The acclaimed singer-songwriter is embracing her Southern roots, genre conventions and queer solidarity as the bassist of indie/country supergroup Julien Baker & TORRES.

For the first time in her career, Sarah Jaffe is ready to be boxed in by a single genre. Mike Brooks
Sarah Jaffe has spent her entire career running away from country music.

“I think that was my knee-jerk reaction because I’m from Texas,” the New York-based indie singer-songwriter, who came up in the Denton music scene, tells the Observer. “And because I started out playing folk music. I knew that it would be easy to kind of corner me into country music. So I ran from that.”

Last week, however, Jaffe appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon as the bassist for Julien Baker & TORRES, a country supergroup made up of Southern indie rockers such as herself. The group donned flamboyant, Western-style shirts (which Jaffe says they all already happened to own) to debut their first single, “Sugar in the Tank.” The genre and aesthetic seemed to fit the entire band like a glove, despite sprawlingly diverse creative backgrounds.

Baker, a Memphis-based folk rock singer, is best known as the co-frontwoman and lead guitarist of Boygenius and for her critically acclaimed solo work. TORRES (born Mackenzie Scott), a New Yorker by way of Nashville, has found acclaim with a distinct blend of rock, new wave and rootsy Southern influences.

Jaffe has dabbled in everything from pop to hip-hop to folk music. One of her best-loved songs, 2010’s “Clementine,” sounds like a quintessential indie-rock coming-of-age movie soundtrack, and her 2019 record SMUT contains electropop influences.

Her journey to country music may have been long and winding, but Jaffe says her involvement in Julien Baker and TORRES eventually came about in a completely organic way.

“I was support on tour for TORRES in 2021 and we just became quick friends. Her and her wife live in New York, and so my partner and I have just become super close with them,” she says.

“Mackenzie told me a couple years ago that she and Julien were making a record in Marfa. I think they were just like, recording demos. They’d each written a set of songs and were meeting in Marfa to record them. Shortly thereafter, she kind of mentioned, ‘It would be great if you could play bass on this when we make the record.’”

The group began reworking the Marfa demos into a full record (that has yet to be formally announced) in Brooklyn in February. Jaffe describes it as a “spread-out process” that brought the group of likeminded artists even closer together as friends.

“It just comes down to a group of queer women becoming fast friends and just liking each other’s company,” she says. “I think we all just liked each other’s company, so they just decided to keep me around to play some more for the live shows.”

These live shows included The Tonight Show and a pop-up show in New York the following night. Several festival appearances have already been announced, and Jaffe says a full tour is imminent.

As for solo work and other projects, Jaffe didn’t have much to divulge. She’s all in on this supergroup at the moment.

“I know it’s not exciting, but Julien and Mackenzie’s record has been like a wonderfully consuming project for the last year,” she says. “It’s really all I’ve been working on.”

Jaffe, Baker and TORRES are far from the first artists to pivot to country music in recent years. Major artists across multiple genres have donned cowboy hats and leaned into a Southern twang; Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter and Post Malone’s F1 Trillion are notable examples in 2024.

Jaffe’s not sure what to make of this trend but she’s happy to be along for the ride.

“I’ve had this conversation within the band, actually,” she says. “I’m figuring it out myself, but I think it’s really cool. There’s such a nostalgia in it. I think maybe that’s what it is. Nostalgia and a reclamation, perhaps. It’s cool to be in a queer group of women that are kind of reclaiming country music in this way.”

Country music isn’t the only new adventure Jaffe is embarking on with this project. This is also her first time being tied down to one genre, an experience she describes as ironically freeing.

“It has been strangely liberating to kind of be in one genre, she says. “I’ve kind of felt untethered by genre, so it’s been really cool to have that boundary for all of us. Just to think more specifically about writing music. If you sit down to write a country song, there’s something very fun about that.”