Julien Baker is working her way towards dropping a new album. In October, she announced that Little Oblivions will be released in February. She shared “Faith Healer” when she made that announcement, and last night, she brought the track to The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.
Baker and her band took to the Nashville venue Exit/In for the performance, which was a gradually swelling affair until it reached its climactic end. Baker is one of the most powerful vocalists in all of music when she really belts it, and she got to show some of that off to a national TV audience last night.
Baker previously said of the song:
“Put most simply, I think that ‘Faith Healer’ is a song about vices, both the obvious and the more insidious ways that they show up in the human experience. I started writing this song 2 years ago and it began as a very literal examination of addiction. For awhile, 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.”
Watch Baker perform “Faith Healer” on Colbert above.
Little Oblivions is out 2/26 via Matador Records. Pre-order it here.
