Welcome to season 8 of the LSQ podcast! I’m thrilled to kick off this season with an interview with Julien Baker & Torres, two artists whose music on their own I’ve admired for years: Julien, as a solo performer and member of boygenius, and Torres, which is the musical moniker of the singer-songwriter Mackenzie Scott. Last year, they revealed that they had been working together on a country project and they shared a beautiful debut single, “Sugar in the Tank” that I fell in love with instantly. Now there’s an album coming and it’s so good! Send A Prayer My Way, a collection of gorgeous tunes that Julien and Mackenzie collaborated on during the past couple of years, arrives on April 17th via Matador.

In the interview, we talk about the inspiration for the project, as well as their respective childhoods, growing up in the South, surrounded by country music and country music culture, and how their relationship with the genre evolved over the years and how it ended up informing the album. We also delve into the other music they loved as kids: Mackenzie talks about her early obsessions with Britney Spears and Broadway musicals like The Phantom of the Opera and eventually writing songs that were country songs with “a little bit of John Mayer”  flavor, and Julien shares how she went from loving Shania Twain to “being radicalized by Green Day” after seeing them on VH1 to discovering the metal bands like Underoath and Norma Jean that inspired her to start playing music herself.