Daily Distraction: Listen to Julien Baker’s new song ‘Faith Healer’ – Entertainment – Columbus Alive

And read the accompanying essay by Hanif Abdurraqib

Today Julien Baker announced a new album, Little Oblivions, and shared a new single from the album, “Faith Healer”. Previously, in Turn Out the Lights and Sprained Ankle, Baker seemed unable to write a bad song. “Faith Healer” continues this trend.

“‘Faith Healer’ is a song about vices, both the obvious and the most insidious ways in which they manifest in the human experience,” Baker said in a press release. “I started writing this song 2 years ago and it started out as a very literal addiction review. For a while, I only had the first verse, which is just a very candid confrontation of the cognitive dissonance that a person struggling with drug addiction can feel – the overwhelming evidence that this substance hurts you, and the counter-intuitive but very real desire for the relief it provides. When I revisited the song, I began to think about the parallels between drug addiction escape and other means of escape that had occupied a similar, though less easily identifiable, space in my psyche. “There are so many channels and behaviors that we use to badly calm the discomfort that exists outside of the formal definition of addiction. I (and so many others) are prepared to believe anyone – a political expert, a preacher, a drug dealer, an energy healer – when they promise healing, and how that will, however genuine, could actually hinder healing. To top it off, Columbus author and poet Hanif Abdurraqib (and occasional contributor to Alive) wrote an essay to accompany Little Oblivions, which releases February 26 on Matador Records. Check out the video for “Faith Healer” below and Hanif’s essay below Little Oblivions If you’re lucky enough to have a future where current anxieties of distance turn into romantic memories, I hope it There will be people who will put this album in their hands for years to come and remember the world it fell into. A world which, whatever the future moment, is likely to be defined by the work that people have undertaken and the struggles that people have continued to come forward for. But it will also be a world defined by the number of us who live on the other side of the distance. , here is a new album by Julien Baker which arrives when a world has just understood again its relationship with touch, with distance. As of this writing, I shouldn’t want to fall into the arms of someone I love and miss, and yet I do. In an era of hands pressed to the glass of windows or screen doors. An era of returning hands. A time when touch has become an illusion. If we have been unlucky enough, our own lives have prepared us for the ever-growing tapestry of evils. Struggling with the inside of oneself has become a side effect of the times, and will remain a side effect of all the times that come out of it. The first time I heard Julien Baker, I wanted to know how an artist could survive such relentless and rigorous self-examination. I have been alone, I have been alone and I have been isolated. There are musicians who know the nuances between the three. Which whispers through the cracks of a single person’s time. Julien Baker is one of these artists. A writer who examines his own mess, not for answers, but sometimes just for a way out. A beacon for a newer and bigger mess. It’s hard to put into words what that sounds like. Little Oblivions is an album that enters into this feeling and broadens it. Sonically, from the sound opening on ‘Hardline’ making the chest snap, loving but persistent jabs to the way ‘Relative Fiction’ spills over into ‘Crying Wolf’, which feels like hitting a freeway. hot that quickly turns into a sparse landscape, drowned in driving rain. Lyrically too, of course. There are writers who might attempt to knock on the doors of their listeners, shouting out their peculiar anguish of the hour. And there are definitely times when I needed it to go from one sunrise to the next. But there are also writers who come forward assuming that anyone listening already knows what it’s like to recover from heartache, or to cry out in lasting darkness and hear only an echo. Little Oblivions is an album that details the exploration, details the cries. An album that offers neither reparation nor forgiveness. Sometimes, however, a chance to revel in life that is never guaranteed. Yes, the life that grows and grows and which is never promised. How lucky to still live, even in our own mess. Julien Baker’s great project, as I have always projected it on myself, is the central question of knowing what someone does with the many calamities of a life that he has not asked for, but whose he wants to make the most of it. I have long since finished with the idea of ​​hope in such a brutal and ruthless world, but I would like to think that this music brings me closer to the old idea that I once clung to. But these are survival songs, and songs of reinventing a better self, and what is that if not hope? I hope that on the other side of our wreck – self-taught or not – there might be a door. And through the opening of that door, a tree is casting its shadow over something that we love. A bench and above it a jacket that once belonged to someone we had buried. Birds who ask us to be an audience to their song. A generous little corner of the earth that has not yet burned or disappeared. I can be convinced of this kind of hope, even if I fight against it. Hearing someone struggle with and always grateful for the circumstances in a lifetime that might reveal a bit of sparkle if either of us stayed long enough. Julien, it’s good to hear from you again. And now in all our anguish and all our glory. I miss the way the outside world reflected on me. Now I make mirrors on the walls. I’m so grateful for a better sound than the howl of my own shadows. Julien, you started again. You expert magician. You make mirrors. Thank you for allowing us once again to watch you maneuver through all of your pleasant and unpleasant renderings. If there is a future, there will be people who may not remember how this album came about at a time when so many people were hungry for a chance to get back together. When the imagination of a person, a city, a country grew. When, despite all of this, in quiet times there were people who still wanted to be held by someone they maybe couldn’t touch. Thank you, Julien, for this comfort. This glass box through which a person could better see a utility for his own sorrow. This kingdom of little shards of sun, stumbling to disrupt the darkness. – Hanif Abdurraqib