Enacting a promise made to each other, Send A Prayer My Way is an album that follows through with a pact to make the music both Julien Baker and TORRES (aka Mackenzie Scott) grew up with, but could never quite see themselves in. Being the change they want to see in the world, the duo crafted their own country record that aligned with their queer identities; they carve out their own sense of home from a genre that always spoke to and reminded them of where they were raised (Baker is from Tennessee and Scott from Georgia), but never seemed about them. Send A Prayer My Way is a small act of rewriting history for both their present and younger selves.
For Baker and Mackenzie, a bonafide country record isn’t completely out of their wheelhouse, both having country and folk influences in their own work. They lean into the genre’s offerings gently here: opening track “Dirt” sets the stage, a four minute down-on-your-luck tale where Baker and Mackenzie trade verses as mellow pedal steel guitar, dusty violin, and a soft organ tone enter the picture. Baker’s central sentiment – “Spend your whole life getting clean / Just to wind up in the dirt” – is a timeless ache that any country great will be furious they didn’t come up with first. A banjo tickles the edges of first single “Sugar In the Tank” while a mandolin adds a sweetness to “Bottom of a Bottle”; they season with the country ingredients, but never overpoweringly so. Their ease and comfort with the style are what make it a decisively palatable record.
Lyrically the duo keep to familiar themes too. Drinking until the last drop (“Bottom of a Bottle”), tumultuous love (“No Desert Flower”), and the despondency of life “(Off The Wagon”) all crop up across the album’s 12 tracks, and you will hear welcome new angles and meaning in their lyrics. “Sugar In The Tank”’s title is a veiled remark about being gay, but if you didn’t know you could happily think it was just using car engines as a metaphor for infatuation and enjoy the song just as much. The stark “Tuesday” has Mackenzie recalling a tale of queer love quashed (“Her mama caught wind that her daughter’s friend / Might be of the wrong persuasion”), leading to shame, self-harm, and staring into the “darkness of eternal night”. The candid tone is disarming and honest, and it shows how a country song can tick all the boxes (crisis of faith, disapproving parents, spiraling shame, cussing off the offending parties) while talking about something other than heterosexual relationships. “Tuesday” is something of an outlier though, as no other songs here feel quite as specific and barbed.
There’s not a bad track on Send A Prayer My Way, but there also aren’t really any songs that blow you away or will find their way to the top tiers of song rankings from either artist. Baker and Mackenzie’s voices mingle nicely, but there are no astounding harmonies here that stop you in your tracks and make you question why they haven’t teamed up sooner. Sometimes it doesn’t quite connect too: the despondent tone of “Downhill Both Ways” isn’t perked up by the bobbing banjo and smudgy pedal steel, while “Off The Wagon” wallows itself into a murky beige stupor, both leaving a gap where some deeper emotional resonance should shimmer. At its best, the album consists of mid range to good songs for both Baker and Mackenzie, albeit dressed up slightly differently to what you might expect from them.
A couple of cuts would even sit contentedly in their respective performer’s catalogue: “Showdown” opens with a gutted and defeated sentiment (“That it can’t get much worse / Depends on who you’re askin’”) and Baker’s yearn tears at your heart in the way it does; “Sylvia” is a charming ode to Mackenzie’s dog, and has a stodgy and stuttering rhythm that echoes her work from Silver Tongue (which, funnily enough, opens with the line “You make me want to write a country song”).
The album is pleasant in every way you could want it to be, but it’s also a few truck stops short of their best and most memorable work. Still, it’s hard to deny it’s enjoyable to hear two friends play together and connect over an affection for a genre that was so formative for both of them. Their love and respect of country music is to be heard on Send A Prayer My Way, again in the comfort they exude in each other’s company. Taking their lived experiences of growing up queer in the South, they offer an in for listeners who, like them, found something missing from music they wanted to connect with. Neither of them try to flip the genre on its head here, but rather just let it speak in terms they want to hear. They aren’t reclaiming the music of their youth, they’re merely recasting it.
