_Search on the internet (let’s use DuckDuckGo) for Julien Baker’s song “Mental Math,” and you get pretty quickly to a site that uses AI to generate an “essay” about the “meaning” of the song. It’s an insult to eighth graders to say that it sounds like a rushed eighth-grade English paper due next period: “In summary, ‘Mental Math’ delves into the complexity of emotional struggles, self-doubt, and the challenges of effective communication within a relationship.” (Note: That’s the second use of “delves” in under six hundred words.)

Human critics have their own struggles trying to express the singularity of Baker’s artistry. In grappling recently with the music of boygenius, the Grammy-winning band composed of Baker, Lucy Dacus, and Phoebe Bridgers, categorically inclined profilers have tended to tag Baker as the “heart” or the “voice” in a group that also includes the “soul” (Bridgers) and the “brain” (Dacus). Naturally, this reductive thinking does a disservice to all three collectively as a band and individually as artists, but to be fair, as John Lennon put it, “Writing about music is like talking about fucking. Who wants to talk about it?” Well, a lot of us, I guess, including me and AI.

So, here I go. To me, the word that best describes Baker’s music, whether live or on a recording, is “presence.” This can have a religious connotation, and fans have responded to her in just that way. “Another thing that profiles do is talk about her audiences,” wrote Alejandra Oliva in the Christian Century magazine in 2023. “It’s like church, they might say. Hundreds of people, hushed and hanging on her every word, faces turned up to the stage. They’re not wrong.” Baker’s biography, again for the categorically minded, as a “queer Christian” something—“singer-songwriter”? “Memphian”? “addict in recovery”?—invites theological musing, but my own perspective comes from before I knew any of those categories, or at least knew only “Memphian.”

When I first listened to her 2015 debut Sprained Ankle, I was an editor at this magazine and wrote about her in an unsigned online piece as an artist from the South to watch. Two years later, I recruited her to write a column for the magazine’s website as part of our series “The By and By,” guessing that she would be as thoughtful, engaging, and skillful in prose as she was in her lyrics.

This is where “presence” comes back in. One of her publicists at that time requested to be the intermediary, having me send edits through him. God bless him, that was his job, but we immediately cut him out of the exchange. Direct connection is not just her style but her raison d’être, and presence flows not only from her art but from her being. Listen to the music. Read those columns. Hear her speak on a podcast, like the one with Katie Pruitt called The Recovering Catholic from 2021, when she’s punctuating thoughts on the paradoxical institutional corruption and true communion of churches with “Dude!” And marvel at the nimbleness of her mind and the deep engagement with her interviewer. In every medium, she fits the definition of presence offered by philosopher Gabriel Marcel in The Mystery of Being: “[W]hen somebody’s presence does really make itself felt, it can refresh my inner being; it reveals me to myself, it makes me more fully myself than I should be if I were not exposed to its impact.”

Quoting lines from “Mental Math” that show the song’s speaker winding her way through her mind to solve the problem of herself, a Reddit commenter in an r/JulienBaker thread seemed to feel Baker’s presence in ways that recall Marcel’s description:

“maybe if i were a little patient / but i never learned the virtue in waiting / it’s too late anyway to take it back / cause i have a lot to say / and never in the right way / and if i could just explain / myself again” from mental math.

there’s so many jb lyrics i love and think about constantly and low key changed my life but this one is just so personal to me. it feels like she took pulled the feeling right out of my head and made it into coherent words.

Baker is a serious person and artist who has suffered and struggled and written music about those experiences, but to determine, as one Pitchfork critic did, that her “music is all calamity” seems to ignore her wit. That was the Pitchfork reviewer’s opening salvo in writing about the B-Sides EP, recorded during the sessions for 2021’s Little Oblivions and on which “Mental Math” appears. As an example of her “jarring images” of that calamity, the reviewer quoted these lines from “Mental Math”: “Hanging on a ledge, outside of your house / Trying not to freak out, staring at the ground / Doing math in my head, how far is it down?” To me, the image is not “jarring” but classic comedy, Harold Lloyd hanging from a clock hand, high above a city street. Danger and ridiculous thoughts coexisting simultaneously. Obviously you have to do mental math because you’re dangling from a ledge and can’t hold pencil and paper! Comedy and calamity hang together.

The song is also about listening and not listening, and how the difficulty of balancing contradictory impulses—such as self-sabotage and self-preservation—can foreclose or undermine connection. It reminded me of something Baker wrote in her first essay for the Oxford American, titled “Doing Nothing”: “By listening to others’ stories we learn how to tell our own stories with more reverence, with more awareness and perspective, how to situate ourselves in the universal character-cast of human beings. Playing music for a living makes creating and sharing thoughts central to my existence, and it affords me an atypical platform to promote things that are important to me. Yet ironically, what having a microphone has taught me is how much I have to learn from listening.”

Silence is presence.

Julien Baker’s “Mental Math” is Track 15 on the Memphis Music Issue LP. Click here for full song credits and liner notes.