The origins of Send a Prayer My Way stretch back nearly a decade. The partnership between US singer-songwriters Mackenzie “Torres” Scott and Julien Baker germinated in 2016, when the pair performed together in Chicago. Scott subsequently suggested, in a text sent during the pandemic, that they make a country album. Accusations that the pair are jumping on an ongoing trend for high-profile pivots towards a Nashville-oriented sound – which has so far involved the likes of Beyoncé, Post Malone, Zayn Malik, Chappell Roan and Lana Del Rey – are thus diffused.
Nevertheless, it still feels telling that Send a Prayer My Way arrives now. Baker has spent much of the 2020s as one-third of Boygenius, a collaboration with Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers that made her far more famous than her previous solo albums. It spiralled into something that resembled a genuine pop phenomenon, laden with awards and headlining Madison Square Garden and the Hollywood Bowl.
Send a Prayer My Way, however, feels like a deliberate shift towards something more intimate and, perhaps, manageable. This is resolutely not the kind of 21st-century country that arrives, metaphorically, sporting a pink sequined cowboy hat, built to wind up on Spotify’s Neon Cowgirl playlist alongside Sabrina Carpenter and Shania Twain. Instead, its closest peer may be 2016’s self-titled collaborative album by Neko Case, kd lang and Laura Veirs. Its tasteful arrangements – big on softly weeping pedal steel and fiddle, occasional muted organ – and mid-to-slow tempos cleave to the less poppy and voguish sound of alt-country: when Tape Runs Out reaches a rocky crescendo, it feels closer to the realm of rootsy Americana than Nashville’s Music Row.
The distinct lack of rhinestones makes sense: like Dacus’s recent Forever Is a Feeling – an album largely concerned itself with tracing the arc of Dacus and Baker’s romantic relationship – it’s explicitly rooted in the personal. Baker and Scott hail from America’s deep south – the former from Tennessee, the latter from Georgia – where, as Baker put it, you “couldn’t escape” country music. Both are also gay, and the country scene of their youth was not exactly welcoming or inclusive.
Send a Prayer My Way’s same-sex love songs and stark explorations of growing up in an environment freighted with religious bigotry feel less groundbreaking in the era of fellow queer country acts Orville Peck and Brandi Carlile than they once might have done. But they’re still marked by an affecting sense of personal reclamation, of two expat Southerners looking back at a genre they rejected in their youth and finding a place for themselves. “In my book there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure / As long as your pleasure’s not unkind,” the pair sing in harmony on The Only Marble I’ve Got Left.
The pair sharply reframe standard country songwriting tropes such as weeping into your beer and/or starting a bar fight on Bottom of the Bottle, and Sylvia’s inveterate wanderer bidding farewell before taking to the open road. It can sound samey: the sweetly upbeat single Sugar in the Tank is an outlier, and Send a Prayer My Way could perhaps have done with at least one more track like it. That said, there’s real power in its combination of low-key musical delights – most notably the sound of Baker and Scott’s voices together, the former high and plaintive, the latter deeper and darker in tone – and lyrics that can deliver an emotional sucker punch.
Tuesday details a young romance derailed by a combination of parental homophobia and internalised shame: “Instead of backing me up / Tuesday melted right down / Asked me to write her mother / To emphasise how much I loved Jesus and men / How I wish that I hadn’t,” Torres sings. The saga devolves into self-harm, religious doubt and regret: the song’s brilliance lies not just in its unflinching retelling, but the fact it choses to spike its conclusion with wit. “One more thing: if you ever hear this song / Tell your momma she can go suck an egg,” Torres sings, softly.
Something of that line’s quiet defiance runs right through Send a Prayer My Way, an album that seems intent on doing things its own way, regardless of commercial expectation or trends of the genre. It’s beautifully made and gently powerful – a reminder that understated pleasures are pleasures all the same.
This week Alexis listened to
Kokoroko – Sweetie
From Kokoroko’s forthcoming second album, Sweetie splits the difference between jazz, Afrobeat and soul in an entirely delightful way: very summery, very London.
