Julien Baker and Mackenzie Scott (a.k.a Torres) are indie singer-songwriters with Southern roots. Baker is from Memphis, and Torres hails from Macon, Georgia. They’ve both always been excellent storytellers with an eye for the harder-edged emotional details in life. On Send a Prayer My Way, they get together for a great country record, celebrating music they grew up with and have always loved. In the run up to the album, they appeared on The Daily Show wearing vintage Nudie suits, and they’ve put together Spotify playlists that go from Patsy Cline to George Strait to Lee Ann Womack to Drive-By Truckers. The album reflects all of those loves, and it’s unafraid to rankle the genre’s hidebound authenticity even as it rewrites conventions the pair clearly love and take seriously.
The album’s wonderful first single, “Sugar in the Tank,” shows off their vocal chemistry as they exalt in the kind of easygoing tunefulness that can equally lend itself to a roots-rock anthem or a country radio hit. Most of the album isn’t as upbeat, particularly as Baker and Torres put their stamp on the genre’s hard-living lyrical traditions. The lovely “Bottom of a Bottle” mixes the steely poetic detail, heart-hungry hurt, and unassuming beauty of a great Lucinda Williams song, while “Off the Wagon” has the downcast gorgeousness of a circa-1995 Sun Volt sulk. “Downhill Both Ways” is a nuanced study in addiction and misery set against a small-town backdrop, steeped in forlorn pedal steel.
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As queer artists, Scott and Baker have said the album was about making country music they could see themselves in, and that others might, too. That comes out most plangently on the centerpiece story song “Tuesday,” which begins “Left Georgia for Tennessee when I was 18/Met a girl named Tuesday who shined her light on me,” then becomes a tale of religious bigotry, fear, betrayal, deep pain, and, eventually, the pride that comes from overcoming a burdened past. The album’s admirable mission colors its riffs on traditional lyrical motifs — like the resilience in the folk ballad “No Desert Flower,” where they sing, “I can take more than a little rain/If the going’s tough I will not cower,” or “Sylvia,” an outlaw open-road paean tinged with a special kind of regret: “What’s it means to have everything if I can’t share it with my girl?”
These kinds reclamations happen all over the album, and they make Send a Prayer My Way feel like a loving tribute that also moves the genre forward. Baker and Torres haven’t just mastered the form, they’ve folded their own lives into its history. On the honky-tonkin’ “The Only Marble I Have Left,” when Torres proudly sings, “In my book there’s no such thing as guilty pleasure as long as your pleasure’s not unkind,” that line has deep meaning — musically and culturally, personally and politically.
