Appointments

"Appointments" opens *Turn Out the Lights* the way a therapy session opens: hesitantly, with a single clean electric guitar figure looping under a voice that starts almost too close to the microphone. Julien Baker's production here is deliberately spare — reverb-drenched guitar, a slow accretion of piano and second guitar line, no drums to lean on — so that every crack in the vocal registers as an event. She sings about missing therapy appointments, about a partner waiting up, about the specific shame of being the person who cancels. The song's emotional architecture is built toward one line, repeated until it stops sounding like consolation and starts sounding like a bet placed against evidence: "it's going to be alright." That she stacks harmonies on herself for it — one voice trying to convince another — is the whole song's argument in miniature. Her vocal character is Southern, unpolished, prone to breaking into a thin upper register exactly where the emotion peaks. Baker was in her early twenties, a queer Christian in Memphis working out faith and self-destruction in public, and this record made her a central figure in that late-2010s confessional indie moment. It is a song for the drive home after a difficult conversation, or for anyone who has ever promised improvement they didn't yet believe in.