In the single most quotable moment of her debut album Sprained Ankle, the 19-year-old Tennessee singer-songwriter Julien Baker plaintively and matter-of-factly mutter-coos, "Wish I could write songs about anything other than death." That's the closest she ever comes to a statement of intent, a this-is-who-I-am moment. But she's selling herself short. Baker writes songs about so many other things. She writes songs about lying in a hospital bed and waiting for consciousness to fade away, listening to the beeps and whirrs of the machines around her and feeling the cold invasiveness of an IV needle in her skin. She writes songs about wandering around a public park, strung out in the dead of the night, trying to figure out if she should complain to God or rejoice in her own squalor. She writes songs about the moment of a devastating breakup, seeing it coming a mile away and being unable to stop it: "I knew I should have said something, but I couldn’t find anything to say, so I just said nothing, sat and watched you drive away." She sings, over and over again, about seeing her veins turn different colors. Compared to all that, songs about death are easy. Here's a song about death: I'm a fucking skeleton, whoa whoa whoa, I'll bite your head off. See how easy that was? I just wrote that. It was nothing. Baker writes songs about living, about staring at the darkness at the core of your being and deciding to struggle on anyway. So no, she doesn't only write songs about death. Her songs are way heavier than that.