Words by Harry Levin

When Julien Baker dies, she’s going to put “...and another thing,” on her tombstone.

Several times throughout our interview I have to cut off the Grammy-winning solo artist — composer, guitarist, and member of the indie-rock supergroup boygenius with Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus — mid-disquisition. She delivers fascinating, extended perspectives on topics such as Madlib’s use of samples in Madvillainy (that’s the album she’s been listening to on repeat), whether music is a universal language (she doesn’t think so), or what it means to be a “producer.”

“All the people operating an auto vehicle are motorists by definition,” Baker tells me. “I press play on Pro Tools and hooked up a fucking scarlet interface. That doesn't discredit the dude who's working like a Neave board in a huge studio with a bunch of outboard gear. I go running, and I'm not Usain Bolt. I can go for a jog and we're still doing the same thing.” Although I don’t want to interrupt her when she’s on a roll (it’s like listening to a college professor who actually cares about their job), I do so to simply ensure we get through the interview in a reasonable amount of time. In truth, her passion and loquaciousness reflect her relationship with making music, which she analogises to a buffet at a fancy restaurant:

“The more I learn, the buffet keeps getting bigger,” Baker says. “I want to try the collard greens and the mashed potatoes, and a little bit of the macaroni and the hushpuppies and the catfish.” Her challenge is refining her enticing, endless choices in realms such as production and theory into something that communicates her intended emotion and narrative. As such, composing the opening theme for Orphan Black: Echoes, the new sci-fi thriller series starring Krysten Ritter on AMC+, was especially challenging. She had to refine her choices into 30 seconds of music based on a narrative she was assigned.

“I've never written for committee. I'm trying to, in the most creative way possible, cram my meaning into a predetermined box, and it feels valuable and fun. It has to be fun,” Baker says. “I like being forced into a beginner's mind.” Baker was a beginner at composing an intro for a television program, but she’s composed for film before and she has a deep-seated point of view on the relationship between music and visuals. To her, sound and vision are intrinsically linked, and she explores this inherent bond from multiple angles.

When she’s writing lyrics, rather than attempting to manifest meaning out of feelings, she uses vivid images as a launching point for sharing meaning. Consider the song, ‘Powers’, which she wrote for the latest boygenius EP,The Rest. In it, she discusses facing the realities of who you are with palpable word painting:

“How did it start? Did I fall into a nuclear reactor?/Crawl out with acid skin or somethin' worse/A hostile alien ambassador?/Or am I simply another of the universe's failed experiments?”

Even her descriptions of music are decidedly visual. “The drummer I play with in my solo music, Matthew. He and I have been friends since we were both 13. Sometimes I'll be like, ‘Can you make the drums more squiggly?’ and he'll be like, ‘Yes’,” Baker says. “I think that's why we make a good creative team. Cause he's not like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about? Do you want more eighth notes? What do you want?’ I'm like, ‘You know, squiggly.’ He's like, ‘Okay, I got you’.”

However, despite this profound union between the two senses, visuals are also a way to separate herself from music. For instance, with music videos, she often gives up creative control to take some pressure off herself and enjoy the observational experience of seeing a visual artist command their chosen medium.

“It's nice for [visuals] to be a place where I can just say ‘yes’ instead of it being all of my vision. It’s kind of exhausting when artists feel like they have to be the auteur of their lives,” Baker says. Her discography is filled with numerous creative music videos. For the ‘Hardline’ video, Baker made “dumb little tiny objects” out of trash and mailed them to the director, Joe Baughman, who repurposed them for a stop-motion production. For the boygenius album, 2023’s the record, Academy-award nominee Kristen Stewart directed a music film based on three songs: ‘$20’, ‘Emily I’m Sorry’, and ‘True Blue’.

“We were in a group chat, and [Stewart] was sending us text messages at midnight that were a page long,”  Baker says. “I don't have to be the one steering the ship all the time, because you care as much as we care. Just pick somebody who's awesome at what they do, and let them cook.” When Baker composed her first motion picture score, that’s how the director worked with her. He let her cook. The film was a biopic documentary called North By Current from director Angelo Madsen Minax. Baker and Minax had mutual friends in the Tennessee indie film scene and he makes “radical queer films” as Baker (who is queer) says, so there were multiple cultural familiarities between them. North By Current tells the story of Minax returning to his hometown in rural Michigan following his brother-in-law’s arrest for the unresolved death of his two-year-old niece.

“All I was doing every day was sitting at my desk making music with no lyrics, watching a really heart-wrenching documentary over and over. But like 30 seconds of it and manipulating Pro Tools and hitting play at the same time and seeing if it synced up,” Baker says. “I spent so much time with that story that I started to go a little crazy about it.”

Initially, Baker tapped into the heavy emotions from a more traditional musical standpoint. The first idea she delivered was her take on Schubert piano arrangements. But that was not what Minax had in mind. He wanted more “bloopy, soundscape stuff” as she describes, which can be heard in the trailer for the film. Baker was fully capable of making music in that synthetic style because she studied Audio Technology at Middle Tennessee State University (before switching her major to secondary education). When it came to pairing her skillset with narrative visuals, Minax guided her along the path. He gave her books on composition (that she regrets only skimming instead of reading in full), to open her mind to the craft. Other than that gentle instruction… he let her cook.

“I think I didn't have enough experience. But then again, where do you start? I wanted to be naturally great at it, but it was actually so challenging. [Minax] was so sweet to me,” Baker says. “I'm so grateful for that opportunity because it taught me how hard it is to take up time and space. It taught me a lot about not cramming a bunch of changes in and how subtle you can actually be.” Those lessons were crucial when she composed the intro for Orphan Black: Echoes. One of the writers on the show is a fan of boygenius and so they approached Baker spontaneously with the opportunity. Plus, Baker watched the original Orphan Black series on BBC when she was in college and she’s a huge Krysten Ritter fan as well.

“I really wanted to do a good job because they came to me. I was really trying to make them like me. I was like, ‘Please let me do this again. I can be good at this. Just give me a chance’,” Baker says, also knowing that trying too hard can be her Achilles heel. “Sometimes I feel like when I try too hard at something it ends up being more rigid. That's my main way I shoot myself in the foot. Being a try-hard.”

In this situation, Baker was grappling with her desire to impress the people who entrusted her with the project, her natural urge to utilize as much of her musical knowledge as possible in 30 seconds, and taking on the feedback from a corporate network behest to its shareholders. Needless to say, the pressure was on, but there was some relief in the format. Unlike North By Current, AMC+ tasked Baker with writing a short song as the intro for Orphan Black: Echoes, complete with her vocals and lyrics.

She wrote the lyrics by once again pulling meaning out of imagery. Except in this case, the image was provided for her through the show. In a video sharing the first official minutes of the series, Krysten Ritter’s character is shocked to realize she has no memory of who she is before she is told she was “created using a very complex process.” So, in her lyrics, Baker touches on the ideas of identity, uncertainty, and urgency: “Do you really wanna know/The lengths I'd go/To touch the smallest pieces of you?/Anything that I can reconstruct/Show me and I'll do it.”

“I'm not gonna write lyrics to a song that are like ‘I was born in a tube’,” Baker says. “I had to extrapolate it so much further for it to be not corny.” Then when it came to writing the music below the lyrics, Baker applied what she learned about subtlety from composing for North By Current. In 30 seconds she couldn’t do three key changes or insert a litany of chords. And so, to extrapolate the same themes as the lyrics, she used three-part harmony. Each tone represents a different version of the character’s identity that could potentially unfold as she finds her memories, but she also had to arrange them in a way that conveys a sense of darkness.

“So what if we do three-part harmony, but it's in an ugly mode? Because it technically should jive. But there's something that feels dissonant about it. What if I put a different analog mechanical process on each of the vocal recordings so that they're all synthetically manipulated in a different way, making them unique?” Baker says. “I was getting way too heady. No one is gonna listen to that and be like, ‘Oh, yeah, there's a fucking Lydian mode shift in here, and it's because you wanted to create disagreement between the three chords you chose. I feel like I was trying to do extra credit.”

The prospect of doing extra credit could be taken literally because she delivered three separate songs to the network. AMC+ only provided feedback after she delivered the finished versions and they selected their favourite (Baker condenses their limited notes to “more drums” and then “not that kind of drums”). Just like Minax wanted her to cook, and like how she lets her visual collaborators cook, the network let her cook. It got her out of her comfort zone, but she enjoyed that aspect of it, “…and another thing” she hopes to try again is composing for different kinds of film and television. “It was fun for that reason, and I was like, ‘Damn, I wanna do this more’.”


Orphan Black: Echoes is available to watch now.

Julien's first solo tour since 2022 will begin this September - get tickets here.