A while ago I wrote an article about Julien Baker's new album, Little Oblivions; it was a final draft that never became an article, and is now gone forever. I can't access that draft and I can't remember most of it, but I remember it contained one of the typical ramblings I dive into when I have a passion for something, find a connection between things, but a lot of it stays in my head and never sounds quite right when I try to put it into words.
Little Oblivions spoke to me like everything Julien makes--hitting me in the face with a sincerity hard to find elsewhere, sharp, but somehow warm and comforting. This was something I'd found once before, in the words and brutality of Scott Hutchison, but somehow the realisation only hit me when I saw Julien give an interview in front of a poster/portrait of the late Frightened Rabbit singer.
Julien and Scott were good friends; they had collaborated, Julien played his memorial concert and covered Modern Leper as part of the 10-year anniversary compilation celebrating The Midnight Organ Fight (which I think was recorded before Scott's death). It was only during that KEXP interview that I really started to make a connection, and started to find Scott in a lot of Julien's work. This is not to say that Julien's music is necessarily inspired or influenced by Frightened Rabbit: it's just what you do when you learn a new word and then all of a sudden that word pops up everywhere you look. It's a form of confirmation bias, but for me, for some reason, Julien and Scott are now intertwined in a way, and I always think about it when I listen to their music.
Saying that Julien's music is similar to Frightened Rabbit's would be an inaccurate statement, although I'm sure Julien could mention Scott as one of her influences, probably even more so for Little Oblivions. I actually think that Julien's unmitigated talent developed at the perfect intersection of her identities, and it's not diluted by any strong influence. And yet, I find similarities - or parallels - between Scott and Julien. They both write with incomparable honesty, brutality and raw clarity only softened by the painful self-deprecation of someone who's been through it enough times to be able to distance themselves from the thing that it's actually become easier to just say it as it is, rather than find a metaphor to hold it together. The result is a surprisingly non-dramatic account that could almost have been written by an onlooker, except the onlooker knows too much. A statement of facts, a cynical depiction, except for those rare moments of hope that manage to hide well in the middle of a song, or maybe close it with an open ending, whether it's a sincere one or one jaded by history that repeats itself when you can't do anything about it. I see this a lot in the tired narratives of The Midnight Organ Fight and Sprained Ankle, and even more so in Painting of a Panic Attack and Little Oblivions which, in sound and themes and general mood, mirror each other like different approaches to the same research question.
It's curious how two different people separated by place, age, gender identity, background and personal experiences both came to develop in a way that brought them this close together. It would be easy to conclude it was the shared experiences with addiction and depression. While they both found comfort and despair in those little oblivions, I don't really think that's what defines a person on a deeper level. But I don't have an answer--I just know that their music inhabits a common place, one that's oddly healing and deeply human.
I find this likeness comforting. It's a good way of keeping someone's memory and legacy alive, for them to keep popping up when you're drawing a comparison, making a connection, learning words, trying to make sense of things. It speaks of the impact they've had--the tiny changes that stick with you.
