Julien Baker has announced her new album, ‘Little Oblivions’.
Due for release on 26th February via Matador Records, it marks the follow up to her 2017 second album and first on Matador, ‘Turn Out The Lights’ – plus her collaboration with Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus, boygenius.
The first single from the record is ‘Faith Healer’, which you can check out below.
“I think that ‘Faith Healer’ is a song about vices,” says Julien, “both the obvious and the more insidious ways that they show up in the human experience. I started writing this song two years ago and it began as a very literal examination of addiction. For a while, I only had the first verse, which is just a really candid confrontation of the cognitive dissonance a person who struggles with substance abuse can feel – the overwhelming evidence that this substance is harming you, and the counterintuitive but very real craving for the relief it provides. When I revisited the song I started thinking about the parallels between the escapism of substance abuse and the other various means of escapism that had occupied a similar, if less easily identifiable, space in my psyche.
“There are so many channels and behaviors that we use to placate discomfort unhealthily which exist outside the formal definition of addiction. I (and so many other people) are willing to believe whomever– a political pundit, a preacher, a drug dealer, an energy healer– when they promise healing, and how that willingness, however genuine, might actually impede healing.”
