Suppose one glanced at the pitch for Send a Prayer My Way. One could conclude that this collaborative project is fraught with the dangers of novelty, a wild-hair whim of two indie rock darlings who wanted to cosplay as country music artists, blowing off steam from their day jobs. Julien Baker and Torres have established their street bona fides individually with critically acclaimed records and touring.
Julien Baker,whose soft soprano delicately delivers excruciating self-recriminations with a beauty that tears at the listener’s heart before bursting into emotive passion that borders on self-immolation, has emerged from punk origins to indie acoustics and intense electric shredding to establish a name in the indie rock pantheon. Her collaborative work in boygenius with Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers expands this penchant for vulnerable introspection to new heights and harmonies.
Torres‘ (the pseudonym under which musician Mackenzie Scott performs) self-reflective observations and honest vulnerability are translated through cinematic art-rock soundscapes. Her most recent album, What an Enormous Room, has embraced a more cinematic soundscape, whichPopMatterswriter Igor Bannikov describes asrich with “multilayered, luscious-yet-intimate arrangements and a lot of ringing void”.
Skepticism about a country project might seem reasonable, but it would be a shame if it caused one to pass on this album.
According to the advance press, Send a Prayer My Way is the fruition of an idea hatched in Scott and Baker’s conversation on a 2016 Chicago night when they were on the same bill at Lincoln Hall. Sure, both artists are offspring of the American South—Baker hails from Memphis, and Scott from Macon, Georgia. However, the gatekeepers might argue that a country music album is more than donning cowboy hats and boots and hiring a steel guitar player.
In a 2017 episode of Revisionist History (“King of Tears”), author Malcolm Gladwell claimed that country music’s genius is found within its narrative connection to our emotional lives. He claims that country music can make us cry in a way that rock music cannot because of the attention to the specificity of the genre’s audience. It is a music born of dust, sweat, struggle, and the interplay between the frailty and resilience of human life and connection.
Given the emotion-laden indie rock output of the two artists featured here, Gladwell’s thesis is tenuous. However, his point about the earthy narrative core of country music stands, and by this (but not only this)measure, Send a Prayer My Way is a damn good country record.
Scott and Baker have co-written a compact, yet rich collection of songs that testifies to their skill as country music practitioners. Their songs attend to many building blocks historically supporting the various additions in country’s structure. On the one hand, country music has excelled at delivering what Dolly Parton calls “sad ass songs”, tales of the mundane, but very real, woes of everyday folks. These are the commonalities of human life, like lost love, betrayal, working-class struggles, joy and sorrow, addiction, resilience, toxic religion, and the surprise of redemption.
On the other hand, Baker and Scott are attuned to the wry humor of outlaw country legends like Willie Nelson, grasping the vein in country music’s lineage that recognizes hard-won joy as a kissing cousin to not taking oneself too seriously.
“The Only Marble I’ve Got Left” performs this perfectly with the declaration, “The longer I live / The stranger I get.” Leaning into the possibility of absurdity performs the adage that “the only way out is through”, but the path proceeds with a steel pedal guitar and a Texas Two-Step. The use of the upright bass in the song traces the quirky rhythms of relationships that expose the storybook myths and declare that happiness differs from happily-ever-after. As Lyle Lovett drolly observed, “[she] wasn’t good, but she had good intentions.”
Examples abound throughout the record of Baker and Scott’s attentiveness to the currents connecting mood and music within the country genre. “Dirt”, the opener, matches the genre’s sparse acoustics with the qualifying awareness of mortality. “Bottom of the Bottle” has a fiddle intro reminiscent of the early Chicks, creating the hazy awareness of barroom koans like “Truth is easier to swallow at the bottom of the bottle.”
The Julien Baker-driven “Tape Runs Out” pairs a grungy Neil Young guitar intro with a narrator’s inner gaze into her shortcomings within a relationship she struggles to think she deserves. Lyrically, it would fit easily into the self-reflective odes within Baker’s solo work. However, the landscape is painted with the palette of folk and country rock, channeling Young’s Harvest strains through the filter of his “Ditch Trilogy”.
The most creative example of the dynamic interplay between musical style and story emerges in the ballad, “Tuesday”. Carried by Mackenzie Scott’s vocals, “Tuesday” is a retrospective narrative of a coming-of-age same-sex crush and the lingering trauma and shame driven by evangelical Christianity’s repressive homophobia. Thematically, the song echoes Lucy Dacus’ “Triple Dog Dare” from her Home Video album, but the power of “Tuesday” is enacted in the interplay between sparse acoustics and more lush walls of sound.
Scott sings that the song is an “exorcism”, an attempt to be released from shame’s possession. The dance between the blooming of awkward passions, the trauma of shame, and rejection is embodied by sparse acoustic guitar and lyrics sung slightly out of sync to the rhythm. When the wisdom of retrospection enters the story, a richer landscape of strings and percussion brings the narrative back into sync with the music as time broadens one’s horizon. The changing time signatures continue throughout the song as vulnerability blooms into self-possession and acceptance. The awkward pain is always there, abruptly emerging in the song’s concluding reminder that it’s never too late to stand up for yourself.
While a song like “Tuesday” may underscore the point, the entirety of Send a Prayer My Way announces itself as an unapologetically queer country record. Julien Baker and Torres present this as a matter of fact. They aren’t creating or joining a sub-genre or waving a banner. It is a simple declaration that this too is life, attending to strands of thread woven into the tapestry of day-to-day life. It is not some anomaly as some seek to propagandize it, but a tributary that has continuously fed American roots and thus should be at home within its music, as much at home in country music as any other factor in its polyvalent story of simple resilience.
Postscript: Shortly following the album release, they announced on Instagram that the remaining dates of the Julien Baker and Torres’ tour for Send a Prayer My Way had been cancelled so that Baker could prioritize her well-being and focus on her health.
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