You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Herway.

Julian Baker is from Memphis, Tennessee. She released her second album, Turn Out the Lights, in October 2017 on Matador Records.

The New York Times called her music, quote, devastating, and Pitchfork gave the album Best New Music.

In this episode, Julian tells the story of her song appointments and how writing it helped her work through her thoughts around addiction, depression, and relationships.

Julian also takes apart the track over, which was originally written as part of appointments, but then split off as a separate track.

I'm staying in tonight. I'm with Stop You From Leaving.

I'm Julian Baker. Do you ever think to say something and then you know that you should not say that thing out loud?

When that happens to me or I know that a thought is irrational, I'll just save it and explore it in a song.

Like I felt an inadequacy and like an imposter syndrome when I would talk to my friends or when I would be at a party just standing around, I would just have this bizarre paranoia that like, I'm not what any of these people wanted and I'm disappointing and I'm letting everyone down.

And that recurring thought was I think probably the first idea that cropped up in my brain for Delirics.

I know that I'm not what you wanted.

Appointments materialized around the weeks in which I was starting to figure out ways to be more proactive about dealing with recovery and mental health.

I actually joined the therapy and actually taking care of myself.

I was sitting on my couch in my apartment in Tennessee and creating a court progression and improvising on top of it.

This is the voice memo I made in my house.

You can hear me stepping on the roofing pedal.

It's just a continuous loop of that and then I place all the cords on top of it.

So I play a court progression and then as they're getting recorded to the loop they build on top of each other and I just noodle around in this reverberant landscape.

Improvisation is a very special and therapeutic place in its own way to just sit with a guitar and play for 45 minutes of uninterrupted sound just transports you to somewhere else.

It's a really nice refuge from constant consciousness and thought that's bombarding you always.

The lyrical content is derived from actual conversations that I had with loved ones about feeling the immense isolation that results from living inside your own head and fear that you'll always feel isolated and not being able to express that to another person.

I was thinking over the conversations that I had had in the last week, allowing myself to confront thoughts that I'm having that I know are irrational.

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