On October 23, Julien Baker played the final gig of her three-day stint at The Middle East Downstairs. The Cambridge stop on Baker’s highly anticipated rock club residency tour featured full-band performances of brand-new music and fresh takes on older material.
These days, newer fans probably know Julien Baker best as one third of the indie rock super group Boygenius. The association is natural, considering that her last solo album Little Oblivions was released over five years ago and Boygenius has occupied much of her time since. When she announced new music and the rock club residency tour with her own band in mid-September, the buzz built quickly. On the first day of the in-person-only ticket sales, fans queued outside of the box office at The Middle East as early as 5:00 in the morning.
This hype persisted throughout the three nights, and even on the final night, repeat attendees were no less enthusiastic about catching another Julien Baker gig. Local legends Future Teens started the evening early; 30 minutes early, to be precise. They had the audience on board right away and were received with all the warmth one might hope to find at a hometown set. As a pleasant surprise, Julien Baker jumped on stage to join them for a performance of “Team Sports.” Eagle-eyed fans might have also spotted Lucy Dacus off to the side of the room.
The audience did not have to wait long before Baker started her headline set. Unlike nights one and two, the entire timetable for night three was pushed up half an hour. Baker explained that she and her band wanted to catch the show at the Upstairs venue. Have Heart, the hardcore punk band from New Bedford, Massachusetts, were headlining their own show, and Julien Baker and company were determined to make it there. She reassured her fans that she wasn’t going to rush through anything, but she also made her intentions clear that as soon as her gig was over, she was planning to make a beeline straight through the crowd to get upstairs.
True to her announcement, Julien Baker had new music to share. Nearly half of her set consisted of unreleased songs. In addition to the new music, Baker also delivered updated performances of her older work. The soft-spoken artist came to prominence well over a decade ago with her unassuming indie-folk debut Sprained Ankle, but over the years Baker steadily evolved her music toward the bigger sound found in tracks like “Hardline” and “Bloodshot” from Little Oblivions. That more robust character was found in the harder-edged renditions of “Even” and “Shadowboxing” from her sophomore album Turn Out the Lights. The song “Everybody Does,” originally a self-flagellating acoustic track from Sprained Ankle, was transformed in the live setting to something more akin to a cathartic group therapy session. The entire room screamed the lyrics “I know myself better than anybody else” back at JB, eliciting a “fuck yeah, Boston!” before the full band joined in for a climactic breakdown. Baker reflected on the changes: “We’ve performed these songs a lot of different ways and they’ve changed as we’ve changed, and I don’t know, I love live music because it’s alive. The recording’s a document of history, and this is like a changing conversation that we get to all have together.” That sentiment encapsulated the essence of the rock club residency tour, with its emphasis on the intimate interaction between Baker and her well-established fanbase.
By 9:50 pm, it was time for JB and her band to make good on their promise to take the fastest route possible from stage to egress. The crowd dutifully parted down the middle and Julien Baker triumphantly sprinted through, making it upstairs just in time for the start of Have Heart’s set.
Check out all of Greg’s photos from the show below.
