Julien Baker & Torres – Send a Prayer My Way (Matador)
Country music has always been a genre haunted by contradictions: tradition and rebellion, faith and doubt, community and exile. In Send a Prayer My Way, Julien Baker and TORRES (Mackenzie Scott) take those tensions and twist them into something stunningly new.
Baker and TORRES share production with Sarah Tudzin (Illuminati Hotties), whose own genre pushing work has challenged expectations in indie rock and punk, and together they make this album sound as intimate as a roadside motel confession and as expansive as a horizon seen through a cracked windshield.
Known for her restless, inventive work with artists – including Baker’s boygenius supergroup project with Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers – Tudzin contributes to the rich sonic palette to Send a Prayer My Way. The production makes space for contradiction: fuzzed-out guitar lines alongside pedal steel; whispered fears next to country twang. The sound of the record is steeped in country textures, pedal steel, banjo, mandolin, fiddle, and hammond organ which are reclaimed for otherness, spiritual doubt, and non conformity.
The album opens with Dirt, a mournful meditation wrapped in gently picked acoustic guitar and shivering pedal steel. The longest track on the record, it sets a reflective tone early on, ending with discordant strings that echo the emotional unraveling within. “Spend your whole life gettin’ clean / Just to wind up in the dirt,” it laments. It’s a brutal paradox worthy of Lucinda Williams or Townes Van Zandt. The circling string patterns mid-song and the quiet devastation of the vocal make it one of the album’s emotional anchors.
In contrast there is Sugar in the Tank, likely the first taste many listeners had of the record. Straightforward country instrumentation, strummed guitar, pedal steel, and a chugging boom-clap-clap rhythm perfectly suits this declaration of love. However there is complexity here, desire and damage are tangled in the titular metaphor. On the surface, it sounds like a sweet plea to keep the engine running in line with the music. But knowing that sugar in a gas tank is a sabotage tactic reframes the lyric as “Come on, baby, break me softly.” There is flirtation, fatalism, and a queer twist on country’s obsession with cars, freedom, and ruin.
Autobiography rises to the surface in Tuesday, a slow-burning Southern story that feels unmistakably like TORRES voice, both figuratively and literally. It charts a teenage romance undone by religious shame and family pressure. The storytelling is sharp, and the emotions sharper. “Tell your mama she can go suck an egg” is a defiant and hilarious kiss off line. If Tuesday has a spiritual forebear, it might be Ruby Tuesday, both songs about women who become stand-ins for loss, longing, and the limits of choice. The production heightens the emotional arc, vocals open over drone and strings, before drums kick in and the story unfolds in skipping, near-spoken lines.
Sylvia follows near the album’s close, it’s only two and a half minutes but lingers much longer. This is a soft spoken cry of dislocation and longing, where drums and rumbling bass notes drive the track forward with a low, foreboding undercurrent. “Neither of my two minds can decide if I’m at home,” the speaker admits. The repetition of “Sylvia, don’t forget me” becomes a kind of prayer, whispered from a motel room halfway down the interstate, away from the one you love and not even being sure why.
Elsewhere, the album is rich with country iconography and the quiet tragedies of life on the move. Bottom of a Bottle and Off the Wagon take metaphors of alcohol and turn them inward, reflective and mournful. The Only Marble I’ve Got opens upbeat, driven by deeper vocals and a quickened rhythm before fading out to ringing voices. Tape Runs Out builds slowly, layering soft vocals over a swing rhythm and swelling intensity. Downhill Both Ways opens with droning strings, before percussion lifts the sound into something more cinematic. And Goodbye Babe, the album’s shortest and final track, ends things with a light, almost conversational tone, guitar bouncing in a stop-start rhythm as if daring the listener to dance.
Throughout Send a Prayer My Way, what emerges is not just a musical collaboration but a shared discussion of otherness. These are songs about women (and queer women, specifically) trying to exist faithfully, fiercely, and with forgiveness within a genre that has not always held space for them.
On this album country traditions are played back in a key we have never quite heard, and used to express grief, love, and defiance. Send a Prayer My Way is an album that is intimate, strange, and generous, written and sung for anyone who has ever felt out of place and kept going anyway, because there might be love at the next turn, or at least another motel, another stage, another song. The title is a stubborn refusal not to be erased.
John Bradbury
Julien Baker & Torres – Send a Prayer My Way is released Friday, April 18th on Matador Records
