Is this the best or worst of times for a pair of US indie musicians to venture into country music? The genre is booming: monthly streaming figures on Spotify rose 20 per cent in 2024, compared with the previous year. But the quintessential sound of America now faces a world upended by unbridled US nationalism. Can country avoid the backwash?
There is a pause in the London hotel meeting room where Julien Baker and her fellow singer-songwriter Torres, real name Mackenzie Scott, are sitting on the other side of a table from me. “What do you think, buddy?” Baker says, looking sideways at her musical partner. Scott mirrors her. “You want to touch it first, or you want me to?” she asks.
They have joined forces for a charming Nashville-influenced album, Send a Prayer My Way. Both are from the South, although neither currently lives there. Baker, 29, grew up in Tennessee and is now based in Los Angeles. With three lauded solo albums to her name, she is also a member of Boygenius, the Grammy-winning indie supergroup. Scott, 34, was raised in Georgia and lives in Brooklyn. She has released six solo albums, also well-received.
Inspired by a shared love of country, Send a Prayer My Way began as a lockdown project in 2020. Ready for release in 2022, it was held back to make way for Boygenius’s 2023 debut. It now arrives in the aftermath of starry crossover ventures such as Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter — and also the turbulent opening salvos of the second Trump presidency.
“I never thought that when we came to release it, America would be this much of a stain upon the world,” Scott says, looking crestfallen. “I never expected that it would be this bad. So many people are revealing themselves to be aligned with the Trump version of America. That is very shocking and very hurtful, and obviously scary and heartbreaking.”
She was brought up in Georgia in a conservative, evangelical Baptist household. “My parents are still those people,” she says. “It’s very complicated for me because it’s so personal. My family is aligned with everything that is against me and all of the people that I want to have freedoms and basic rights.”
Country’s values tend to overlap with those of Scott’s family. But the genre is a broad church. Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson are Democrat supporters. Dolly Parton espouses a bipartisanship that has vanished from Washington DC. Alt-country offers an indie alternative to the mainstream, while traditional country has its own rebellious wing with the outlaw movement that formed in the 1970s.
A reference point for Baker and Scott was A Taste of Yesterday’s Wine, the 1982 duet album by outlaw mainstay Merle Haggard and George Jones, aka “the Rolls-Royce of country music”. “That record I love,” Baker says. “I was like, we’ll do something like that.”
Send a Prayer My Way has drinking songs, love songs, down-on-your-luck songs, funny songs and sad songs. The yearning tones of pedal steel guitar, played by Scott’s regular collaborator JR Bohannon, curve through the music. As with Haggard and Jones, but also not at all like them, the objects of romantic attention are female. “I’ve lost my woman,” the two singers cry in “Bottom of a Bottle” amid a plaintive fiddle accompaniment. (In real life, both are in same-sex relationships: Scott’s wife is the painter Jenna Gribbon, while Baker is in a relationship with her Boygenius bandmate Lucy Dacus.)
“People think of country as uniformly being the Toby Keith variety of inflammatory American nationalism,” Baker says, citing a notoriously chauvinistic star from the 2000s. “Like, we’ll put a boot in your ass. But it also has a tradition of people who are mistrustful of the government and the police, who don’t abide by social norms and who feel like outsiders. So it is actually quite suited for two queer people to be making this.”
Baker, who has a similarly religious background to Scott, began playing music in a praise band at church before making a teenage about-turn into Memphis’s punk and hardcore scene. “It’s like the younger brother of Nashville,” she says of her home city. “Memphis is a little bit shittier, but endearingly so.”
She wears a black cap with, unpatriotically, the logo for a defunct Canadian basketball team, the Vancouver Grizzlies. Her arms and hands are heavily tattooed, including letters on each finger spelling “hard work”. The word “thanks” is inked on the palm of one hand. Scott wears an elegant headscarf, an urbane twist on folksy attire. The rolled-up sleeves of her jacket disclose a less extravagant set of tattoos.
Country music was the soundtrack to their childhoods. “My grandma’s favourite was George Jones,” Baker recalls. Her father was a fan of Dwight Yoakam. Scott remembers listening on the radio to pop-country by Faith Hill, Shania Twain and Tim McGraw. When The Chicks, formerly The Dixie Chicks, are mentioned, she and Baker do an impromptu rendition of the chorus of their 2006 hit “Not Ready to Make Nice” — the group’s rejoinder to being blacklisted by the country establishment after criticising President George W Bush and the Iraq war in 2003.
Send a Prayer My Way takes a swipe at reactionary Southern attitudes on “Tuesday”, a Tennessee-set tale of Christian faith and homophobia in which Scott sings of being requested to lie to an ex’s mother about “how much I loved Jesus and men”. But the album is motivated not so much by a sense of difference as feelings of affinity.
The pair exchanged song ideas by email while writing. It was kick-started by “Bottom of a Bottle”, which Scott initially emailed as a demo to Baker. The email’s subject was tentatively titled “pastiche”. “If this is too much of a nod to a very specific style, then I am happy to scrap it,” Scott recalls fretting to her collaborator. “But those fears kind of dissolved early on.”
Scott reckons that her voice is most naturally fitted to what they’ve done here. “I actually think it’s my best vocal work. I’m not trying to toot my horn, it just feels best for me,” she says. Baker also views the album as a return to the source.
“If this style of music were an accent, it’s like it’s my real accent. That is how I was taught to speak and play guitar,” she says. The percussive guitar technique known as chicken picking is an example. “That’s like a Labrador carrying a duck,” she says, to laughter from Scott. “I can play noodly indie stuff, but this is what I’m meant and trained to do. Like, this is right!”
‘Send a Prayer My Way’ is out on April 18 on Matador Records
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