Turn Out the Lights

The title track arrives as the record's structural spine: nearly five minutes that begin as a whisper and end as something close to a howl. Baker builds it on a hymn logic — a repeating minor-key guitar figure, the notes ringing out into cavernous reverb, joined eventually by strings and a piano that behaves like a slowly rising tide. There's no percussion; the swell is entirely a matter of layering and volume, which makes the climax feel like an interior pressure rather than a produced effect. Lyrically it addresses a lover or a God or possibly the same entity, someone whose presence turns the singer's private darkness into a room she has to keep tidy. The image of turning out the lights is doubled: the theatrical dark after a performance, and the moment alone with your own mind when the audience is gone and the noise you make becomes company. Her voice goes from near-spoken to full-throated, straining at the top of her range in a way that reads as unguarded rather than technically impressive. Recorded largely by Baker herself with minimal overdub trickery, it carries a live-room intimacy — you hear the guitar's fret noise, the breath before the phrase. Best encountered alone, at night, headphones on, without the intention of doing anything else.