The New Outlaws
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.)
