Faith Healer

"Faith Healer" opens with a wall of electric guitar distortion that sounds like release — cathartic, almost violent in its fullness after the careful minimalism Baker is known for. This is one of her most explicitly rock-coded moments, the rhythm section driving with genuine force, the guitars layered into something that approaches noise-rock at its edges while maintaining melodic clarity at the center. The song operates in the territory of misplaced devotion — the way people project salvific power onto other people, onto substances, onto anything that promises relief from themselves, and the particular devastation when those objects of faith reveal themselves as incapable of what you needed them to be. Baker's vocal delivery here is more urgent than plaintive, the performance carrying a quality of urgency, of someone trying to outrun something that keeps pace exactly. The faith healer of the title is a figure who arrives with promise and leaves having taken something, and the song refuses to assign clear culpability — it understands the seduction of false remedy too well to be simply accusatory. Culturally, the track connects to a tradition of southern rock and gospel that Baker grew up adjacent to — the structures of religious devotion applied to secular hungers. This is music for the car, windows down, volume high, when you need the sound itself to do some work — when the feeling is too large for quiet.