Julien Baker's "Appointments" Lyrics Explained: The Refrain Is the Only Trying Left

"Appointments" follows a narrator who stays home while a frustrated partner walks out, after being told to talk to somebody and stop missing appointments. The narrator says lying isn't worth the effort, then spends the rest of the song telling one lie on repeat: it'll all turn out all right. That knowingly false sentence is the trying everyone says is missing.

Introduction

The door is still open when the narrator says they won't stop anyone from leaving, and the line comes out flat and tired, like something rehearsed alone in a kitchen more than once. The song stays inside after that door shuts, with one person left to sit with the accusation they just heard: you're not trying. What follows is a song about depression and the people who run out of patience with it, and about a narrator who answers that charge the only way they still can. They pick a sentence they know is false and keep saying it.

Verse 1: losing the argument on purpose

Most of the first verse is reported speech, the narrator relaying what the other person thinks, wants, and won't quite say out loud, so that by the end we know the partner's complaints better than we know the narrator's own feelings. The partner wanted "someone who I used to be like," an earlier version who presumably showed up on time and looked like effort. The shame is old and practiced. "You don't have to remind me so much" tells you the reminders have happened plenty.

Read that defense slowly. The narrator refuses to argue because arguing would mean lying, which admits the partner is right while also confessing they're too drained to fake otherwise, so the only rebuttal on offer proves the charge. Then comes the suggestion to "talk to somebody again," someone unnamed who "knows how to help," and the verse ends on its title word, stranded on its own line like a task nobody checked off.

That "'til then" stings. Getting better gets pushed off to some future office, and in the meantime the narrator's whole job is logistics. Show up.

Verse 2: trying on a waiting-room slogan

Once the partner is gone, the narrator stops reporting and starts bargaining, and the bargains are strangely calm: if I ruin this, I can live with it; if I fail again, you're still listening. Ruin and failure get treated as likely outcomes, things to plan around rather than prevent, and "Nothing turns out like I pictured it" slides in as plain fact.

You could frame this sentence above a potted plant in a therapist's lobby: the blank page as opportunity, the void as a place to paint something new. The narrator reaches for it the way you'd pull on someone else's coat, and the "maybe" and the "just" give the game away, because this is comfort borrowed from somewhere else, tested to see if a nice idea can cover a hollow feeling. Canvases are the only object the narrator picks up in the entire song, and they're a metaphor for nothing being there. It almost fits.

Who is "still listening"? I can't settle it. It might be the partner who just walked out, or the "somebody" from the first verse, or something larger that a person talks to when the house is empty, and a fan who hears a faith song in that line has a fair case, since the refrain's "I have to believe" hands them plenty of ammunition.

The turn: a hope that arrives already cancelled

The sentence takes itself back in the same breath. Knowing and believing split apart, and the narrator refuses to let either one go, holding a fact in one hand and its opposite in the other. The hope gets spoken and voided before it can even land.

Now go back to the first verse. The narrator wouldn't argue because "it's not worth the effort to lie," and here they are, lying, out loud, fully aware of it. So the lie costs effort, and the narrator pays it anyway. The partner left convinced nobody in this house was trying, and this line shows what trying looks like from the inside when there's nothing visible to point to: no kept appointment, no brighter mood at dinner, only a sentence propped up by force.

The chorus admits the trick. The reassurance offered to "you" was aimed back at the speaker all along, a way of taking care of yourself by pretending to take care of someone else. That "have to" carries the weight of obligation, the way you have to eat or have to get out of bed, and once it arrives the song stops describing anything. No more partner's thoughts, no more canvases, no more scene. One sentence repeats until it wears smooth from handling, and the repetition becomes the job. The lie is the work.

Bridge: the voice in the back

Behind the lead, a second voice chants the refrain and then mutters "Probably not," saying aloud what the lead keeps swallowing. The song lets the doubt and the belief sing at the same time, and neither one wins.

Conclusion

The partner walked out believing the narrator wasn't trying, and on the visible evidence, a missed appointment, a shrug, a refusal to argue, that verdict seems fair. The song spends its back half answering it without ever addressing the partner, because the effort it describes happens where nobody can check: one person alone at night, forcing a sentence through until it can bear weight. I hear the refrain change as it goes, belief wearing down into something closer to a grip on a railing. Nobody would call that recovery. It might still be enough to get the narrator to morning, and to the phone, to reschedule.

Lyric analysis powered by Scalpel.