Julien Baker & TORRES discuss collaboration and honouring their love of country on new album 'Send A Prayer My Way' • Interview • DIY Magazine

Consider the scene: in the 1976 documentary Heartworn Highways, country music tearaway David Allen Coe stands in front of a group of prison inmates, all sat cross-legged on the floor and hanging off his every word. Coe, dressed head to toe in a black flamboyant suit spotted with sparkling rhinestones, tells them of his own time inside. The story he recalls is dark and traumatic, speaking of his intense fear during a particularly compromising situation when face-to-face with a fellow inmate. The haunting words sit at odds with his own showy self, his look completed by dangling reflective earrings on both sides of his face. Coe abruptly ends the story and jumps jarringly into his distinctive outlaw country style. The scene has stuck with Julien Baker. “He’s like a jester that gets to hang out in prison,” she notes from her Los Angeles home. “It’s dazzle camouflage.”

The moment embodies much of how Julien sees her new, collaborative project with Mackenzie Scott’s TORRES, a beautifully crafted trifecta of classic country storytelling, upbeat escapism, and a heartfelt nod to a genre that has, even against the odds, underpinned both of their adolescent lives. While Mackenzie grew up in the Deep South of the United States, Julien was raised in Tennessee, and although the latter found a country music collaboration at first unexpected, it’s this notion of place that’s brought the two of them together, even if their shared experiences had set them on different paths.

The pair originally met at a show at Chicago’s Lincoln Hall back in 2016, long after the debut TORRES album had reached Julien’s ears as a junior in high school. “I was just like, this lady is on some shit,” she beams, playfully lamenting Mackenzie – joining the conversation from the East Coast – for leaving out the fact that she was already a fan by the time they first played together. Enthusing over her collaborator’s early work, Julien nods to Mackenzie’s noise pedals, all-white suits, and the cacophonous sounds that came to life over in Franklin, TN, just a few degrees separated from where she was studying in Nashville, itself the spiritual home of country music. Mackenzie, meanwhile, became aware of Julien through her sleeper-hit debut ‘Sprained Ankle’: “I thought it was beautiful,” she recalls.

It would, however, be another four years before the collaborative project really started to take shape, spurred on by the pandemic and both of their desires to stay creative. Mackenzie made the first move, having just had her tour supporting TORRES’ 2020 release ‘Silver Tongue’ cut short in dramatic fashion, only narrowly avoiding getting trapped in mainland Europe. Julien, it turns out, was the first person she thought of for a collaborative project, having tiptoed around the idea of making a country record for some time. In what she describes as a moment of boldness, she texted Julien who immediately responded with a yes. “I was like, hell yeah,” notes Mackenzie.

“I always wonder, why me?” Julien interjects, noting her affinity to the hardcore music scene at the time; more The Devil Wears Prada than David Allen Coe. “I figured you would have a stable full of Nashville players who are more stylistically inclined. I wasn’t like, here’s me, four-wheeling.” But for Mackenzie, she remains the obvious choice: “I have a love of country music,” she explains. “It’s woven into my lexicon and my world lens. In terms of collaborating with somebody, I was like, who can understand where I am coming from?”

“From a really young age I was embedded in a culture where country music was just around.”

— Julien Baker

Surprised but enthusiastically on board, what would become their collaborative record – next month’s ‘Send A Prayer My Way’ – has ignited a somewhat hidden connection to country music for Julien, and brings something that has been always embedded into Torres’ music very firmly to the forefront. Having rebelled against the genre in her past, Julien speaks of a full-circle moment of sorts, reconnecting with something so intrinsic to her upbringing and a time and place lost in her self-proclaimed punk rejection of the genre.

“The thing that’s so interesting about it, from a really young age I was embedded in a culture where country music was just around,” recalls Julien. “It was in the air you breathe, and on the radio, in every gas station. I even worked in a country-western steakhouse,” she smirks, reminiscing about sweeping up peanut shells and serving bread rolls while donning a Mohawk and gauges. In East Tennessee, she joined family members listening to bluegrass legends Ralph Stanley and Jimmy Rogers, and outlaw country from Merle Haggard and Steve Earle. “Even when I was at my most incendiary, I was like ‘Mama Tried’ [by Merle Haggard] was a good song. There are a lot of tracks in country music that are undeniable.”

Reconnecting with her past has had a profound impact on her musical approach and to storytelling, discovering a dimension that she hadn’t previously reckoned with. In her mind, the banjo she has played on previous projects is no longer exclusively in the realm of sad indie rock, but now nods to her uncle’s front-porch style. “There’s more of a milieu tying me to this instrument that’s cultural rather than just taste,” she says. This cultural impact on ‘Send A Prayer My Way’ is immediately evident. For a pair of songwriters celebrated for overt self-reflection, these twelve tracks paint a different picture, playing out through the no-frills directness so intrinsic to the country genre.

“There’s something I love about this format,” agrees Mackenzie. “There are these chords you expect to hear, and this melodic style that exists within this set of parameters that aren’t boundary busting. It allows for a type of sincerity and warmth that becomes lost in the production of an indie rock record. There are certain things that just shine through a little clearer within this format that I like very much, and that I’ve never really allowed myself full access to.”

It’s a subtle shift that mirrors Julien’s fascination with Heartworn Highways; an opportunity to tell personal stories through a universal lens, to pull apart and reassemble wider themes of addiction and relapse, or religion and sexuality – a multitude of experiences shared by both. “I feel like these songs are not just written to speak to people who have this shared lens or lexicon,” Mackenzie expands, “but actually speaking through that lens as well. My inner world is definitely reflected in it to some degree, but it’s a little bit of a costume, these country tropes. That’s partially why it’s fun, to write a personal experience and push through that particular meatgrinder. It allows for a bit of play.”

“This is about growing up where I grew up, and seeing people in addiction and poverty.”

— Julien Baker

On ‘Send A Prayer My Way’, the pair turn their personal tales into folktales, from the damning opener ‘Dirt’’s reflections on falling off the wagon and climbing back on, to ‘Tuesday’’s exploration of queerness in the Deep South. These stories walk a delicate tightrope between fiction and reality, twisting real-life shared trauma into playfully executed lore deep-rooted in country traditions.

It’s a format that’s increasingly attracting a host of players from the mainstream, not least Beyoncé finally taking home the Best Album GRAMMY for stepping into the genre. For Mackenzie and Julien, the benefits are clear. It provides an opportunity to speak more broadly, and arguably more freely of their experiences; not just cosmic, complicated values, but the tangible ones too. “It’s available to people who are sitting around on back porches playing music, or to kids in basements,” Julien notes. “There’s something where the same subject matter gets to shine in a different regional dialect.”

“I feel like in my own music people know it’s about me,” Julien continues. “This is about growing up where I grew up, and seeing people in addiction and poverty. Because it’s couched in this tradition of country music, it seems more broadly applicable to a character speaking about alcoholism, or a character talking about poverty.”

“As some folks know, I was in school plays and I really thought I was going to be somebody who went off and did stage acting professionally,” Mackenzie concludes, harking back to this notion of showmanship, “before I realised I didn’t have what it takes. But I love that, I love playing a role and dressing up. This is just another opportunity for that.”

“It was fun,” Julien returns. “It is fun,” Mackenzie corrects. “And we’re not even on the road yet.”

‘Send a Prayer My Way’ is out 18th April via Matador.

#AD