Nashville Artist of the Month Julien Baker says she stocked her playlist with “the songwriters or the musicians that I want to hear speak to me.”
Many of the 15 tracks she chose are the work of women or bands that prominently feature the voices of female members, and that’s by design.
“I started seeking out female-identifying voices long ago,” she reflects, “because, yeah, it was easier for me to invest emotionally in those voices, both literally the authorial voice and the singing voice.”
Baker also shaped her list with location in mind: “As much as I can sit here and email and text and Zoom with all my friends about songs and their music and my music and being a musician, there’s something that I miss so much about the communal atmosphere of music and going to your friend’s shows and seeing them shine and do their thing. So, I tried to keep it predominantly to Tennessee artists, because I’ve been missing my music family.”