Julien Baker and Torres walk the line

The product of a decade of friendship, it’s a triumphant foray into country from two beloved, iconic songwriters. Facing a world that feels more sinister and foreboding by the day, the album is a much-needed antidote, or, to borrow a phrase from the record, a flower in the desert.

The morning of our chat, a death-threat comment had been left on a promotional post for the rollout, claiming that Baker, Scott, and all the other “gays” weren’t country and would never be. Scott posted it on her story – which is how I learned about it myself – but Baker hadn’t been clued in yet. “Wait, we got a death threat? Oh my god! We must be doing something right,” she exclaims mischievously. “You can’t be so vanilla that it’s just palatable for everyone... Ugh. I’m honestly kind of stoked. I hate to break it to you, but there are more gays doing country music than you realise. The call is coming from inside the house!”

Scott and Baker first met in Chicago in 2016 when they were paired up on a bill for a show and hit it off quickly. “It was fucking awesome,” Scott remembers. “She had a huge, spaceship pedal board and a full room.” Baker was only a fresh 20 year old at the time, but even then, Scott recalls, she could capture a crowd like no other. That enigmatic charisma has helped propel Baker through her career, drawing exponentially increasing throngs of fans into her various musical worlds and projects.

There wasn’t some immediate urge to collaborate after that first meeting, but there was an instant friendship. Both went on to achieve considerable success as solo artists (Baker later as a member of boygenius) before even considering crossing paths professionally. Scott, she tells me, always had the idea to make a country record in the back of her mind, but never really found the right time or right way or right place to make it work. But in early 2020, right around the first lockdown, there was an opening.

“I reached out to Julien and was like, ‘Yo! We should make a country record.’ I totally meant it, but I said it kind of jokingly because I was worried she was gonna be like, ‘I don’t really have time for that kind of thing,’” she recalls. Baker laughs loudly at this and quickly interjects: “I had all the time in the world!”

Coming to country music was both a reclamation and a homecoming. Scott and Baker were raised in the deep south; Scott in Georgia and Baker in Tennessee. Both were also queer kids brought up in religious households. And though they speak now about the South with a deep sense of love and nostalgia – they’ve since moved away, Baker to L.A. and Scott to New York – stepping into an appreciation for the cultures that raised them came after experimenting in other directions.

Baker, for one, found community first in the punk world. She came up in the scene while still a songwriting student in Nashville. “I had a job at one of those Western steakhouses, and it was just Top 40 country music radio all day long, beating into your brain. I had a chip on my shoulder,” she says. “At the time, I was in a DIY punk band playing house shows and stuff, and so that was really not my scene. You know, the like four-wheeling, duck hunting thing. I thought: That’s not for me.”

And yet, country was still the backdrop of her life. To say she ever truly hated it – even if she at first had mixed feelings about, as she calls it, the Blake Shelton brand of the genre – would be disingenuous. “I don’t know! Four-wheelers are kind of indiscriminately fun, whatever class of person you're in,” Baker laughs.

“Country music was in the cultural air I was breathing. I could not escape it,” Baker recalls. The first album she remembers loving was Shania Twain’s Up – which I, an Ontario girl myself, can’t help but co-sign. “I’m a child of the early 90s! When I started hearing music for the first time – like, any secular music at all – Shania was top five for me,” Scott rushes to add. Shania: a universal love.

In her own way, Baker had already started to consider the answer to these questions in her songwriting program at college. While she was finding her roots in punk, she also found herself intrigued by her Music Row-inclined classmates. Many of her peers recognized that to subsidize life as an artist, getting pitches picked up for country writers’ rooms and country hit radio was the way to go. “There was something interesting to me about the exercise of writing a pop song or a country song and being, like, ‘Here it is!’ It was like, I knew the formula, but I still wasn’t really attached to it,” Baker says.

Scott, meanwhile, had her own roundabout. She was raised as a fundamentalist Southern Baptist, and her secular music exposure was limited. She had her hands on Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, and one particularly memorable Enya CD, but other than that, it was mainstream country and church music. “I was definitely not allowed to watch any MTV,” she remembers. “But, it was not that long until I was able to get on iTunes and, like, get whatever I fucking wanted. It’s funny, because I wasn’t even trying to listen to anything transgressive. It was like, I was secretly downloading musical theatre.”

In high school, she was obsessed with the theatre scene – Phantom of the Opera and Les Misérables were pivotal. “I had to play it down that I wasn’t stoked about [Wicked] coming out this year,” she says. “I had to pretend that my senior year yearbook quote wasn’t: ‘Kiss me goodbye / I’m defying gravity.’” While theater spurred her interest in performing, she quickly crossed over to songwriting at Belmont University. From there, she eventually found her way to the indie scenes of Nashville and Brooklyn.

When I point out that there’s a certain level of theatricality to the Send a Prayer My Way era – a common thread, maybe – Scott is quick to flip the observation back. Yes, sure, she and Baker are clearly pulling from common country tropes like cowboys and long-lost lovers and lap steels and line dancing and drinking and drawls, there’s no reason why they have any less claim to that imagery than anyone else. First of all, there’s the simple fact of the matter that they were raised in it. It’s their legacy just as much as the next person’s. And, second, isn’t all country kind of its own performance anyway?

“I feel like country music, there’s a little bit of musical theatre in it,” Baker says. “I don’t know the last time that one of these older, touring pop country artists, like, moved a bale of hay. They’re heavy, dude! Meanwhile, the guy that plays drums with me on the road grew up on a farm and is not ‘country-coded’ at all.”

Exaggeration, Baker and Scott agree, is part of the allure. The larger-than-life narratives of Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, and Willie Nelson were, of course, true to the lives of their authors in some ways, but they were also spun into outlaw adventures that anyone could get lost in. It’s all central to the elevated, mystical lore that gives the outlaw country genre its edge.

Send a Prayer My Way brings all of this to the table. On songs like “Dirt” and “Bottom of a Bottle,” they hone in on that classic state of being down-and-out. “You were swinging for the fences / You were running over every cup / Now you’re stuck back digging ditches,” Scott croons on the former, an aching album opener. On others like “No Desert Flower,” there’s opining about the kind of sturdy love that stands the test of time. It’s not the romance of bubble gum pop, but rather the trust of being weathered and bruised by the years – with someone at your side to see you through. Listening to Send a Prayer My Way is like being transported to a new adventure, a new way of opening yourself up to sin and to failure and to love and to life. It’s both a helping hand in times of need and the kind of record you howl at the moon to with friends.

“It’s like the David Bowie thing where he’s like, ‘I’m wearing a costume, sure, but don’t tell me Bruce Springsteen is not,’” Baker says.

“Yes!" Scott adds. "Like, if you're on stage in a pair of suspenders and a flannel shirt with a beard, you're not more honest than the next performer – you’re still performing. It’s just, are you acknowledging that you’re performing or not?”

The endless litigating over what does and doesn’t count as country seems to Baker and Scott as vaguely tiring and pointless. Of course, there’s something to be said for the fact that they’re championing difference in a genre that’s not known, per-se, to embrace outsiders. But can’t it be enough that they’re also just making a great country record? Notably, to prepare the palettes of listeners for this record, Baker and Scott have released various iterations of a “Cuntry” playlist. There, they nestle their own releases between those of country greats like Luke Combs, Sam Hunt, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, and, yes, Blake Shelton. It’s an amuse-bouche of sorts. It’s a warm embrace of the genre that raised them – and nod to the fun of it. But it’s also a mission statement. Send a Prayer My Way is good, boot-thumping country. Full stop. To add to descriptions of their album any additional qualifiers aren't really necessary.

“Just thinking about the same subject matter translated into a different musical dialect thing, there’s themes [on this album] that aren’t totally outside of our wheelhouses,” Baker says. “We write a lot about romantic relationships and longing. And there’s a couple of songs about drinking, women, being on the road and being lonely, not feeling like you belong to anybody or feeling like you’re an outsider. But, that’s also in my canon of subject matter because that is my life. Those are all things both of us wrote about in our prior musical catalog that didn’t have this sound attached to it.”

All that's to say, when Baker and Scott finally got to work, ideas came quickly and easily. Since the genesis of the project came at the very beginning of the pandemic, as the world waded to uncertainty, demos traded back and forth were subbed in for studio sessions or in-person meet ups. Finally, in early 2022, they got in the studio. At Scott’s suggestion, they went down to Marfa, Texas. After being mostly in their houses for two years, being in the middle of nowhere with wide open spaces was a welcome change. There isn’t much to do in Marfa besides a bar and a coffee shop and an occasional hike or trip to the town square, so time was spent obsessing over the minutiae of every track.

“That’s the thing. It wasn’t like Mackenzie came to Nashville or I went to New York where we both just left at the studio and were like, ‘Peace. I’m going home to my partner and my house and my dog, and I’ll see you tomorrow.’ It wasn’t like clocking out for work,” Baker says. “It was like, there’s nothing to do but hang out. So that kind of put us on an acceleration track of bonding, which was nice.”

In the studio, Scott explains that the pair had compatible instincts. Making a record together had an easy flow, without the competition or push and pull that can occasionally come with collaboration projects. “We’re both pretty much immediately able to recognise if something is really working or not without having to discuss it,” she adds.

They were also able to champion each other, finding promise in ideas that sometimes the other would discard. Rather than putting down a song that felt too hard to finish, they’d encourage the other to stay the course, moulding the idea until they found a fit. “Tuesday,” a heartbreaking but cheeky ballad of young love shrouded in secrecy, was one of those tracks. It’s the most narrative song on the record, and a song that Scott almost wanted to give up on. But Baker saw something in it and convinced Scott to keep working. With changes to the pacing and instrumentation, it turned out one of the record’s gems.

Busy solo schedules kept the release on pause for a while. Both Baker and Torres wanted to do the rollout the right way and not let the project become a sideshow or after thought. And, after a listen back to the original mixes, both agreed it could use a final tune-up. To get it right, they went to a studio in Brooklyn last year, where they edited what they’d built in Marfa and whittled the track list down to a tee. Then, they started building the world that would bring those recordings to life.

And what a rollout it has been. Bedazzled hats and suits, a video featuring queer line dancing collective “Stud Country,” and appearances on late-night have all been fair game. Following along for the ride has been pretty much a constant stream of queer, country joy. And that’s sort of how it should be. “Even though this project is politically situated and serious and drawn from really deep, emotional wells of our own personal experience, it’s also, like – dude, it’s just music,” Baker says.

Still, the cultural climate they began the record in is not the same one they'll release it in, and the change, for both of them, carries weight. While Scott and Baker rightfully maintain that “queer country” is also just “country,” they acknowledge that the current moment warrants a serious consideration of what their presence in the genre means and what it can do for others. As America continues to split along ideological fault lines, Baker and Scott are staking their claim on cultural territory that many might try to see ripped away from them. They know the record is significant, and they’re ready for it.

“I didn’t expect it to be so prescient,” Scott says of the release timing. “Like, I didn’t expect the timing of the album release and the tour – specifically being through the American South – to be something that felt as important as it does. It’s always been important to me. I’ve felt like this was important since we started the project. But it hadn’t felt like it was this important.”

“Yeah,” Baker agrees. “The last time Trump got elected into office, I was also putting out a record. And I remember feeling, like: ‘Oh my god. This couldn’t matter less to me.’ Like, I couldn’t have given less of a fuck about people watching my Audiotree when there were thousands of people stranded at the border.” This year, Baker felt that same sort of feeling creeping in. Except with Send a Prayer My Way, there exists for both Baker and Scott a vehicle for outreach beyond just marketing and self-promotion.

“Hopefully, the people that do care have the agency left to come to a gig,” Baker continues. “I’m not asking anyone to buy anything. I don’t care about selling T-shirts. I don’t care about selling records and advancing our shit. I want to see people at our shows inhabiting a safe, celebratory, reinvigorating physical space together. That seems like the most rewarding and effective thing to be done.”