Coming in from the cold with Julianna Barwick's new album

JULIANNA Barwick is contradictory. Her music is esoteric, often eerie. In person, however, Barwick is chatty, upbeat. and sociable, so the isolation of Iceland, where she recorded her new album, Nepenthe, drove her to distraction. She would sit in cafes, watching the world pass. The loneliness worsened as the weeks passed. She worried for her sanity.

“I’m not really big on being on my own,” she says, in the living room of her parents’ home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, struggling to be heard over the barking of the family dog.

“I don’t mind touring without anyone. That’s fine. I’ve done it over and over. To be in the same place, day after day, without company, is different. It doesn’t agree with me.”