The group Julien Baker calls “my favourite band in the universe”
Julien Baker doesn’t want her fans to pigeonhole her. While some find inspiration in her identity as a queer Christian, the need both fans and the media alike feel to let that label eclipse the brilliance of her sound grew tired quickly. In 2018, she declared: “I just want to be an artist. I don’t want to be the queer Christian artist”. Those familiar with her debut album, Sprained Ankle, will already know Baker’s faith is not what makes her voice so intriguing, nor is it the reason she shot to global success. But that’s not to say religion isn’t entwined in her confessional songwriting.
At 13, seven years before she’d record her debut, a raw account of substance abuse and a fraught relationship with faith, she listened to ‘The Dryness and the Rain’ by mewithoutyou. Having grown up in the south, Baker was constantly confronted by propaganda about the war on terror and said that hearing the track sung in Arabic was “mindblowing”.
The sense of juxtaposition that she found herself defined by later in her career was echoed in the song – but far more seamlessly, an Arabic prayer fused with a discussion about a Christian god. “I was fascinated by how a person was able to reconcile things that are – because of the cultural and political precepts placed around the religions – put at odds,” Baker told Line of Best Fit. The band rose up at the same time as the Christian metalcore scene, which tended to broach religion more negatively.
But mewithoutyou took a different tact, not decrying or endorsing one God but instead simply looking at elements of different religions that chimed. “I’d never heard a band pull from all those elements and combine them,” explained Baker. “[Not] without it being like the New Age, modern lunch-plate style religion: ‘I like these elements of Buddhism and Judaism, I’m going to appropriate a bunch of cultures and be really insensitive.'”
During an interview with the Irish Times, Baker seemed to share the band’s ability to explore religion more inclusively. Religion, she says, is inescapable – “just a name for how we live out our convictions”. How people choose to do so is ultimately up to them.
Baker’s ultimate appeal is in her unflinching ability to capture a sense of longing, whether for love, stability, or a more concrete relationship with her faith. “For so long, I struggled with these two parts of myself that seem inherently contradictory,” she reflected. “The way I saw it, I could be one or the other. I finally reconciled these two things by realising that I am Julien Baker, a whole person.”
While that conclusion was a highly personal point to arrive at, listening to mewithoutyou was a pivotal moment. “They managed to honestly inspect these religions and manifestations of people’s attempts to connect with whatever celestial prevailing presence there might be,” Baker said.
“Approaching faith in that way revolutionised how I approached faith and lyrics. I’ve got two mewithoutyou tattoos; they’re my favourite band in the universe.”
