Julien Baker

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She is definitley not a Christian. She is a lesbian

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These religious tensions are all over Baker’s music; she put them up front in her lyrics, and she speaks about them to anyone who asks. Baker was raised in a deeply Christian household in one of the most Christian parts of the country—Memphis, Tennessee—and she watched as several of her friends were dismissed or sent away from the church community after not conforming to its strict standards. She saw one friend shipped off to Refuge (formerly known as Love in Action), a now-defunct camp designed to “cleanse homosexuals” of their queerness, through Bible study. Baker knew that she herself was gay while this was happening, and acutely remembers the clammy-palm anxiety she felt when she came out to her parents, at seventeen.

Instead of turning her away, however, Baker found that her family was suddenly, radically accepting. She told one reporter that her father took a Bible down from a shelf and spent the next hour finding scripture to support her, to prove that she was not going to Hell. It was in this moment that Baker confirmed her belief in God, though not in the judgmental being she had been raised to fear and hide herself from. Instead, she saw her new conviction through the lens of Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”: “It’s like that part of the novel where the people in the town forget everything and someone puts up a sign that says ‘God Exists,’ ” she said, on the phone from her dorm room at Middle Tennessee State University, where she is studying literature with a double minor in Spanish and Secondary Education. “That’s what my tattoo says. ‘God Exists.’ ” Baker engages with her reaffirmed faith in “Rejoice,” a soaring three-minute ode to belief that has become the climax of her live set, and which she calls her “mission statement, if I have one.” She begins the song humming about her fellow burnout peers (“All of my friends live in a plastic bag walking around / Jumping the train tracks, over the fence, veins all black”), but ends it by saying that they will all be redeemed, no matter what dumb mistakes they make or immature foolishness they pull. There will be a millennial deliverance: “But I think there’s a God, and he hears either way / When I rejoice and complain.” She closes out the song by singing the word “rejoice” again and again, right up against the crack in her register, whipping up the crowd into a tent revival of the heart. “Ultimately, I feel like there is just a pervasive evidence of God, “ she said, plainly. “Though I know that is maybe a controversial thing to say.”

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