On Send a Prayer My Way, Julien Baker and Mackenzie Scott, who performs as Torres, are falling off the wagon and staring at its wheels; they’re reckoning with regret; they’re wrestling hateful mothers. Longtime listeners of the two artists know that they often lay their struggles at the forefront of their music, from prying at religion to coming to terms with queerness to looking up from a bottle’s bottom.
But here, they come at these themes from a new angle. About five years ago, Scott floated the concept of a country record to Baker, a la Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings—and was surprised when she said yes. “I was worried that Julien would say no, and I cannot stand rejection,” Scott told Garden & Gun. “So I framed it as, ‘Wouldn’t that be hilarious if we made a country record?’ And Julien was like, ‘Oh, hell yeah, I’m gonna send you some demos.’”
Country music played a formative role in both singers’ lives: Scott grew up in Georgia, surrounded by church music and ’90s country; Baker grew up in Tennessee on a steady diet of Merle Haggard and George Jones. (You can check out the duo’s “Cuntry” playlists to see some lasting favorites.) But for the length of their respective careers, they’ve stuck to the rock/indie nexus.
Send a Prayer My Way, the result of their country collaboration, is an examination of religion, drugs, and love set in working-class Southern neighborhoods—both a tribute to their upbringings and an effort to reimagine the genre. At times, the blend of their individual rock styles with country creates something fresh, but some efforts feel more pastiche than inventive.
The album’s obsessed with love, in every iteration—and how much you can make peace with it. Scott opens “Tuesday,” a slow-moving and tender paean to the titular woman, with adoration. But as the song reveals itself to be about queer desire, it also reveals the challenges its narrator faces: the hateful response from her crush’s mother and the mournful self-excoriation that results, all grounded by Baker’s accompaniment on a resonant dobro. “Sugar in the Tank,” meanwhile, is nothing if not self-assured. As Baker repeats “I love you” at the start of each line, underscored by banjo and a Hammond organ, the song ramps up in passion, insistent and rollicking. When it breaks into the chorus, the pair’s voices come together, their twangy vocals layering in an earnest and honest country-pop element with tongue-in-cheek sultriness (“Put a little sugar in the tank,” a nod to queerness too) that cools down cleanly on “I’ll love you all the way.” They thread classic imagery beside the love declarations: They’re “tied up on the train tracks,” “strung out on the drying rack,” and “sitting outside with the engine runnin’.”
“Sylvia," about Scott's beloved dog, is a portrait of stable, enduring love that’s honest, open, and all-encompassing (“A day for me is a week for you/And my life’s already halfway through”), buoyed in warm, adoring harmonies. On “No Desert Flower,” a slow-moving, folksy promise to weather hardships, a more tremulous version of Scott’s voice (often husky on this record) stretches over a soft-strummed, hollow-drummed production.
Certain tracks hark back to the darker hallmarks of Scott and Baker’s songwriting. On opener “Dirt,” Baker is raw in the face of depression and substance abuse; she wryly repeats, “Spend your whole life getting clean/Just to wind up in the dirt.” With its spare, fingerpicked opening that slowly layers in violin and piano and her gentle remarks about observing an unbreakable pattern, it feels like a classic Baker song—the pedal steel representing the only outlier from her usual work.
Despite moments of darkness, Baker and Scott also mix in humor—another country staple—to mixed effect. While the honky-tonk “The Only Marble I’ve Got Left” winks hard at listeners, making “losing your marbles” sound cute and hokey, “Tuesday”—a more serious track, with its discussion of religion-borne homophobia—ends with the music cutting out as Scott sings, “Tell your mama she can go suck an egg.” It's a jarring admonishment that hangs haphazardly over the song’s end. After a serious, introspective rumination, she spits out an unserious, childlike insult—it’s not funny so much as awkward. The same goes for the spoken introduction to closing track “Goodbye Baby,” in which Scott tells Baker a lewd joke (with a censored punchline). It feels like a classic setup: studio banter caught on the record by accident. It’s silly, and fine—except it’s utterly disconnected from the song itself.
Baker and Scott wanted to honor the genre that was entwined with their upbringing, but since that’s not quite the music they’ve spent their careers perfecting, the shoehorned-in motifs—like spoken-word-as-comedy—can come across less authentic. Maybe Baker and Scott will, inspired by this experience, incorporate more elements of country music into their songwriting going forward. Or maybe making this album will be a flash in the pan for them both, like a Stetson you try on that ultimately doesn’t fit. Still, their reimagination of the genre incorporates queerness in a way that traditional country music often bucks against—which makes it, warts and all, an important entry in the style’s expansion.
Bruce Springsteen was right. At the risk of simplifying the value of this impressive box set, giving away the main storyline of his new biopic, and flattening decades of mythmaking, the reality is just what Springsteen always claimed. Even when he tried the material with his closest collaborators, using some of the strongest songs he had ever written, the most powerful version of Nebraska is still the one he recorded at home in Colts Neck in January 1982. Just a lonely man in his early thirties with an acoustic guitar, a TASCAM PortaStudio, and an Echoplex, capturing solo demos for what he thought would be a full-band project. Everything that came after was an experiment.
But what an experiment it turned out to be. For those who don’t know the story, here it is in brief. After the success of his upbeat 1980 single “Hungry Heart” and a long streak of relentless touring and critical praise, Springsteen entered one of the most creatively intense chapters of his life. He began by writing the grim ballads and shadowy lullabies of Nebraska, which he then tried to recreate with the E Street Band and in solo studio sessions before ultimately choosing to release the home demos. He did no press and no tour, which left him free to keep writing, and that work became 1984’s massive commercial hit Born in the U.S.A. During that time, he tossed aside enough songs to fill multiple albums, later shared through collections like Tracks and Tracks II: The Lost Albums. He also found time to help revive the career of early rock’n’roll icon Gary U.S. Bonds, co-writing and co-producing two comeback records, contributing a Grammy-winning song to Donna Summer, and hitting the gym with enthusiasm.
It might sound like a golden moment, but for Bruce, it felt like a creative cage—the kind of brooding, restless chapter that inspires a filmmaker to cast Jeremy Allen White to play you on screen. The twist is that the most crucial moments, from the original Nebraska to the electric and explosive version of “Born in the U.S.A.,” happened quickly and naturally, before anyone could complicate the process. Unlike anything else in his official catalog, Nebraska 82: Expanded Edition offers a clear window into that moment. Within this tight collection is a sharper, more complete image of one of Springsteen’s most legendary and personal records—still the one he treasures most—along with rare insight into his creative rhythm.
The set includes a newly remastered version of the album, a disc of solo acoustic outtakes carrying the same raw emotion, the legendary Electric Nebraska sessions, and a live album and film capturing Springsteen performing the record start to finish in an empty New Jersey theater earlier this year. The live material feels reverent, with beautiful support from former Bob Dylan bandmate Larry Campbell. The remaster reveals that, despite the album’s association with the birth of lo-fi, the sound is richer and more intentional than much of what followed. Listen to the last half minute of “Atlantic City” through headphones and focus on how the acoustic guitars, mandolin, and background vocals fade away layer by layer. It’s a reminder of how much careful craft went into creating such stark beauty.
Unlike his earlier box sets for Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River, this one isn’t about showcasing how many different paths he could have taken. It’s about sharpening the vision. Where Nebraska is known for its unbroken mood, Electric Nebraska jerks between heartland laments and roaring rock songs across its eight tracks. These takes feel like rough sketches more than finished recordings—mostly Springsteen on electric guitar and vocals, Max Weinberg on drums, and Garry Tallant on bass—hinting at an album that could have been more accessible and mainstream in 1982. And yet, this raw version of “Downbound Train,” with its clanging rhythms and unsettling bridge, may be one of the strangest things he ever put to tape.
It’s easy to see why Springsteen thought these sessions didn’t work. Versions of “Open All Night” and “Johnny 99,” which on the original album burn with desperate energy, sound here like something a bar band could fall into with a casual count-in and some good-natured rockabilly riffs. On one hand, it highlights how his delivery gives shape and gravity to his songwriting. (Compare the early acoustic “Thunder Road” to its triumphant album version for proof.) On the other hand, slipping into different musical skins was a key part of his process then. He could turn something as playful as “Pink Cadillac” into a moaning, shadowy reflection of itself, as if the character had returned to earth wrecked and hollow, fixated on one thought.
For devoted fans, these shifts are what make the box set essential: witnessing how songs like “Working on a Highway” transformed from a chilling ballad called “Child Bride” into a loud, laughing, raucous number. Some of the outtakes, like the quietly devastating country song “Losin’ Kind,” have been passed around unofficially for years. But this set also reveals two entirely unheard songs: “On the Prowl” and “Gun in Every Home.” In the first, he ends with a dizzying repetition of “searching,” drenched in slapback echo that mimics the sound of a live band. In the second, he paints a nightmarish portrait of suburban life and ends with a bare, defeated admission: “I don’t know what to do.”
Within a single song, Springsteen might take the role of a killer hiding in the dark or a runaway on the move, either escaping or facing the question of whether being caught is actually a strange kind of salvation. That’s the point of sitting in the dark: you can’t see the exit. Yet sometimes he caught brief glimpses of where it all might lead. Along with the original demo tape, Springsteen sent a letter to his manager, Jon Landau. He went through each track, detailing the grim subject matter, floating arrangement ideas, and occasionally letting a sliver of optimism shine through.
He scribbled a note next to “Born in the U.S.A.,” which appears here in two early forms: a heavy acoustic blues and a full-band rocker stripped of its later synths, leaving no doubt about how the narrator feels. “Might have potential,” he wrote. That small spark of belief carried him through. He knew these songs would take work, and that truly understanding them would take time. But he also trusted that at the end of each hard-earned day, there would still be magic in the night.
