Julien Baker

Her ten planets split almost evenly, three in air, three in water, two in fire and two in earth, which is a less common result than any lopsided chart. Air puts the case and water feels it, and when neither has the numbers neither gets the last word. Baker was born in Memphis in the autumn of 1995 and has released music both under her own name and inside a band, two formats that ask opposite things of a songwriter: one wants a single voice and the other wants a voice with room left in it.

The Sun, Mercury and Venus sit inside eleven degrees of Libra, the sign that will not close a question while the other side is still unsaid. Identity, speech and taste in one narrow band are not three separate decisions: for anyone who writes words to music, the sentence and the sound get settled at the same moment rather than one being fitted to the other later. Libra also resists a verdict, which is a working difficulty rather than a trait when the job is finishing songs. The Sagittarius Moon has no such hesitation.

Mercury and Venus are conjunct within a quarter of a degree, about as close as that pair comes, and the Moon sits on Jupiter inside two thirds of a degree. The first welds the line to the taste; the second gives private feeling an appetite for scale, and a writer this careful ending up on large records rather than small ones is that appetite getting its way. Four of the ten were retrograde at her birth, Mercury among them, and a retrograde Mercury does its editing inward before anything is said aloud.

Saturn finished its first circuit of her chart on 24 February 2025, at twenty nine, arriving back at the degree of Pisces it held when she was born. Saturn deals in what has been built and what it cost, and it returned to a position that was already moving backwards at her birth, which keeps the accounting private. A decade of releases by then, made in two different arrangements, is a fair amount for one lap of the slowest visible planet to have produced.