Of all the things Julien Baker and Mackenzie Scott miss about the South, food ranks way up there. Scott is lucky: Her wife, a celebrated artist and Knoxville native, makes a mean biscuits and gravy, and she lives near an excellent catfish joint in Brooklyn. Baker, who resides in Los Angeles, can’t get a decent catfish to save her life. “It’s such a shame,” says the 29-year-old indie rocker and boygenius member, shaking her head in disapproval.
When Scott, 34, mentions that they make the catfish to order so that it’s piping hot and perfectly crispy when you bite into it, Baker winces like she’s aching for home. “Why aren’t we eating there for practice?” she asks Scott, who performs under the stage name Torres. The three of us are gathered together on a Zoom call to discuss their excellent new country album, Send a Prayer My Way (out April 18). “Why are we always eating Thai food?” She’s joking. But also, she’s not.
The thing about these two is that when it comes to the South and all its fixins — like food, certain sayings, and music — Baker and Scott know what they’re talking about. After all, they grew up there. Both were exposed to country music early on in different ways as they came of age in Memphis, Tennessee (Baker) and Macon, Georgia (Scott).
For Baker, it was through the church and family reunions. Her cousins picked guitar and sang Carter Family-style harmonies at her minister grandfather’s tent revivals. Growing up, she used to visit her dad’s relatives in Arkansas and watch them two-step to Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road” at the local dance hall. For Scott, it came from driving around Macon with her two older siblings — the patron saints of ride-givers — in the ’90s and tuning in to the Top 40 country artists that dominated local airwaves: Faith Hill, Tim McGraw, the Chicks, George Strait.
Their love of catfish, the hometowns, their deep-rooted connection to country music — all of it matters. Because if there’s one genre obsessed with credentials, it’s country. “When I think of a genre that’s really fiercely about authenticity, usually I think of militant punks,” Baker says. “But country is worse.”
Except what does “authentic” country even mean? The question has been on a lot of people’s minds in 2025, when two of the genre’s biggest stars, Jelly Roll and Post Malone, started out in hip-hop, and Beyoncé just took home the Grammy for Best Country Album. And if a white rapper from Antioch can pivot to country, why can’t two queer indie rockers? Country music has always evolved by force, by those historically excluded demanding to be let in. So call Scott and Baker the new outlaws, a Waylon and Willie for modern times. Or don’t call them anything at all. Just listen. Because what you’ll hear on Send a Prayer My Way is pure country — in the widest sense of the word.
The initial goal for Send a Prayer My Way was to recreate the country-pop sounds of Scott’s childhood, “to make a lot of Music Row glossy bangers,” as Baker puts it. But the album they ended up with is more West Texas than Nashville, more Uncle Tupelo than Little Big Town. Alt-country and outlaw country proved to be major influences for the duo, as did Americana-adjacent artists like Lucinda Williams and Linda Ronstadt, who Scott says “didn’t necessarily get their flowers as country musicians at the time.”
All the hallmarks of a classic, mainstream country album are here, too. There’s the rich storytelling of “Tuesday,” a song about a scandalous love affair and disapproving parents that plays like a Southern Gothic, lesbian version of Trisha Yearwood’s “She’s in Love with the Boy.” There are little ditties about desert flowers and weary tunes about drowning your sorrows in “a river of Four Roses.” There are upbeat love songs like “Goodbye Baby,” which Randy Travis, Mr. “Forever and Ever, Amen” himself, will hear and wish he wrote. There are songs about falling off the wagon and staring at the bottom of the bottle, and songs about redemption too. This is country music, where church happens every Sunday, no matter what happened on Saturday night.
Every track on Send a Prayer My Way is easy to listen to, downright pleasant actually. There’s an earthy warmth to the entire album, as if it were recorded over a late-night campfire session. In fact, they recorded it in Marfa, Texas with a host of friends and collaborators. The inimitable Aisha Burns provides the crisp violin that cuts through the winsome “Bottom of a Bottle.” The album’s ever-present pedal-steel guitar comes courtesy of J.R. Bohannon, whose dexterous playing throughout Send a Prayer My Way recalls Lloyd Green’s and JayDee Maness’ invaluable contributions to the Byrds’ beloved Sweetheart of the Rodeo.
All in all, it’s a sincere love letter to the sounds of these artists’ childhoods, and to a genre that until recently hasn’t been particularly receptive of queer people. Scott would know. After graduating from Nashville’s Belmont University in 2009, she did songwriting rounds for all the major labels. She wasn’t out at the time, but it was abundantly clear to her that “the least acceptable thing you could be was a lesbian.” Somehow, in a town full of guys who, as Baker says, “wear a cowboy hat to go do syncs at a Universal Music Publishing office,” the most mockable figure on Music Row was a lesbian. “That’s the joke, right?” says Scott, before letting out a soft, heartbreaking laugh as Baker leans in and listens intently. “Like, there’s nothing funnier you could be than a lesbian.”
And yet, you won’t find a trace of animosity on Send a Prayer My Way. Scott is adamant that the album isn’t “a fuck you” to a genre she felt shut out of. Despite everything that happened in Nashville, she says she still just “wants to be at the party.” But she and Baker also aren’t holding out for approval from Music Row suits (they’re releasing the album on Matador Records). They aren’t banking on the album’s excellent lead single, “Sugar in the Tank,” becoming a Top 40 country radio hit. Instead, they’re bringing “country music to the people who already love it,” says Scott, and embarking on a five-month tour across their home region, hitting as many honky-tonks as they can along the way. I’m talking Birmingham, Alabama, Saxapahaw, North Carolina, even Oxford, Mississippi.
“There’s plenty going on there that fucks with us,” Baker says after catching me mumble “Mississippi, really?” to myself. “It’s not just people who wish that the mascot didn’t get changed from Colonel Reb.”
It’s true. The South is not a monolith. And all those things that country artists sing about, activities that Baker very much identifies with like baling hay, riding around on four-wheelers, and shooting cans — it’s not just people in cowboy hats who love Toby Keith doing that stuff. If you’re Baker, the guy baling hay is your best friend Matt, and he’s wearing skinny jeans and a Fall of Troy shirt. And the people shooting cans in the creek on a random Friday night? “Fucking lesbians,” says Baker. “They had a little nylon two-seater truck with the fold-down jump seats.” Who’s laughing now, Nashville?
