“I’m no desert flower, I can take a little more rain,” sing indie darlings Julien Baker and Torres (aka Mackenzie Ruth Scott) on Send a Prayer My Way. This lovingly crafted outlaw country album has been on their minds for almost a decade; the two solo artists met in 2016, when a pre-Boygenius fame Baker sidled up to Scott with a bag of weed after one of her gigs.
The two lesbians from Tennessee wanted to reckon with their conflicted relationship to the conservative-associated soundtrack of the American South. But their plans were put on the back burner until the pandemic (and a stoned call from Scott) got things cooking. Now, they’ve set up camp with elegant fiddles, sun-dappled mandolins, banjos, expansive pedal steel guitars and the occasional herd of rattling drums.
Interviewed for The Independent earlier this year, the more outgoing Scott (better known for her funkier-edged indie-rock) explained that – during a period of such bewildering social upheaval – she was drawn to the structure, rules and history of country music. Baker, meanwhile, came to accept that the narrative twang of country was rooted deeper in her “lived experience” than she’d previously allowed herself to acknowledge. So they set about making space for their own stories within that tradition, while also following in the footsteps of queer artists such as KD Lang, Brandi Carlile and The Indigo Girls.
So on “Off the Wagon” Baker, who has gone through her own struggles with addiction, sings about “threading the needle, changing the dose” – her tentative voice picking its way through the confusion. “Tuesday” has Scott, in her deeper, dustier vocal, unpacking a long-suppressed tale from her teen years about a girl whose mother is scandalised by their relationship. The girl “asked me to write her mother and say sorry for the confusion/ That of course there’d been no sin”, she sings. “And to emphasise how much I loved Jesus and men…” The explicit details about queer love and Scott’s confrontation of homophobia are wonderful.
The duo’s vocals blend with giddy joy over the sweet strum of single “Sugar in the Tank” and with easygoing companionship over the trotting beat of “The Only Marble I’ve Got Left” (on which they agree that “there’s no such thing as guilty pleasure/ As long as your pleasure’s not unkind”). On “Bottom of a Bottle”, they throw sisterly lifelines as they immerse themselves in the blues tropes of ending up alone and checking “every honky tonk in town… I lost my faith… I lost my woman”.
Country music’s seemingly immovable framework provides a solid structure for Scott and Baker – both restless, questing thinkers –in which to explore their own uncertainties. The acknowledged unease of open-ended questions is balanced by melodic resolutions and witty modern games with old country cliches. “You get the hand you get and try to deal,” they sing on “Off the Wagon”. Hooks are tossed out as smoothly as well-thumbed playing cards; Send a Prayer My Way follows the rules of old, familiar games, but invites new conversations to the table. A warm and inclusive record.
