Julien Baker & TORRES
Artist & Spotify Presale: 2/5 @ 10am - 2/6 @ 10pm
Public on Sale: 2/7 @ 10am
Julien Baker & TORRES
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
