Julien Baker And Torres Rewrite Queer Faith In New Song
“Tuesday” tells the story of a devastating relationship between queerness and religion, with a twist ending.
Are you a lesbian with religious trauma? Does a random wave of Catholic guilt ever slap you square in the face? Do you still have a complicated relationship with the balance between your spirituality and your queerness? Well boy do I have a song for you.
Julien Baker and Torres speak directly to the queer women with a complicated relationship to the church in their new single “Tuesday”. As the newly released third single for their upcoming record Send a Prayer My Way, the track embraces the storytelling tradition of country music and devastates listeners over a tender Americana sound. “Tuesday” tells the story of young queer love destroyed by the expectations of a religious mother who condemns the suspected queer relationship between her daughter, Tuesday, and the song’s narrator. In a flurry of shame, Tuesday resorts to asking the song’s narrator to “write her mother and say,/ ‘Sorry for the confusion’/ That of course there had been no sin/ To emphasize how much I love Jesus/ And men.”
Related: Julien Baker And Torres Pay Homage To Queer Country In ‘Sugar in the Tank’ Music Video
The crushing, but all too relatable story, is sung by the solemn, defiant voice of Torres who shared in a recent interview with The Independent that she “find[s] religion to be really oppressive and limiting and dogmatic.” The track explores the violent result of religious shame as the lyrics depict self-harm and the hopelessness that takes over the narrator’s mind as she sings, “The darkness of the eternal night started/ closing in/ and I thought surely/ no future exists.”
Both Julien Baker and Torres have been incorporating religious imagery in their music as it was a familiar language in their shared home state of Tennessee. “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,” Baker told The Independent.
While religion is often used as a destructive force in queer people’s lives, this musical duo refuses to let the bigots define spirituality and instead, they wrap up the song defiantly—“Your shame was not mine/ And I am perfect/ In my Lord’s eyes.” Oh, and to any parent gearing up to pray the gay away from their queer child, Baker and Torres end with one final message to you, “Tell your mama she can go suck an egg.”
