Album Review: Julien Baker and TORRES, ‘Send a Prayer My Way’

On the surface, Send a Prayer My Way is the result of a decade-long friendship between two indie singer-songwriters with Southern roots and a longstanding love of country music. More deeply, it’s an opportunity for two remarkable voices – TORRES’ lower in register and full-bodied, Julien Baker’s higher and gentler – and approaches to songwriting – both bracingly vulnerable, with varying degrees of comedic levity – to entwine and make space for each other. “In my book there’s no such thing as guilty pleasure/ As long as your pleasure’s not unkind,” Mackenzie Scott sings on ‘The Only Marble I Have Left’, the closest the album comes to straight-up honky-tonk music. You could call it an act of subversion, but this is a record less concerned with reclaiming the genre’s traditions than reframing enduring themes of shame, betrayal, and heartache through a new, resilient lens and – more importantly – in good company. It’s an embrace, not some kind of reappraisal, which can make the ice thaw faster and devastating times, God willing, less so.

1. Dirt

Stark honesty is the first thing you’d expect from a Julien Baker and TORRES collaboration, but opener ‘Dirt’ goes a step further by dramatizing it. There’s no separation between the listener and the person Julien Baker dials up after last call: “If you ask how I’ve been doing, I won’t lie/ More than half the time, I’m only skating by/ Waiting for the ice to melt beneath me/ Why do I keep at it?” It sounds like a rhetorical question, but Baker is genuinely looking for answers before landing on the song’s devastating titular line: “Spend your whole life getting clean/ Just to wind up in the dirt.” She stretches the word clean with such pure, almost dreamy precision that the rawness of the truth strikes even harder. But the real magic, the moment where you realize the album’s potential, comes when Mackenzie Scott’s voice swings in to offer some form of understanding. It’s Aisha Burns’ strings, though, that ultimately prove the biggest balm.

2. The Only Marble I’ve Got Left

With Scott taking on lead vocals, Send a Prayer My Way introduces its playful, downright funny side on ‘The Only Marble I’ve Got Left’. Scott, especially, seems to delight in this slightly more ragged mode, delivering lyrics like, “If you get a taste with trouble/ Any given afternoon/ It won’t be me reining you in/ Oh, ‘cause I like trouble too.” Sounds like a healthy match!

3. Sugar in the Tank

Here’s a single so infectiously romantic and tuneful you could dress it up in any genre, but the duo’s countrified version is a true joy. I love how Baker’s declarations gradually and poetically become more concrete, especially as soon as Scott’s voice joins in: “I love you swimming upstream in a flash flood/ Wondering when I’m gonna drown.” There’s desperation in the yearning, and the song’s conversational nature suggests there’s a long distance still to be travelled. But the engine’s already running, no doubt.

4. Bottom of a Bottle

Scott’s singing aches louder than in any of the previous tracks on ‘Bottom of a Barrel’, a song of searching vulnerability by way of an explanation. The narrator is out looking for her woman; “Next thing I knew, I was horizontal and my friends were fishing me out of the bottom of a bottle.” Could be the same one from ‘Dirt’, all wound up. Baker, tellingly, doesn’t get her own verse, but she’s got her back.

5. Downhill Both Ways

Dreamy and, for most of its runtime, drumless, ‘Downhill Both Ways’ feels like it’s over before it’s begun. It’s a portrait of addition accentuated by wistful pedal steel, evoking point where there’s less wondering, just drowning. 

6. No Desert Flower

Scott’s melodic sensibility is instantly recognizable in the chorus, and though the folky arrangement is a bit of an odd fit for this one, the band subtly diverges from it. The two artists seem to have snuck a couple of more solo-sounding songs in the middle of the tracklist.

7. Tape Runs Out

Darker yet (convincingly) groovy, the song finds Baker returning to the subject of honesty: “How come you can always tell when I am lying/ And I hardly ever ask you for the truth?” The lack of control manifests in one of the most satisfying buildups either artist has laid to tape, culminating in an electrifying wash of instruments that all flirt with being in the red. Again, you wish it’d last a little longer.

8. Off the Waggon

There’s nothing rare about a country ballad about being down-and-out, barely hanging on; this album has given us a few already. But how many artists would care to find the perfect electric guitar tone to reinforce the matter-of-factness and weathered melancholy of a line like “It makes sense to want not to feel”? To make this sort of numbness seem not just inevitable, but tangible, reasonable? Baker finally belts it out, for maybe the only time on the record, as if to show it’s not for a lack of trying.

9. Tuesday

Many singles have preceded the release of Send a Prayer My Way, but ‘Tuesday’ and ‘Sugar in the Tank’, two of the earliest ones, represent the best aspects of Baker and TORRES’ collaborative songwriting – really two sides of the same coin. ‘Tuesday’, with its piercing specificity and narrative focus – not to mention TORRES’ mix of vulnerability and cheekiness – feels like the record’s crowning achievement. It turns the page back to a relationship that’s caused lasting shame but which was also, in many ways, eye-opening. The delivery is as engaging as the storytelling: at one point, Scott recalls the titular character asking her to write to her mother and apologize for the confusion – “That of course there had been no sin/ To emphasize how much I love Jesus and men.” Baker’s voice comes in as she adds and men, making it one hell of a punchline.

10. Showdown

The same way ‘No Desert Flower’ is a dead ringer of a TORRES song, the sparseness of ‘Showdown’ chillingly calls back to Julien Baker’s Sprained Ankle. It gets a little overshadowed here, but Baker’s voice is hard to ignore, like sadness in the loudest of settings. “Fireworks are going off all night around my house,” she sings, “And I can’t find a single thing to be happy about.” Reminds me of jasmine.4.t’s ‘Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation’, which Baker had a hand in producing. 

11. Sylvia

The conflict here is simple and universal, the twist being that Sylvia is actually Scott’s dog. “So alone when I’m not with you/ But I ache to see the world/ What’s it even mean to have everything/ If I can’t share it with my girl?” she sings. The hook is as memorable as the song is relatable, though it leaves something to be desired.

12. Goodbye Baby

Ending the record with ‘Goodbye Baby’, which opens with humorous in-studio banter between the two singers, suggests they were having too much fun making the record not to include a few lighter, more upbeat songs. Send a Prayer My Way may gnaw at the pain of saying goodbye, but it concludes with the often more powerful sentiment of returning home to your loved one. A thing to be happy about, that gives meaning to everything.