Boygenius's Julien Baker and Torres on their queer country album: ‘We committed to the bit and here we are'

Independent

26-02-2025

Julien Baker and Mackenzie Scott are giggling about their new venture: country music. Baker, of course, is the indie star who makes up one-third of the supergroup boygenius, with Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus. Scott is better known as the singer-songwriter Torres. (They're calling their collaboration, simply, Julien Baker & Torres.) The latter was listing off her favourite classic artists when Baker chimed in, admitting she enjoys 'some of that new s***, though.' Especially, the 'really ignorant' song ' Hard to Forget' by Sam Hunt. 'The first time I heard it, I was like, 'This is an offence to nature!'' Baker laughed. 'But the more I heard it on the radio, I was like, 'I love this song.'' (I listened to the truly heinous 2020 hit after our interview, and it's so catchy that it corrupted me.)
But there's also genuinely good new country music, says Scott, pointing to The Highwomen, a female supergroup who released a lesbian ballad about a man hitting on your girlfriend – 'If she ever leaves me, it won't be for you,' sings Brandi Carlile, surrounded by close harmony. 'I'm glad someone wrote that song – we were all thinking it,' Scott says, shaking her head. Baker agrees, then does her best deep-voiced impression of the man: 'All the lesbians who've ever been out with their girlfriends have had some dude say, ' Hey '.'
Neither of these musicians is especially known for an affiliation with country music. Twenty-nine-year-old Baker crafts gentle, heartbreaking songs that land like prayers. The lyrics are self-critical, often bleakly so, and delivered in a pure, elegiac voice that floats hauntingly above the music: a twinkling guitar, or, on her last album, a full band. More recently, she became borderline famous for making bands cool again with boygenius, picking up several Grammys along the way. At 34, Torres has been releasing music that might be loosely described as indie rock for a little longer. But they're both from Tennessee, the home of country music, so from their first single as a duo, the sweet and euphoric love song 'Sugar in the Tank,' the change felt natural. Their forthcoming album Send a Prayer My Way is all earthy but angelic Americana, each track carefully arranged around a simple story of daily romance, devotion and the work of trying to be a good person.
Their friendship feels palpable through a screen – with Scott just the joker to bring out Baker's lightest, funny side – despite the fact they're video-calling in from different ends of the country. Scott is in a dark purple-lit recording studio in her basement in Brooklyn. Baker is sitting in a light, airy kitchen that backs onto a conservatory in Los Angeles, as her dog, Beans, pads around in the background. She hesitates when I ask what precipitated the move, and says that she relocated there from Tennessee two years ago with her partner. 'I really like it here, which seems like a traitor thing to say. But people are deliberate about trying to create community out here.'
Baker and Torres met backstage 10 years ago at a show they played together in Chicago, when Baker was a 'really cute and sweet' 20-year-old baby, according to Scott, who approached her offering weed. 'You weren't scary but I was like, 'Oh, no, ma'am'. I was such a dork,' laughs Baker, putting on a nerdy voice. From that early stage in both of their careers, they were compared for being vaguely masc queer women with guitars from Tennessee. Their sounds were different, but their vocabularies made them artificially comparable: they both talked about God, the Devil, the South. 'I feel like that was just available imagery so of course we used it,' says Baker. 'When I was a baby, before I could speak English, my family was reading me devotionals. It's more than just an allegiance to a faith that ties you to something, it's cultural – it's like a folk tale.'
Both would come to regret allowing themselves to be marketed in that way, particularly Baker, who engaged in the conversation around what it meant to be both queer and Christian. 'I took the bait and ruined it,' she says. 'I was being a contrarian and people would be like, 'Well, how's it been being a queer person in the South?' Then I was being like, 'Well, me and my family actually have complex conversations about it and there's more to theology and belief than the people from Westboro Baptist Church who stand outside Planned Parenthood.' I was just interested in the fact this cultural category is a little bit more nuanced than people from outside of it want to consider. I wanted nuance and what I got was [Christians] being like, 'You can do both!'' She was the 'queer Christian artist', a title she never wanted to hold.
Where they sit with their spirituality today differs. Scott feels very curious, very open, though she's not a religious person ('I find religion to be really oppressive and limiting and dogmatic,' she says). Baker wades around in my question without answering it: I say I'm sure her relationship to her spirituality has evolved, as it typically tends to as one ages. 'One would hope. For some people that is not the case, it's really static,' she remarks, despondent for a few minutes. She has a habit of breaking away and staring off to the left while she carefully verbalises sentences like she's channelling someone else. 'As I've gotten older my interest in defending the tenets of Christianity or a specific religious dogma have gone down to zero,' she continues when prompted by Scott. 'But there are some things about religion that are inborn into civilisation that are valuable, like the need to gather and to have communal worship and to live in a community with each other.' She remembers learning about a prehistoric human skeleton found with a hip that had once been broken; it had healed together in such a way that experts know the person was alive for a long time afterwards. It's proof, she says, that this person was fed and carried and that humans do have altruistic care built into them.
This country project began early on in the Covid-19 lockdown, when both of them were wasting time answering emails and getting despondent. 'I'm 90 per cent [certain] I smoked a massive joint and got a wild hair and thought, 'What if I texted Julian to ask if she wanted to make a country record with me,'' hoots Scott. Baker grins and says, 'I committed to that bit and here we are.' What initially attracted Scott to the idea was that country music came with structures, rules and a history – and its production certainty doesn't allow for anything less than solid narrative storytelling. That strict creative container promised a freedom that wasn't provided by their solo projects.
I wanted nothing to do with country music, but no matter what I did, I couldn't escape it
Julien Baker
Before their collaboration, Baker had been living in Nashville for a while and had started exploring songwriting for others – what's known as 'pitch' writing. This involves writing songs directly for other artists to perform or pitching them to industry professionals on Music Row, Nashville's hub for country music. It was here that an early version of 'Sugar in the Tank' was born. Both Baker and Scott were fans of country music, especially Scott, but it wasn't until they began writing together that they took a closer look at how deeply their personal connections to country music ran. Baker revisited her dad's favourite songs and had a realisation: ''OK, this is actually deeply within me as a person and my lived experience,' but I had distanced myself from it when I got into punk and hardcore as a teenager. I wanted nothing to do with country music, but no matter what I did, I couldn't escape it because I lived in Tennessee.'
People will imagine that Baker must've loved collaborating with boygenius on The Record so much that she decided to do another collaboration immediately. In fact, this album got temporarily shelved because of the non-existent (at that point) boygenius' album; if the country project was put out first, its release and promotion would've had to be rushed before The Record. 'It sucked because we were both chomping at the bit to get it out,' says Baker of Send a Prayer My Way. 'It would've felt really bad to start something and have an end date already in the future and to truncate it [because] it had to be done by the time I started doing boygenius stuff. I'm glad we waited. I think it served the songs too.'
It must've been frustrating for Scott, then, I suggest, who had to sit on the sidelines while country music had its moment over the past couple of years with musicians from Post Malone to Zayn trying their hand at cowboy content. Baker and Scott could've been an early contender, leading the trend, if they'd released in 2020 or 2021. At this point, Baker looks a little guilty, Scott looks a little awkward. 'It's been tough for me. I can't pretend like it hasn't,' says Scott and chuckles uncomfortably. 'There's certainly been a bit of a sensation of waiting in the wings while these huge artists released their country albums one by one and like, 'OK, cool.'' She comedically salutes hello to the Beyoncé country album as it comes along. 'Well, yeah, hope I live up to the Beyoncé album!!!'
Baker laughs along with their misfortune but adds the salient point that pop and rock music in the Nineties had its flirtation with the country sound and fashion too – and the popularity of the genre is the point, it's what attracted them to it. 'I agree, JB,' Scott says to Baker. 'We're not doing anything that hasn't happened thousands of times before. We're doing something within a well-worn tradition.'
I'm so f***ing glad I'm not making a solo record
Julien Baker
While there could have been immense pressure on Baker to match the phenomenal success of boygenius, she says she doesn't feel that way at all – in fact, quite the opposite. 'I'm grateful for having timed things out the way they did because hopefully whatever attention I got [for boygenius] or whatever my profile is now, hopefully that just benefits the project,' she says. This is, she explains, very different in sound from boygenius (though I'd argue there's a little of that heartbreaking and bending euphoria on 'Sugar in the Tank' as on boygenius's 'Not Strong Enough'), but it was made with the exact same ethos, which is why she thinks it works.
This is Baker's magic formula: make music that is highly thoughtful, with people she already knows, and keep it very close to her chest until it's fully created. That's how you get intimate songs like the delightful harmonic ballad 'Goodbye Baby' about how much they love their girlfriends. Or lyrics that hold a full world in their simplicity, like those on the wistful 'Tuesday,' when Scott sings of a friend's mother who suspected their queerness at 18: 'Instead of backing me up Tuesday melted right down/ Asked me to write her mother and say sorry for the confusion/ But of course there'd been no sin/ And to emphasise how much I loved Jesus and men.'
'That's the other thing too… I'm so f***ing glad I'm not making a solo record,' Baker adds. 'It sounds like no fun to go back to being in this solipsistic space where I'm telling a story about myself and I'm making all the decisions and every decision I make is representative of my world and my identity. It's so much more fun to be in a project with someone else that we can be creative with and it not have to be essentially representative of who we are as people because it's already inside of an established genre.'
In another timeline, they might have found themselves in the 'so bad it's good' new country s*** category they were laughing about just half an hour ago. 'I imagined the finished record to be a bunch of Hardy tracks, just really highly produced hooky bangers,' Baker laughs, referencing the Mississippi-born singer, whose pop country songs about redneck partying, drinking and small-town values have been streamed hundreds of millions of times and frequently hit the No 1 spot on the country charts. The fact that Baker and Torres's songs turned out to be more tender, traditional Lucinda Williams-style tracks, with a bit of 'outlaw country', is a relief, Baker thinks, because 'there's something in that really commercial timbre that's in all the pop country music that didn't get on us'. The music, just like the idea for this project, might been lightly worn at the beginning but it's accidentally better, fortuitously truer to their experience than they'd ever intended it to be.