The Catharsis of Julien Baker’s “Tokyo”

The Catharsis of Julien Baker’s “Tokyo”

Johanna Zen

“You want love/This is as close as you’re gonna get.” It’s hard to imagine a lyric full of such ancient-sounding sorrow coming from someone as young as 24 years old. But singer-songwriter Julien Baker has always had a way of rooting her own pain into some universal feeling that sounds as old as time. On her debut album from 2015, Sprained Ankle, Baker lays it all out on the line, admitting to us her worst fears, her darkest thoughts about herself, and her fixation with death. These themes have been present throughout her entire body of work, from her second album, Turn Out the Lights, to her work in supergroup boygenius with fellow singer-songwriters Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus. In her newest single “Tokyo,” she sings about her own sadness as if she’s in a trance. She compares herself to an airplane circling the title city, waiting to land but not knowing how to do so without crashing and burning, resigning herself to the inevitability of her self-destructive patterns.

It’s a cliché at this point to talk about how “there is strength in being vulnerable,” but Baker somehow does so in such a profound, beautiful way. She has spoken at length about her faith, her sobriety, and mental health. The visceral honesty in her songwriting allows her audience to confide in her feelings and allow themselves to fall apart, knowing at the end of the song that they’ll somehow be able to keep going. Nothing about Baker’s lyricism suggests defeat, but rather learning to live with the ebbs and flows of pain.

Mental health is a contentious subject, with popular media often treading the line between raising awareness and glorifying the issue. “Tokyo” finds a sweet spot that allows this vulnerability without celebrating the maladaptive patterns found inside or telling us that “it gets better.” Baker is not trying to be strong for her audience, or showing how she made it through a mental health crisis towards a fictitious “other side.” Instead, she’s telling us simply where she is right now, in a fragile place but still moving forward. Once, when asked what her reason is to stay alive, she answered with an easy smile, “my reason to stay alive is to show people that there is a reason to stay alive. How about that?”