Julien Baker once quit her job to play music with Joyce Manor
When Boygenius’ Julien Baker was growing up, she had a series of pivotal music awakenings. Her earliest musical experiences revolved around the church, having grown up in a devout Baptist family. But as a teen, she caught a clip of Green Day playing on television and soon found she was drawn to alternative music and the hardcore scene, too. Her folky lyricism often charts her relationship with religion, fusing it with the confessional tone of the emo bands she was so drawn to as a teen.
In her solo albums, particularly on Little Oblivions, Baker strikes an introspective tone in a way that’s frank and brutal. It packs the same emotional force as the punk and metalcore bands she was so enthralled with growing up. Plumbing the depths of her experiences with religion, addiction, and love, Baker told GQ some of her biggest influences were songs that had been “revolutionary” to her far earlier.
Joyce Manor’s ‘Constant Headache’, which also made its way onto a list of influences for Boygenius’ The Record, had huge significance for Baker. It wasn’t just its sparse chords and pained narration of a lonely party scene that made it an important record to her, but the reminder of a night playing alongside the band. “I was fascinated by the simplicity of [their sound], how mournful and emotive it could be with lo-fi production and such a simple hook,” she recalled.
Baker’s old high school band played with them in Memphis, and she’d asked for time off almost a month earlier, ahead of the gig. “The job was at, like, a knockoff of Texas Roadhouse, where you crack the peanuts on the floor, and there are taxidermied animals everywhere,” she recalled. “I had asked for time off weeks in advance because I was losing my mind that we were about to play with the Joyce Manor because my band and I were obsessed with this record when it came out.”
When she discovered she’d been scheduled for the day of the show, Baker quit without a glimmer of hesitation. “That seems like such an impulsive, childlike thing to do,” she mused, “But the older I get, the more I feel like it was weird prescient wisdom where I was able to ask, ‘Would I want to make 35 dollars making this shift, or will I want to have the memory of playing with a band that means so much to me with my friends?'”
To this day, the “crustiness” of the song’s production gives Barker flashbacks to playing the show. “The one DIY venue where it was going to be was under construction, so it was just in a parking lot around a bunch of abandoned buildings,” she recalled with pride. “It was just a generator and some floodlights and like 30 kids in the middle of downtown Memphis. The mic kept shocking my face. And I was happy as could be.”
Check out ‘Constant Headache’ below.
