Julien Baker is inextricably linked to the Telecaster, largely staying faithful to the model throughout her illustrious solo career and with boygenius. She recently shared why it’s her workhorse guitar, and why she believes the Tele is the most usable electric guitar out there.
“The beautiful thing about the Telecaster [is that] there's not a formula. There's not a way a Tele is supposed to sound. It's not imbuing the player with parameters of style. It's your most standard, and in a way, your most usable guitar,” she tells Fender, before launching into a stunning rendition of her 2017 song, Funeral Pyre. For this performance, Baker demoed a birch green Telecaster from Fender's recent Player II series.
“It doesn't seem like the instrument is informing a ton of your style. It's not forcing you to play in a certain way, or demanding that you execute it with a certain formal skill. I think it leaves a lot of room as such, like a blank canvas for you to discover how [it] is most comfortable for you to play.”
In a 2021 interview with Australian Guitar, Baker discussed how her love affair with Teles started. “As a child, I never had much breadth of knowledge about guitars. I got an SG, and I didn’t really like my SG because the neck was too thick. Then I had an Ibanez Artcore, which I got because I wanted a hollowbody Gretsch or ES-335 but I couldn’t afford one.
“And I mean, no shame on Ibanez! They have some great guitars, but that one just didn’t have particularly good hardware, so I replaced it with a Telecaster – and that was, like, the Goldilocks zone.
“But it’s interesting because it’s like proximity breeding complacency – I know a Telecaster, I know how a Telecaster is supposed to sound and how it’s supposed to work, and I’ve always just felt like there’s not much I couldn’t accomplish with it.”
Baker has recently announced a solo tour that kicks off on October 23 in Chicago, Illinois. The tour marks Baker's first solo outing after boygenius' Best Alternative Music Album Grammy win and the band's hiatus announcement earlier this year.
