Both raised Southern Baptist, Julien Baker and Mackenzie Scott (a.k.a. Torres) have taken similar paths, breaking free of the conservative environs of their childhoods and becoming singer-songwriters acclaimed for their brawny guitar riffs and queer self-expression. But, it turns out, you just can’t take the South out of the coastal indie darlings.
On Send a Prayer My Way, their first album as a duo, Baker and Scott reclaim the honky-tonk music they grew up on. With familiar genre hallmarks like pedal steel and banjo, drinking songs, and honey-sweet harmonies, the pair demonstrates a deeper understanding of what makes authentic country music than many of the good ol’ boys in Nashville. The album sounds fresh and contemporary even as it reaches for, and strikingly captures, classic country vibes.
Baker and Scott sound fantastic singing together, with Baker’s peeling bell of a voice sitting perfectly alongside Scott’s husky alto. Their songs, meanwhile, cover every shade of blue, from the sad-bastard after-hours balladry of “Off the Wagon” to the yearning catharsis of “Sugar in the Tank” and “Bottom of a Bottle.” Many of the musical and lyrical tropes they employ throughout will be eminently familiar to many listeners (not to mention one or two of the melodies, including “Tape Runs Out,” a reimagining of Songs: Ohia’s “Farewell Transmission”).
But Send a Prayer My Way is pastiche-free. It drips with passion and sincerity, especially on “Sugar in the Tank,” a joyful, romantic paeon that could have been released at any time in the last six or seven decades. It also goes way harder than any of Baker’s boygenius bandmate Lucy Dacus’s comparatively sedate love songs on the understated Forever Is a Feeling.
Send a Prayer My Way may not reinvent the wheel musically, but by virtue of the fact that Baker and Scott are young, queer women who’ve left what Morgan Wallen calls God’s country, it does at times take on a subversive bent that challenges the cultural hegemony that’s all but co-opted the genre in the popular imagination. They sing about women who’ve done them wrong, whom they can’t stop missing, and who drive them to drink.
Most striking is Scott’s “Tuesday,” about a romance foiled by a disapproving mother, but it’s not because of the singer’s fondness for whiskey or because the road is his only true love. Instead, it’s because she “might be of the wrong persuasion,” pressured “to emphasize how much I love Jesus and men.” As only a country song can, it juxtaposes the deepest heartbreak (there are mentions of self-harm and “the darkness of eternal night”) with folksy levity (“And one more thing, if you ever hear this song/Tell your mama she can go suck an egg”).
While queer country is hardly a new concept, Baker and Scott are pointed and defiant in their embrace of it on Send a Prayer My Way. What’s more, they know full well that being a truly great country singer means being willing to be brutally honest with your audience.
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