Despite its reputation as a bastion of Stars and Stripes jingoism, country music has always had space for outsiders and rebels. From Johnny Cash to Lil Nas X, there’s a rich history of artists embracing the genre on their terms. That tradition continues with Send a Prayer My Way, a gripping, emotion-drenched new album from the indie songwriters Julien Baker and Torres.
It’s a sugar-spun marriage of minds from two songwriters with a record in pursuing their own path. Baker is best known as one-third of the arena-filling alternative “supergroup” Boygenius; Torres, aka the Florida songwriter Mackenzie Scott, is a blistering left-field rocker whose most recent solo LP declared its larger-than-life ambitions with its title, What an Enormous Room.
Baker and Scott have talked about wanting to make the sort of record that would appeal to them as queer women raised mainly on country music.
“People think of country as uniformly being the Toby Keith variety of inflammatory American nationalism,” Baker said recently about the flag-waving country superstar of the early 21st century “Like, we’ll put a boot in your ass. But it has a tradition of people who are mistrustful of the government and the police, who don’t abide by social norms and who feel like outsiders.”
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Outsiders usually make the best music. But the big surprise with Send a Prayer My Way is how conventional it feels. Baker and Scott have created a handsomely vulnerable alternative-country LP that does not mark a stark departure from their recent work. This will come as good news to fans of Baker, particularly anyone who discovered her through her Grammy-winning collaboration with Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus (who was recently revealed to be Baker’s partner in real life).
If lacking in revolutionary moments, this bruisingly divine album crackles with songwriting chemistry from the outset. The opening track, Dirt, showcases Baker’s sensitively expressive voice, while the single Sugar in the Tank is an agreeably pacy pairing of her sharp, angst-ridden croon with Scott’s dusky drawl.
Of all of Boygenius’s members, it was Baker who seemed the one who had travelled furthest from relative indie obscurity to the cover of Rolling Stone, packed arenas, and duets with Billie Eilish – achievements that the band ticked off in short order. She played Dublin’s intimate Whelan’s venue as recently as 2022. There and elsewhere, there was little in her wonderfully woebegone solo catalogue to suggest she would soon be performing to crowds of 15,000, as she did when Boygenius appeared at Kilmainham a year later.
Boygenius is now on open-ended hiatus. It is encouraging to find Baker moving on from that chapter of her life with confidence and ambition. She certainly has struck up an enormously creative partnership with Scott, who bares some deep emotional scars on the flensing Bottom of a Bottle; it’s about an unhealthy relationship with alcohol that dovetails with Baker’s persistent theme of the dangers of addiction.
The album’s “country” touches tend to be understated. You can hear them in the slide guitar at the start of Downhill Both Ways and in lyrics about “leaving Georgia for Tennessee” at the top of Tuesday. An aura of grungy intensity hangs over Tape Runs Out, which sounds like Soundgarden trapped in the Mojave Desert. The beautifully bustling closing track, Goodbye Baby, opens with a spoken-word exchange between the duo about the difference between jelly and jam (“jelly’s more vicious,” Baker says) before their voices intertwine to sumptuous effect.
Darkness and light combine impressively on a beautiful album that doesn’t do anything groundbreaking but instead stands as a testament to a duo of talented songwriters coexisting in harmony. Send a Prayer My Way falls a long way short of a holy show. Anyone wondering what would happen if Boygenius went Garth Brooks will be underwhelmed. Yet if country cliches are few and far between, the album nonetheless radiates folksy warmth. It’s enormously comforting to bask in its campfire glow.
