Julien Baker Instagram – Transforming the spirit of friendship and collaboration into outlaw country music, Julien Baker and Mackenzie Scott – better known as Torres – tell Laura David about the universality in songwriting for this week’s cover feature.
Send a Prayer My Way is a triumphant foray into country from two beloved songwriters. Facing a world that feels more sinister and foreboding by the day, their songs are a much-needed antidote, or, to borrow a phrase from the record: a flower in the desert.
“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.”
The cultural climate that Baker and Scott began the record in is not the same one in which it’s being released – and the change carries weight for them both. While Scott and Baker maintain that “queer country” is also just “country,” they acknowledge that the moment warrants a serious consideration of what their presence in the genre means and what it can do for others. As the US continues to split along ideological fault lines, the pair 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. “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.”
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💿 @matadorrecords | Posted on 07/Apr/2025 13:36:42
