Through her first three solo albums, Julien Baker established her voice as a piano-based singer/songwriter and a rocker. After reaching a new height of stardom with boygenius, she is returning with a country album made as a duo with fellow lesbian musician TORRES.
It’s a labor of love, in the works since 2020, not an obvious stepping stone in Baker’s career. Moves from pop or rock into country always threaten to be posturing, but “Send a Prayer My Way” reflects both singers’ southern roots. (Unlike her boygenius bandmate Lucy Dacus, she’s continued working with the indie label Matador.) It’s a true collaboration, rather than a solo Baker album featuring TORRES. The latter takes almost all the vocals on several songs. Thicker and deeper, her voice contrasts well with Baker’s.
Baker’s 2021 solo album “Little Oblivions” was a harrowing listen, laying out some of her life’s worst moments and gazing in horror on her relapse into alcohol misuse. (She played all the instruments.) One hopes it’s an album an artist would only have to make once. “Send a Prayer My Way” returns to these themes a few times, filtering them through some of country music’s best qualities: literate storytelling, duets that function as dialogue. “Bottom of the Bottle” is a classic country drinking song, heading to the low points of a life spent in the bar. Baker quietly ends the song by singing “God, don’t let me die here at the bottom of the bottle.” During “Dirt,” she muses upon the challenges of recovery: “spend your whole life getting clean, only to end up in the dirt.”
“Send a Prayer My Way” is plainspoken enough to hide how thoughtfully crafted it is. The sound is neo-traditional, with acoustic instruments and smeared electric guitar dominating. Even the snare lands with an old-fashioned, wooden thud. Baker and TORRES go much further into country than most indie artists who flirt with it. “Dirt” delicately weaves together acoustic guitar and violin, sans percussion. The energy level picks up with “Sugar in the Tank,” driven by banjo and pedal steel. Following two slow, melancholy songs, it moves into party mode. The celebration continues in its video, set at a packed gay bar.
Baker and TORRES dedicate their love songs directly to women. The album exists within country’s tradition of tales about Southern life, but it opens up space for different ones to be told, where hard-drinking women in small towns create each other’s heartbreak. Both singers retain a faith in God but struggle intensely with Christianity as it is practiced in the US. If anyone questions their authenticity as country singers, “Send a Prayer My Way” connects to the genre’s basic vocabulary, while much recent mainstream country consists of dog whistles set to secondhand Nickelback riffs.
“Tuesday” resonates as the album’s centerpiece. In it, TORRES reminisces about a relationship with a girl when she was 18. Both were in the closet, which led to a betrayal when Tuesday’s mother discovered his daughter’s sexuality. As the song relates, “Tuesday melted right down/ Asked me to write to her mother to clear up the confusion/ That of course there had been no sin/ To emphasize how much I love Jesus and men.” While these lies led to self-harm, she comes to the present-day conclusion “I am perfect in my Lord’s eyes.” She even brings a sly sense of humor to the final line. Her pause in the middle sets up an expectation of profanity, but TORRES tells Tuesday’s mother to “suck an egg.”
Baker and TORRES bring out the best qualities in each other’s singing and songwriting. At a time when groups have fallen out of favor, one hopes the duo returns to the genre together for at least one more album in this vein.
