Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Is this the best or worst of times for a pair of US indie musicians to venture into country music? The genre is booming: monthly streaming figures on Spotify rose 20 per cent in 2024, compared with the previous year. But the quintessential sound of America now faces a world upended by unbridled US nationalism. Can country avoid the backwash?\u00a0There is a pause in the London hotel meeting room where Julien Baker and her fellow singer-songwriter Torres, real name Mackenzie Scott, are sitting on the other side of a table from me. \u201cWhat do you think, buddy?\u201d Baker says, looking sideways at her musical partner. Scott mirrors her. \u201cYou want to touch it first, or you want me to?\u201d she asks.\u00a0They have joined forces for a charming Nashville-influenced album, Send a Prayer My Way. Both are from the South, although neither currently lives there. Baker, 29, grew up in Tennessee and is now based in Los Angeles. With three lauded solo albums to her name, she is also a member of Boygenius, the Grammy-winning indie supergroup. Scott, 34, was raised in Georgia and lives in Brooklyn. She has released six solo albums, also well-received.Inspired by a shared love of country, Send a Prayer My Way began as a lockdown project in 2020. Ready for release in 2022, it was held back to make way for Boygenius\u2019s 2023 debut. It now arrives in the aftermath of starry crossover ventures such as Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s Cowboy Carter \u2014 and also the turbulent opening salvos of the second Trump presidency.\u201cI never thought that when we came to release it, America would be this much of a stain upon the world,\u201d Scott says, looking crestfallen. \u201cI never expected that it would be this bad. So many people are revealing themselves to be aligned with the Trump version of America. That is very shocking and very hurtful, and obviously scary and heartbreaking.\u201dShe was brought up in Georgia in a conservative, evangelical Baptist household. \u201cMy parents are still those people,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s very complicated for me because it\u2019s so personal. My family is aligned with everything that is against me and all of the people that I want to have freedoms and basic rights.\u201d\u00a0Country\u2019s values tend to overlap with those of Scott\u2019s family. But the genre is a broad church. Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson are Democrat supporters. Dolly Parton espouses a bipartisanship that has vanished from Washington DC. Alt-country offers an indie alternative to the mainstream, while traditional country has its own rebellious wing with the outlaw movement that formed in the 1970s.A reference point for Baker and Scott was A Taste of Yesterday\u2019s Wine, the 1982 duet album by outlaw mainstay Merle Haggard and George Jones, aka \u201cthe Rolls-Royce of country music\u201d. \u201cThat record I love,\u201d Baker says. \u201cI was like, we\u2019ll do something like that.\u201d\u00a0Send a Prayer My Way has drinking songs, love songs, down-on-your-luck songs, funny songs and sad songs. The yearning tones of pedal steel guitar, played by Scott\u2019s regular collaborator JR Bohannon, curve through the music. As with Haggard and Jones, but also not at all like them, the objects of romantic attention are female. \u201cI\u2019ve lost my woman,\u201d the two singers cry in \u201cBottom of a Bottle\u201d amid a plaintive fiddle accompaniment. (In real life, both are in same-sex relationships: Scott\u2019s wife is the painter Jenna Gribbon, while Baker is in a relationship with her Boygenius bandmate Lucy Dacus.)\u201cPeople think of country as uniformly being the Toby Keith variety of inflammatory American nationalism,\u201d Baker says, citing a notoriously chauvinistic star from the 2000s. \u201cLike, we\u2019ll put a boot in your ass. But it also has a tradition of people who are mistrustful of the government and the police, who don\u2019t abide by social norms and who feel like outsiders. So it is actually quite suited for two queer people to be making this.\u201dBaker, who has a similarly religious background to Scott, began playing music in a praise band at church before making a teenage about-turn into Memphis\u2019s punk and hardcore scene. \u201cIt\u2019s like the younger brother of Nashville,\u201d she says of her home city. \u201cMemphis is a little bit shittier, but endearingly so.\u201d\u00a0She wears a black cap with, unpatriotically, the logo for a defunct Canadian basketball team, the Vancouver Grizzlies. Her arms and hands are heavily tattooed, including letters on each finger spelling \u201chard work\u201d. The word \u201cthanks\u201d is inked on the palm of one hand. Scott wears an elegant headscarf, an urbane twist on folksy attire. The rolled-up sleeves of her jacket disclose a less extravagant set of tattoos.Country music was the soundtrack to their childhoods. \u201cMy grandma\u2019s favourite was George Jones,\u201d Baker recalls. Her father was a fan of Dwight Yoakam. Scott remembers listening on the radio to pop-country by Faith Hill, Shania Twain and Tim McGraw. When The Chicks, formerly The Dixie Chicks, are mentioned, she and Baker do an impromptu rendition of the chorus of their 2006 hit \u201cNot Ready to Make Nice\u201d \u2014 the group\u2019s rejoinder to being blacklisted by the country establishment after criticising President George W Bush and the Iraq war in 2003.Send a Prayer My Way takes a swipe at reactionary Southern attitudes on \u201cTuesday\u201d, a Tennessee-set tale of Christian faith and homophobia in which Scott sings of being requested to lie to an ex\u2019s mother about \u201chow much I loved Jesus and men\u201d. But the album is motivated not so much by a sense of difference as feelings of affinity.The pair exchanged song ideas by email while writing. It was kick-started by \u201cBottom of a Bottle\u201d, which Scott initially emailed as a demo to Baker. The email\u2019s subject was tentatively titled \u201cpastiche\u201d. \u201cIf this is too much of a nod to a very specific style, then I am happy to scrap it,\u201d Scott recalls fretting to her collaborator. \u201cBut those fears kind of dissolved early on.\u201d\u00a0Scott reckons that her voice is most naturally fitted to what they\u2019ve done here. \u201cI actually think it\u2019s my best vocal work. I\u2019m not trying to toot my horn, it just feels best for me,\u201d she says. Baker also views the album as a return to the source.\u201cIf this style of music were an accent, it\u2019s like it\u2019s my real accent. That is how I was taught to speak and play guitar,\u201d she says. The percussive guitar technique known as chicken picking is an example. \u201cThat\u2019s like a Labrador carrying a duck,\u201d she says, to laughter from Scott. \u201cI can play noodly indie stuff, but this is what I\u2019m meant and trained to do. Like, this is right!\u201d\u2018Send a Prayer My Way\u2019 is out on April 18 on Matador Records<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Is this the best or worst of times for a pair of US indie musicians to venture into country music? The genre is booming: monthly streaming figures on Spotify rose 20 per cent in 2024, compared with the previous year. But the quintessential sound<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":256738,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-256737","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256737"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256737\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":256739,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256737\/revisions\/256739"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/256738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}