Julien Baker recorded Turn Out the Lights in six days at Ardent Studios in Memphis, twelve hours a session, in 2017. Six days. The compression matters, because the album sounds like it was made in one sustained breath, not a collection of songs assembled over months, but a single movement with a beginning, a middle, and a destination it has been heading toward from the first note. Released on October 27, 2017, through Matador Records, it is Baker's second album and her most complete one. What makes it complete is the logic connecting all eleven tracks into something that functions more like a proof than a playlist. Baker self-produced the record, as she had her debut, which means every decision about space and weight and silence was hers.
The proof begins with "Over," a piano instrumental that functions as a deliberate overture, signaling what the rest of the record will carry before Baker has sung a single word. Camille Faulkner's violin enters on that track, and on "Appointments" immediately after, establishing the album's tonal palette in the first two songs. Faulkner, whom Baker met as a student at Middle Tennessee State University, returns on tracks seven, nine, and eleven as well, which means her strings frame the album's emotional peaks with a consistency that feels architectural rather than decorative. Cameron Boucher plays saxophone and clarinet on those same opening two tracks and does not appear again after that. His woodwinds belong to the setup.
"Appointments" was released as the album's lead single on August 17, 2017, a full two months before the record arrived, and it earns that placement. The sequencing from "Appointments" through the title track and into "Shadowboxing" traces something like a descent, into the full weight of what Baker is carrying. "Appointments" holds a kind of exhausted resignation. The title track, released as a single on October 11, 2017, builds to the kind of crescendo Baker absorbed growing up playing praise music in Southern churches: dramatic, full-throated, designed to be felt in the chest. "Shadowboxing" names the problem precisely, the fight happening entirely within the self, against an opponent who knows every move.
The album's emotional center of gravity is "Televangelist," which sits at track six, roughly the midpoint, and carries the record's most direct confrontation with faith. Baker grew up playing in church bands, and that background is audible throughout the record as tension rather than comfort. She plays keyboards on "Televangelist" and on "Everything to Help You Sleep," the two tracks where the question of whether God is listening gets its most direct airing. Craig Silvey, who mixed the record (his credits include The National and Arcade Fire), gave the album a sound that is simultaneously intimate and cavernous, which is exactly what that tension requires: Baker's voice close enough to feel private, the reverb wide enough to feel like the silence of a very large room. Mastering by Greg Calbi kept the dynamic range intact, so when the quiet moments are quiet, they are genuinely quiet.
"Happy to Be Here," track eight, is where the album's title earns its full weight. Matthew Gilliam contributes backing vocals on the record, and his is the only other voice present across the eleven tracks. After seven songs of solitude, a second voice reads as the first evidence of company, the first suggestion that someone else is in the room. Then "Hurt Less" and "Even" carry the record toward its close, and Baker designed the closer, "Claws in Your Back," as a direct answer to "Go Home," the final track on her debut, Sprained Ankle. "Go Home" ends with the line "God, I wanna go home." "Claws in Your Back" ends with "I wanted to stay." That pivot is the whole argument of the record, stated plainly at the last possible moment. Additional recording on "Claws in Your Back" was done separately from the main Ardent sessions, in Richmond, Virginia, which means Baker returned to the song after the rest of the album was finished. The closer was the last thing completed, and it needed to be.
What Baker built across these eleven tracks is a record that takes the condition of not being okay seriously enough to follow it somewhere specific. The album peaked at number three on the US Americana/Folk Albums chart and also charted on Top Rock Albums, which tells you something about the audience that found it: people who were not looking for a song to feel sad to but for a record that would stay in the room with them until the end. The move from "I wanna go home" to "I wanted to stay" is quiet and more durable than resolution. It is the decision, made in the dark, to keep going.
