Julien Baker & TORRES have released a new single, ‘Tuesday’, offering another glimpse into their forthcoming collaborative album, Send a Prayer My Way, out April 18 via Matador Records. With a stripped-back Americana sound, the TORRES-fronted song centers on trying to overcome and heal from the guilt, shame and religious abuse that so many people experience discovering their identity and growing up Queer.
Julien Baker & TORRES have already released two critically acclaimed singles from Send a Prayer My Way. ‘Sylvia’ showcases their shared love of country music while highlighting their distinct songwriting styles and interpretations of the genre. Previous to that they debuted ‘Sugar in the Tank’ on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon—the song was the #2 most-added track at AAA radio and currently holds the #17 spot on the chart.
Send A Prayer My Way has been in the works since Baker and TORRES played their first show together in 2016 and at the end one singer turned to the other and said, “You know, we should make a country album.” This is the origin story, the stuff of legend in the world of country music, and the beginning of a collaboration between two artists already admired for their spare, elegant lyrics as well as the courage to share their struggles with those who love their music. It’s also the beginning of creating a work that, like the most enduring country albums, sustains and inspires, reminding both singer and listener that not one of us is ever totally alone in this world, that music is a steady companion. Pre-save Send a Prayer My Way here.
Send A Prayer My Way
The New Outlaws
Listen: For some of us, maybe even most of us, it’s been a rough year. As I write these words, it’s mid-November in Chicago, the warmest autumn on record, and the bad news keeps coming. Family and animals and homes washed away in the rural south. A wildfire season that never ends. Too much water in some places, not enough in others. Back in my home state of Texas, pregnant people, some barely out of childhood, are dying for lack of medical care. And Lord have mercy if you, or someone you love, is an undocumented immigrant, or if you’re trans, queer, poor, Black, and the list goes on (and on and on). Sometimes it feels like the whole damned world has made up its mind to destroy itself once and for all. So I feel it in my bones when Julien Baker sings, That it can’t get much worse depends on who you’re askin. Maybe you feel it, too, and maybe you could use the good company of this much-anticipated country album by critically acclaimed artists Julien Baker & TORRES (aka Mackenzie Scott).
Send A Prayer My Way has been in the works for years. Imagine two young musicians playing their first show together at Lincoln Hall, a much-loved venue here in Chicago. It’s January 15, 2016, and bone chillingly cold outside, especially for a couple of southerners. When the show is over and they’re shooting the shit, one singer says to the other, “We should make a country album.” This is the origin story, the stuff of legend in the world of country music, and the beginning of a collaboration between two artists already admired for their spare, elegant lyrics as well as the courage to share their struggles with those who love their music. It’s also the beginning of creating a work that, like the most enduring country albums, sustains and inspires, reminding both singer and listener that not one of us is ever totally alone in this world, that music is a steady companion. Why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking,” they sing in “No Desert Flower.” I can take more than a little rain/If the going’s tough I will not cower/And all the passing years won’t wash me away.
I’ll lay my cards on the table from the get-go: Send A Prayer My Way is a damn fine country album, written and sung in the best of the outlaw tradition—defiant, subversive, working class, and determined to wrestle not only with addiction, regret and bad decisions, but also with oppressive systems of power. (In the best outlaw country, The Law is no friend of yours, and neither is The Man; in TORRES and Baker’s music, neither are religious blowhards or mothers who can’t stomach their daughter’s sexuality.) These are songs about wrapping up a long shift and driving home bone tired, just hoping for a little weed and a quiet place to put your feet up; or falling off the wagon (again) and wondering if this time it will finally drag you under the wheels; or thinking that bad decisions are the only decisions you know how to make. If you ask how I’ve been doing I won’t lie/More than half the time I’m only skatin by/Waiting for the ice to melt beneath me, Baker sings in the opening song “Dirt,” and a few lines later, this beauty: Spend your whole life getting clean/Just to wind up in the dirt.
Mercifully, this is only the beginning of the stories TORRES and Baker are determined to tell. Because these are also songs about radical empathy and second chances, and third chances, and while there’s plenty of struggle and regret in here, there’s also humor and defiance. In my book there’s no such thing as guilty pleasure/As long as your pleasure’s not unkind, TORRES sings in “The Only Marble I’ve Got Left.” On “Tuesday,” she turns her gaze backward, remembering a love affair long in the rearview mirror, and the harm done when passion meets shame. And if I could only go back in time/I’d rewrite our whole story…And now I know that your shame was not mine/And I am perfect in my Lord’s eyes. There is clarity in time’s passage, at least sometimes, and whatever grace some of us can muster often comes from taking the irreverent, and much funnier, low road. And in this way, Send a Prayer My Way reminds me of Lucinda Williams’s Happy Woman Blues (1980), or Loretta Lynn singing about The Pill in 1975. And just like those badass women, Baker and TORRES aren’t asking for anybody’s tolerance, or forgiveness, and they sure as shit aren’t asking for permission.
And I’m here for every word of it. Because some of us sinners (and I mean that as a compliment of the highest order)—the criminals and cheaters among us, the addicts and lonely-hearted, those of us who, in the words of that brilliant and mad old outlaw, Townes Van Zandt, wear your skin like iron, your breath as hard as kerosene—were nursing our own private heartaches long before the world started its most recent long skid. Some of us have learned the hard way that leaning on poetry, stories, and songs ain’t a bad way to save your own life.
So listen: Whatever your story—if you’ve been staying up late and sleeping in, dodging calls from old friends and wondering how many times you can break your own heart through every fault of your own; if you’ve been missing work, or skipping school, or blowing past deadlines like they’re four-way stop signs on the highway to hell; and most especially, if you’re feeling afraid for your life, or the lives of those you hold most dear—I hope you will find some comfort in these twelve songs. I hope you will put a little sugar in the tank and let these two singers love you all the way to hell and back. Because here’s the thing about going to hell and back: You came back.
Elizabeth Wetmore
Author of Valentine
Praise for Julien Baker & TORRES
“It’s tender, introspective and joyous, owing as much Uncle Tupelo and the alternative country tunes Baker snuck onto the duo’s shared playlist of inspiration as it does to Nelson, Parton, Cash and Jennings”– Uncut
“Angelic harmonies, unabashed lyrics, and goosebump-inducing tones. A new-gen country classic” – Notion on ‘Sylvia’
“They engage with the traditions of country, using it as a vessel to craft twelve tracks as formidable as they are vulnerable” – Dork
About Julien Baker
A native of Memphis who began playing music in church as a child, Julien Baker shot to worldwide attention in 2015 with her show-stopping debut, Sprained Ankle. Recorded in only a few days, it was a bleak yet hopeful meditation on identity, addiction, faith, resilience and redemption. An intense and immersive performer, her live shows were described by The New Yorker as “…. hushed, reverential. The only sounds you hear between songs are her fingers as she tweaks the tuning on her electric guitar, scattered whispers between friends, and the rustling as the crowd waits patiently for Baker to start strumming again.”
Baker’s acclaim grew with 2017’s Matador debut Turn Out the Lights and the following year’s self-titled debut EP with boygenius, the trio she formed with fellow era-defining artists Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus. With the release of her 2021’s solo album Little Oblivions, Baker cemented herself as “one of the leading female singer/songwriters of her generation, both for her music’s muted grandeur and lyrics that seem to dive headlong into emotional chaos” (Rolling Stone). The album was met with worldwide critical acclaim and supported with performances on Late Night with Seth Meyers, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Late Late Show with James Corden and CBS This Morning’s Saturday Sessions.
Baker reunited with boygenius in 2023 for their first full-length, the record, which won three Grammy Awards and was supported by the biggest tour of the musicians’ collective careers — including sold out shows at New York’s Madison Square Garden and Los Angeles’ Hollywood Bowl.
About TORRES
TORRES is the pseudonym of Mackenzie Scott. She was born January 23, 1991, and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her wife Jenna, stepson Silas, and puppy Sylvia. She has been releasing albums and performing as TORRES since 2013.
What an enormous room is TORRES’ sixth studio album (her third with Merge). It was recorded in September and October 2022 at Stadium Heights Sound in Durham, North Carolina. It was engineered by Ryan Pickett, produced by Mackenzie Scott and Sarah Jaffe, mixed by TJ Allen in Bristol, UK, and mastered by Heba Kadry in NYC. The album contains 10 songs. Mackenzie wrote all of them. Sarah played bass guitar, synths, drums, organ, and piano. Mackenzie sang vocals, played guitar, bass, synths, organ, piano, and programmed drums. Additional synth bass, tambourine, and shakers were played by TJ Allen.
Pre-save Send a Prayer My Way here.
Send A Prayer My Way
Tracklisting
- Dirt
- The Only Marble I’ve Got Left
- Sugar in the Tank
- Bottom of a Bottle
- Downhill Both Ways
- No Desert Flower
- Tape Runs Out
- Off the Wagon
- Tuesday
- Showdown
- Sylvia
- Goodbye Baby
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