Julien Baker - Sprained Ankle, my god

Always managed to move in
Right next to the cemeteries
And never far from hospitals
I don’t know what that tells you about me

occam's razor says they're living in dense urban areas so nothing is ever that far away

because all of those dense urban-centred cemeteries...

lol there are two cemeteries down the road from my high school!!

i live next to a (small) cemetery

anyway lucy dacus is the greatest songwriter in indie rock today

the way they trade vocals on "souvenir" is exquisite, and their harmonies at the end!!!

oh yeah this record gave me a nervous breakdown

― insufficiently familiar with xgau's work to comment intelligently (BradNelson), Thursday, November 5, 2015 3:12 PM (three years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

happy anniversary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljOonyYsMJI

love it

julien is so damn adorable

anyone know why "boygenius"?

policygenius was taken

cool that they made Julien's vocals totally inaudible in that clip

nice! me & my dog is still my fave. (though they mixed julien super low in that performance, bummer)

also calling them a "supergroup" sometimes makes sense in press outlets that have covered the individual members before and given them lots of praise, but it's kind of weird to hear them referred to that on late night tv

xp!
yeah, i'm sure they listened back to it later and were a little :/

(not to focus too much on the mixing of a live performance but) maybe what happened was that julien's voice was a bit too high in the mix during rehearsal, so during performance the mixer turned her down AND she chose to sing further away from the mic in an attempt to fix it on her end, and it ended up with her pretty much at 0

re: the band name

“I felt the need then to qualify that we didn’t want to be in control in a mean or exclusionary way," Baker says. "But the thing about being a woman in the music industry is that you constantly feel the need to qualify yourself. We produced this record and all the players are female. It was important for us to show that there doesn’t have to be a man behind the scenes pulling the strings who is later accredited with the genius.”

lmao I can definitely imagine an unfamiliar sound guy assuming she'd have a small/meek vocal presence only to render half the audience deaf xp

xp cool, thanks!

to be fair to the sound person, she definitely looks like she's belting it in that performance. maybe he/she overcompensated ... or maybe Karl Malone is right.

but yeah, a bit of a bummer there.

caught 'em tonight - JB actually has become a much quieter singer, like to the point where she was generally the quietest of the three performers. my guess would be she's had some formal training and it's reigned her in a bit.

anyway, Dacus was fantastic and the group set was stunning. they (apparently for the first time) eschewed amplification for "Ketchum, ID" resulting in a startlingly warm singalong -- now that was something else

I just got home and someone has already put it up on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NxC76FD45M

man they kick so much ass

beautiful video

something about julien's voice instantly pierces my heart

ok, this is a silly thing to revive with, but imagine boygenius covering the roches' "hammond song"

hehe

that would be dope

I saw them in Vancouver this past weekend and it was really good. It was a pretty sad but beautiful few hours. Very moving. Maybe the best show I've seen this year.

hell yeah:

https://www.stereogum.com/2023750/watch-boygenius-cover-the-dixie-chicks-cowboy-take-me-away-in-seattle/video/

These shows look so great. I got tickets for The Tallest Man On Earth a long time ago so I’m going to miss the boygenius show tomorrow night. :(

Since this is the de facto Boygenius thread now, enjoy a Phoebe Bridgers Christmas song with Jackson Browne(!)

https://www.stereogum.com/2024160/phoebe-bridgers-christmas-song/music/

UM

love everything about the story behind it, song's gorgeous too

McCarthy Trenching is singer-songwriter Dan McCarthy’s band. We played a show together in Omaha this last year. They named the band after the trenching company owned by Dan’s uncle so they could sell those t-shirts instead of having to make their own. The first time I heard this song it hit me like a ton of bricks. A lot of McCarthy Trenching songs do that. It’s not that often that I hear a Christmas song that doesn’t make me want to quit music. I played a show in L.A. around the holidays last year where I covered it for the first time. Jackson Browne was there, and he came up to me after the show to tell me how much he loved the song. A couple days later, Dan got a Bandcamp notification on his desktop computer that someone paid 50 bucks for his record and wrote a nice note and signed it Jackson Browne. He thought someone was fucking with him. So when I decided to record a version of the song, I knew who I wanted to sing on it. Plus, I have wanted to make music with Jackson as long as I’ve wanted to make music.

that is awesome!

I love jackson browne

I love this song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrV4SFp5N0U

Cool that the guitar magazine bro seems to be a fan.

she really seems like the nicest person

and she does awesome things with her guitar

wild to imagine that future generations discovering julien baker will (probably) be able to find videos like this

wonder why it's unlisted

They keep them unlisted for the first week to push people to access it from their site.

aah, clever

https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2018/11/29/boygenius_cpollack_brick-02f55231f7ee6092d2ae7404589d9acb5525f594-s2000-c85.jpg
with love from Cameron Pollack/NPR

the boygenius ep is great. somehow i only discovered it now.

somehow I only tried her music lately, and now I am head over heels, can barely listen to anything else. it's as though "Little Fury Bugs" is a genre and it warrants 10000x investigations, every angle must be pursued. my ankles are sprained.

I've only heard Turn Out the Lights, did she cover that Death Cab song somewhere?

no, but "Appointments" for instance is a take on it, in the way that the lines of marble guide the sculpter's hand

Oh! I see what you mean now, sorry, that makes sense. Now I have another reason to go back to "Appointments" though!

the way she sings "marathon runner, my ankles are sprained", and in particular, the word "my" into the word "ankles", I could listen to that forever and ever and ever. I feel a terrible loss, or even a shame, there that I can't understand outside the singing. is shame supposed to be so beautiful?

new shit!

https://youtu.be/bWAOkg2i6_g

there is actual percussion! it sounds good! album is out in february.

Yeah I like that.

Once again I fell into a loop of watching live performances of her and it’s so hypnotizing. Seeing her perform
is the definition of Sehnsucht for me.

I have only listened to Julien Baker a lil bit (mostly the boygenius record) but this is one of my favorite ILM thread titles

'hypnotizing' otm

The boygenius record is probably the best thing she has been involved with. I don’t think I actually like listening to her lyrics or her records in a way that I enjoy let’s say, Phoebe Bridgers, but seeing her live performances is so enthralling to me because she seems to go somewhere else when doing so. The way she gets completely lost in it is not that common to see imho... it’s the small performances of her... I’ve seen videos of her with big audiences and I don’t think it works that well because she’s sounds more self-conscious.

I have the opposite problem. I can't get into any of Bridgers's solo stuff but I love Baker and Boygenius

I've fallen down a couple of Baker YouTube wormholes recently. She's captivating on stage - lost in it and seemingly lacking in self-consciousness. I've been trying to find a non-weird way of saying 'it's her mouth' but there it is. That turn of the head she does. She's so good.