“这是一个难题，不是吗？”朱利安·贝克（Julien Baker）is reflecting on how she chose to approach the follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2017 album,熄灯- 对成瘾，信仰，性和心理健康的脆弱而坚定的探索，主要伴随着朱利安的结晶混响。Telecaster，只有偶尔的钢琴，小提琴或器官会增加额外的深度。这是一个神奇，亲密，令人心碎的记录，但它造成了自己的问题。
- Read more:朱利安·贝克（Julien Baker）承认，她对在新唱片上打鼓感到“折磨”
“I didn’t want to go back over similar ideas – that’s obviously a fear of people who put out small instrumentation records,” Baker tells us from her home in Tennessee, musing on the denser, more layered production on the forthcoming小遗忘。“If you’d been doing something for four years, you’d want to do it differently. And I feel like it’s always going to be one way or the other, right? It’s like斯普林斯汀推出内布拉斯加州or Dylan going electric, and all of a sudden people are like, ‘What’s going on!?’ Well, they’re just musicians doing something different… but I felt tortured about it!
“我真的很想在唱片上有打击乐的元素，因为我想扩大声音调色板并找到更多的歌曲。但是在某个时候，我只是走到这些疯狂的恐惧之外，就像，‘但是你不是鲍勃·迪伦不过……没关系！你为什么对此感到害怕？只需将鼓记录在记录上即可。冷静下来，这没什么大不了的！’”
The expanded options Baker gave herself certainly add a strikingly different dimension to小遗忘, but this is still very much an intimate, personal record – aided by trusted engineer and collaborator Calvin Lauber, Baker played all the instruments you hear, even when she was out of her comfort zone.
“I played all of the drums on the record because I wanted them to have an ‘un-drummerly’ sound,” she chuckles. “I think sometimes when you’re less proficient at something your non-technique-grounded ways of achieving things end up being really interesting.”
更有趣的是，贝克这次是如何探索吉他的 - 尽管仍然有很多郁郁葱葱的Arpeggios在唱片中浏览唱片，但歌曲，例如硬线标题曲目展示了她的吉他实验中更粗糙，更深奥的一面，这为程序增添了截然不同的氛围。
“我只是想发出更多丑陋的声音！”她说。“因为我觉得熄灯我当时想，“一切都必须精心策划和美丽！”我错过了发出丑陋的声音！有一个笑话，我的董事会上有四个混响踏板，人们总是喜欢，‘为什么？！没人能告诉！’
“我想成为最好的独奏家，在很大程度上是因为我是女孩。我想露面在我的伙伴车库里的果酱，向他们展示我可以很好，成为一个女孩”
“One of the dudes I used to tour with once came up to me after a soundcheck when I’d playing around with one of my reverb pedals because it wasn’t working, and he said, ‘I see you up there pressing all those buttons and it sounds the same to me…’ And I was like, ‘Why can no-one hear this but me!?’ It’s that classic guitar nerd thing where you’re like, ‘But the tone! The tone has to be perfect!’
“And so this time I thought, ‘Well why not try to make something interesting with much broader strokes?’ So if there’s going to be a tremolo on it, it’s going to be a square wave, and if there’s a distortion it’s going to be a weird squashy fuzz.”
练习不完美
贝克的早熟才华毫不奇怪地使她很早就找到了吉他，尽管在其他音乐方向上没有步履蹒跚的步骤。
我的父母让我上了钢琴课，就像您将他们带到足球练习以及所有其他东西的方式一样，试图找出他们擅长的东西。“而且我在钢琴上非常恐怖，因为我从未练习过。”
事实证明，这是她家人中的其他人在学习一种真正激发了她对吉他的热爱的乐器的尝试。
“我父亲在房子里有吉他，他在自学如何演奏，但我会去偷它！”她记得。“It’s the guitar I still play today, because he eventually was like, ‘Here, just take it!’ This guitar was like $100, super cheap, and is now just covered in a whole bunch of skateboard stickers, but I still play it live! And it works, because it’s kinda like that good/bad thing – it’s what I want!”
她渴望拿起父亲的廉价声学的愿望是由Pop-Punk迷住了年轻的Julien的可及能量的渴望，它陷入了早期的大门，尽管这肯定导致了一些与齿轮相关的失误。
When I got into ‘guitar’ music that wasn’t my parents’ music, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh,Green Day呢那个家伙弹吉他 - 我想弹吉他！’”朱利安惊呼。“从字面上看，我有一个七年级时得到的SG，因为我想从打倒男孩”合唱团的吉他，我不会闭嘴！我当时想，‘我什么都不想要！我不想要食物，我不想让你为我的大学付费，我只想要那把吉他！’愚蠢的事情是，尤其是对于我播放的音乐……我讨厌SGS！Not that I hate the guitar, but I hate them for what and how I play – the neck is crazy wide, they’re clumsy and dark… I’m like, ‘What was I doing?!’ I just wanted that guitar.”
Pop-punk is not famous for its technically challenging guitar work, but it provided the gateway to Julien developing into the wonderfully fluid and expressive lead player she is today, though the route she took to get there proved a little circuitous.
“我只是想整天整天玩Powerchords多年！”她解释说。“但是后来我开始听音乐，例如《秋天的男孩》和我的化学浪漫，他们都有……独奏？我当时想，‘我不想只弹节奏吉他！’我想成为最好的独奏家，在很大程度上是因为我是女孩。我想露面在我的伙伴车库里的果酱，向他们展示我可以成为一个好人，成为一个女孩 - 听起来很俗气，这是最俗气的事情！我很想播放音乐，这让我感到非常恐惧，而且里面有很多家伙，以至于我想，‘看这个！’
“但是这影响了我的吉他弹奏！因此，我参加的第一支乐队最终成为明星杀手[朱利安的大学时代乐队发行了好评American Blues在2013年分裂之前]，每首歌中都必须独奏一个大型混音，以便所有人都知道我很好，因为我对吉他弹弹奏非常自觉！我当时想，‘他们首先要知道我擅长吉他！’我为什么要这样做？！它是如此无味，但是当我们想把所有东西切碎时，我们都经历了一个阶段！”
On the slab
她的SGS日子现在很长，虽然她当然不是吉他收藏家，但很少见到她弹奏的电吉他，这不是一个小但心爱的电视台风格乐器之一。朱利安（Julien）来到电视上，毫无疑问，她现在已经找到了一生的吉他，尽管进行了一些调整。
“我不知道为什么我从不喜欢Stratbut I never did,” she explains when talking about the protracted road from that wide-necked SG to her current squeeze. I used to say that a Strat was a one-trick pony, and I think that’s a really unfortunate way to look at Stratocasters – they’re really cool for a lot of different sounds. But Telecaster was the most comfortable thing for me, and I like the particular foibles of it.
“这很有趣，因为我正在寻找我为从事兼职工作而保存的第一把吉他，这就是伊巴内斯ArtCore - 这是伊巴内斯（Ibanez）上没有阴影 - 是5,000美元的负担得起的版本格雷施或我想要的335。我当时想，‘好吧，我负担得起，它是半空的，它有笨蛋……”
“我开始和皇后Zoia一起玩。是数学，伙计。我认为这只是一个效果踏板！但是后来我都对自己感到生气，就像：“我不敢相信我不明白这件事！”
And the craziest thing is that it’s double-wide, and it fed back infinitely, and it was horrible, and I was like, ‘I guess this is just my tone now!’ So many things I just took for granted, like, ‘This is how my guitar’s gonna sound, I can’t do anything about it.’ I also strung that guitar with nines… who sets a guitar up with nines?! I have tiny hands, but they’re not that tiny!
“然后我第一次玩电视广播员，那是精致而美丽的交叉点，一点点紧缩，这正是我想要的。我坚持玩电视台的原因是，这是我所满意的，而且我也有这个特定的mod，您可以在系列和平行系列中运行拾音器，这听起来很棒，这听起来很棒Lollar那是我大多数时候弹吉他的脖子。我想要的东西比普通的电视脖子拾音器要比普通的电视拾音器更热得多，而且更容易分手……我可以继续使用Tele Pickup Mods！”
Pedal power
Last year was, of course, a year like no other, and one that created huge challenges and obstacles for musicians who would normally be spending their time on the road. For Baker, who was already off the road making小遗忘，自从她上路以来已经有一年多了，但是她以类似的方式孤立地应对了强制时间：通过对效果踏板变得非常书呆子。
她同意：“我的生活发生了很大的变化，但随后，全球情况在我的生活方式中施加了巨大的变化。”“但是自从我们完成唱片以来，我一直在努力分数，这对我来说真的很有趣。我非常喜欢循环，并尝试自己构造所有层，但是我觉得我没有以可能的方式利用循环和采样。所以我得到了一个[Chase Bliss] Blooper…哦，天哪，那东西吗？吹我的想法！
“另一件事使我完全螺旋式旋转是我开始玩EmpressZoia. It ismath伙计。我认为这是一个效果踏板！这很谦卑！因为我看到了演示，所以我想我想像的是您可以构建吉他声音，几乎像是音序器单元，但您拥有无限堆叠的参数。And you can use it like that, but that’s like, one-tenth of what you can use it for, and so I got into this shit where it’s like… you have to create the ins and the outs of the signal flow, and if you want it to be a sequencer you have to like, pick a wave and then put an oscillator in there! People who do Eurorack stuff would hear me talking about this stuff and be like, ‘You’re a simpleton!’ But I’m out here with this guitar pedal and I had no clue how to do stuff!
“But then I was all offended at myself – like, ‘I can’t believe I don’t understand this thing!’ So I sat there, and I watched this three-hour-long Zoia tutorial on YouTube and I figured out how to make crazy noises, while also having a basic understanding of modular synthesis. It’s not a lot, but even that was a crazy learning experience for me, because now I’m not pretending to know what attack, decay, release and sustain are – I actually know what those mean!
“这是一个很小的回报！因为我将花两个小时处理这件事，而我所做的就是创建这个最基本的欧洲序列，例如“ Boop，Boop，Boop-Boop”。我向我的女友展示它，她说：“哇……那是两个小时吗？”
花了两个小时的时间弄乱一个凉爽的新踏板似乎是在我们的书中度过一天的一种有趣的方式，沉浸在自己的手工艺品中的自由是一年来远离别人的意外之后，而一个朱利安肯定没有’t take for granted.
“It’s something that I’ve become so immensely grateful for in all this,” she affirms. “It’s a tradeoff maybe, but I woke up at 8am this morning and just practised for two hours, and now I’m going to do interviews for a few hours and then I’m going to practise until 5pm, and try to sculpt the right tones for a live session.
“曾经有一段时间我上大学并找到工作，然后也许在晚上，我会有一些时间来磨练自己的手艺。因此，音乐是我的工作，这是一种巨大的特权。”
“It’s a privilege that I get to do that – because there was a time when I was in college and trying to get good grades, and I had to get a job because I was broke, and then maybe in the evening, I would get some time to hone my craft. So it’s a huge privilege that music is my job, and I feel like if it’s going to be my job then it is actually a worthy way to spend my time – I’m going to sit down and change my understanding of how to make sounds by building it out of a controlled voltage signal.
“And it’s been helpful in that it distracts me from the fact that quarantine is happening, and there are at-risk people in my life, so I’m stuck in my house watching while the world is freaking out, and I’m like, ‘Well I have this one meaningful activity that I can do!’ It’s almost like this whole quarantine has been me being obsessed with sound.”
缓慢的果酱
The world-altering effects of the pandemic have altered the way many of us relate to the world of work and the obligations therein, and as music is her job, COVID-19 has helped Julien to reevaluate how she relates to the art that she makes.
她解释说：“我一直以一种强制性的方式与音乐互动。”“并不是说这曾经有必要。But it feels like there was this whole sense of always having to be going, going, going… and then when your life halts and everyone around you’s life halts, you realise, ‘Oh I actually do have two hours to spend geeking out about modular synthesis, because that makes me feel good – not because it’s productive, or because I feel like I have to be writing a song, or I have to be creating music because music is my job. I’m like, ‘I’m just going to sit here and learn thisRufus Wainwright歌曲是因为和弦很漂亮！’这是与音乐互动的更真实的方式。”
在与其他音乐家互动时，毫无疑问，朱利安和独立摇滚灯之间的纽带有一些特别之处Phoebe Bridgers和露西·达克斯（Lucy Dacus）。Since they released their critically acclaimed EP asBoygenius早在2018年，这三位年轻吉他手之间的超凡脱俗的化学反应已重新点燃，这是Bridgers and Dacus的发行版，以及三人组的人声向Paramore主持人Hayley Williams的首张独奏专辑，盔甲的花瓣。那时也就不足为奇了，布里奇斯和达克斯开启了Favor- 专辑中更具实验性和雄心勃勃的时刻之一。
贝克回忆说：“这很奇怪，因为他们俩都碰巧在纳什维尔到这里 - 我认为露西正在使用工作室完成她的新唱片或单曲之一。”“And she asked, ‘Would you guys sing on my song?’ And I was like, ‘If you guys sing on my song…’ and then I think it was Phoebe who said, ‘Can we all sing on each others’ songs?!’ It was a fun couple of days to come back together after doing that tour together and playing those songs.”
Boygenius及其接下来的巡回演出显然是一个时刻，它巩固了这三位年轻和非凡的音乐家之间的特殊纽带，这显然对这三个人制作音乐的方式产生了持久的影响。
“If I’m going to be lame about it, they both have small egos and they’re good communicators, and they’re kind friends,” Julien explains of what makes the bond between them so special. “Because I did all the songwriting on my records and played all the instruments, I didn’t have somebody who could use to gauge how the songs were going, and I hadn’t had that since I was in The Star Killers when I was in college and high school. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh! Making music just because it’s fun, and being able to bounce ideas off other people, yeah man… it’s been pretty lonely just writing songs on my own!’
“现在，我们仍然会来回送几个小时，然后‘您如何看待这一点？’这实际上使我变得不那么宝贵，音乐和零件。如果有人不喜欢我的主意，那并不像我的世界被摧毁，就像：“好吧，我有一千个想法，让我们在入睡之前尽可能多地尝试其中的许多想法！”
“我讨厌使用这个词，因为它有点俗气，但这是一种非常纯粹的音乐体验。写作时，我的脑海里很容易，因为这只是我在卧室里试图诗意的！在整个体验中拥有额外的善意并最终与人分享，真是太好了。”
小遗忘朱利安·贝克（Julien Baker）于2月26日出局斗牛士。