#turn out the lights

even // julien baker

Julien Baker at the Aladdin Theatre
Portland, Oregon
December 2017

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Julien Baker on writing ‘Claws in Your Back’ and her reason to stay alive. (x)

❝… What I was thinking when I wrote the song, I wanted ‘Claws in Your Back’ to be sort of the antithesis to the last song on the last record which is ‘Go Home’, and ‘Go Home’ is a sort of song that I wrote about the feeling of hopelessness, of, you know… things are so bad on this earth, there’s so much despair and so much hurt that I would prefer if I could just move on to the next plane of existence where, hopefully, things will be better. But that’s such a sad way to look at things, that we’re just killing time on Earth where things are awful until we can move on and, you know… be better, instead of try to make things better right now. Why would you want to delay healing, and why would you want to delay helping each other? And learning that lesson occurred over the time it took me to write all these songs. And so at the end in ‘Claws in Your Back’, when I was writing that song… It’s about some of my friends who were feeling that same kind of hopelessness. And when my heart was breaking to see them feeling the way that I had, I thought, ‘I wish I could tell them that if they could just hang on that there’s a way out’, and there’s a reason to stay, as in, like, literally stay alive. And so I take it back, I don’t just want to waste my life being sad. I want to stay, I want to make it better. I want to try.❞

❝My reason to stay alive is to show people that there is a reason to stay alive.❞

Singers that are helping me stop loving him - even though I don’t want to

     julien baker – conversation piece