because “it’s the mercy I can’t take.” If faith in God is really just a way of filling in the blank spaces, a way of entering into those little oblivions, then there’s no way for Baker to explain the love and longsuffering demonstrated by those who stick around her — those people who, even as she struggles with addiction, choose to stay. “Nobody deserves a second chance,” she sings, in “Ringside,” but “I keep getting them.”
In an interview with The New Statesman, Baker expressed that she is “certain that there’s something out there” — even if that something is only a “God manifested in the dignity of other human beings.” Even through addiction, even through doubt, “Little Oblivions” locates divinity in the person standing beside you. “How come it’s so much easier with anything less than human, letting yourself be tender?” Baker asks in “Favor,” seeing her friend cup a dead moth in their hands. There is nothing more difficult than being vulnerable, except, perhaps, accepting those hands that reach out to hold you. “Who put me in your way to find?” Baker insists. “And what right had you, not to let me die?” In the end, for Baker, faith isn’t a way to cope with life. Faith isn’t about escape, and it isn’t just another little oblivion. Faith is as much about letting yourself break down as it is about letting others help you up, cross over to that other side and write another song.
Anastasia Knudsen (22C) is from Morgantown, West Virginia, double majoring in creative writing and comparative literature. She edits for Canopy Forum, a digital publication about the interactions of law and religion. Outside of devouring fiction, her interests include running, caffeine and geology. Contact Knudsen at ana.knudsen@emory.edu.
