TRACK REVIEW: Phoebe Bridgers - I See You

TRACK REVIEW:

Phoebe Bridgers

I See You

9.6/10

The track, I See You, is available from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDGWhJmnack

GENRES:

Indie-Rock/Folk-Rock

ORIGIN:

Los Angeles, U.S.A

LABEL:

Dead Oceans

The album, Punisher, is available from 19th June. Pre-order it here:

https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/phoebe-bridgers/punisher/lp-plus

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AS I battle through the…

PHOTO CREDIT: Lindsay Ellary

inevitable itchy eyes and streaming nose that hay fever brings, I am trying to put that to the back of my mind as I write about one of my favourite artists. There is a lot to unpack when it comes to Phoebe Bridgers - and I wanted to start with some general impressions. To me, she is one of the coolest and most talented artists around right now. I always think Bridgers could make an incredible actor – I am know that I am already going off on a tangent! She has this gravitas and aura that would translate well to the screen. Whether she was in an Indie film or starring in a Netflix series, I could see her lighting up the screen. Not only is Bridgers this captivating presence and wonderful musician, she has so many levels and depths that makes her far more arresting and inspiring than so many of her peers. Before I move onto that, I want to bring up another cool thing about Bridgers. Artists cannot tour right now, so many are making do streaming from home and stuff like that. Bridgers is not content to do the standard performance, though. As NME reported, Bridgers is turning her home into a sort of world tour circuit:

“As well as sharing the new cut, Bridgers has also announced a live-streamed ‘world tour’ which will see the singer perform in various rooms around her home. The run will begin next Tuesday (May 26) with a show broadcast direct from Bridgers’ kitchen.

This comes after Bridgers was forced to cancel her 2020 tour dates due to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak”.

I will discuss Bridgers as a artist who can assume various guises and collaborate quite freely. One of her most notable collaborators is Conor Oberst (Bright Eyes). I want to explore other angles and avenues, as I think the fact Bridgers is such a compelling artist is because she expands her horizons and picks up something fresh from other artists/collaborations she can bring to her own world.

PHOTO CREDIT: Molly Matalon

Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers are part of Better Oblivion Community Center, and I think that the work she has done with Oberst is stunning. The New Yorker ran a fascinating interview with Bridgers (conducted a few days ago) where Oberst was mentioned:

“Conor Oberst, of Bright Eyes, was in the audience. He and Bridgers met when she was added to a bill he was part of at the Bootleg Theatre, in Los Angeles, in 2016; two years later, they made an album together, as Better Oblivion Community Center. “Right when I heard her start to sing, I felt like I was reuniting with an old friend,” Oberst said, of their first encounter.

Bridgers was brought up with the music of Laurel Canyon—the nimble but vulnerable folk songs that proliferated on the West Coast in the nineteen-seventies, when writers like Joni Mitchell began exploring parallel ideas of domesticity and unease—but she came of age listening to emo, a subgenre of punk rock focussed on disclosure and catharsis. Oberst is one of its most beloved practitioners. “I went directly into Bright Eyes as a teen-ager,” Bridgers said”.

I think I will come back to collaborations a bit more later – apologies, as this will not be the most cohesive and linear review! -, as it is rare for an artist – especially a fairly new one – to work on other projects and have that sort of ambition and curiosity. I opened by mentioning how fascinating Bridgers is, and how she sort of radiates this cool. I was delving around and trying to find some information regarding her start and what her family are like. Again, I think one can learn a lot about an artist and their process when they head back in time and look at the environment that they grew up in. This might seem needlessly forensic and deep for a single review, but I think Bridgers is an artist that we should all know; I love the fact that, as the New Yorker interview reveals, music came into Bridgers’ life at an early stage:

“Bridgers was born in Los Angeles on August 17, 1994, and grew up in Pasadena. Her father built sets for film and television, and her mother, Jamie, held a series of jobs—receptionist, executive assistant—while raising Bridgers and her younger brother, Jackson. “If we’d lived anywhere else, we’d have been very solidly middle class,” Bridgers said. “But in Pasadena all my friends’ parents were directors or actors.” Bridgers started playing guitar seriously around age thirteen, after Jamie tried to get her to learn piano. “I fucking hated being forced to do something. Reading music felt like math homework,” she said. “Guitar was my rebellion.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Lera Pentelute

Jamie drove her to classes at the Folk Music Center, in Claremont, and her father introduced her to the cerebral, shaggy-haired singer-songwriters who came to inform her sound. “He was pretty sensitive about money, and he didn’t love it when I was taking guitar lessons,” she said. “But, as far as music goes, he’s the one who listened to Tom Waits, he’s the one who listened to Jackson Browne.”

Music became a haven, a break from having to parse her experiences. “It’s intangible, which I love,” she said. “What I find hard about visual art is being in a gallery thinking, Do I like this? Why don’t I like this? Why do my friends like this? Am I supposed to look at this for fifteen more seconds?”

In 2009, Bridgers began attending the music program at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. She started dyeing her hair unnatural colors, and, later, shaving it off. She was not an especially good student—“I just didn’t get far enough in school to where it was interesting,” she said—but remains grateful for the vocal training that she received there. “Having to sing every day is the best thing you can do for your voice. If I’m on tour and I’m singing every single fucking night, I’m fine, weirdly,” she said. “I turn into the Terminator. A zombie who can sing but not function in society”.

At the moment, life is the same with Bridgers as it is with us all: confined to a relatively small space and limited sphere. I know that she is keeping busy and finding new and inventive ways to play live and put her music out. As her album, Punisher, is out on 19th June, she will be releasing it into the world, and she will not be able to promote in the usual way. I also wonder whether she has some new songs brewing that have been inspired by lockdown and a more isolated life.

I want to bring in another section from that New Yorker interview, as it talks about her current living situation, but it also mentions an artist I will talk more about later: Elliott Smith is someone who has inspired Bridgers more than any other, I would say. I shall move on soon but, as I was reading the interview, I was stopped by a passage that mentioned Smith and Bridgers’ respect for him:

“Bridgers has spent much of the past three years on tour, but when she’s not travelling she lives alone in Silver Lake, a trendy neighborhood on the east side of Los Angeles. The singer and songwriter Elliott Smith, who died of a presumed suicide in 2003, in nearby Echo Park, is one of Bridgers’s favorite musicians. Like Bridgers, Smith seemed possessed by the kind of melancholy that blossoms rather than shrinks when exposed to too much sunshine. The title track from “Punisher”—the term is a jokey pejorative that musicians use to describe the type of overzealous fan who lingers at the merch table a little too long—addresses Bridgers’s deep devotion to Smith. “I wrote a song about how, if Elliott Smith were alive, I probably wouldn’t have been the most fun person for him to talk to,” she explained. “I’m a superfan, and I know way too much about his music. So I wrote that as if I were the punisher”.

I will, as I said, touch upon Elliott Smith more later – some may ask why I cannot do it now; I apologise, once more, for the slightly random ordering of points! -, but Bridgers’ new album is almost out. Following 2017’s remarkable Stranger in the Alps, some might say that Punisher is a difficult second album. Her debut is such an accomplished and memorable record, I feel the only way Bridgers could transition without feeling that overwhelming pressure and expectation is to sort of change course and produce an album that is different.

It appears that Punisher is going to be a different beast to that of Stranger in the Alps. I found a couple of sites that mention the new album; Bridgers discussing the sound of Punisher and how things will differ from her debut outing. Judging by this article in NME, it seems like there is more intensity on Punisher:

“Speaking to NME about the album last year, Bridgers explained: “The production is totally different to my first record. People still kind of think of me as like a folk artist, but on the first record, I truly was deferring to other people to produce me. I basically had these country-folk songs. [On the new record] I do a little bit of screaming on what we’ve recorded so far”.

I guess three years has passed since Stranger in the Alps, so it is inevitable Bridgers’ music would have incorporated new elements and shifted a bit. It is rewarding when you see this artist come into the world with a terrific debut and be taken to heart by so many people. Bridgers would have felt encouraged by that, and her extended touring and collaborations would have made an impression when it came to working on the second album. When NME interviewed Bridgers in October of last year, they did ask her about how she had progressed from her debut album:

“Does that make you feel like a very different person and songwriter to that which wrote ‘Stranger In The Alps’?

“I could talk a big game about how I’m not that person or I’m getting far away from those topics, and then I end up with 10 songs that are about depression. I have no idea. I’ve never really been afraid of how people were going to define me, as long as I didn’t write some cheaper song because people like that I’m depressed.”

And what makes the new album different from your debut?

“The production is totally different to my first record. People still kind of think of me as like a folk artist, but on the first record, I truly was deferring to other people to produce me. I basically had these country folk songs. [On the new record] I do a little bit of screaming on what we’ve recorded so far”.

I do want to linger on the subject of the second album, and how Bridgers has changed things this time around. I am keen to explore her latest single release but, before then, I will bring in a feature from DIY where Bridgers discussed Punisher in terms of there being this evolution; there are also bits to the record that are sort of a continuation of Stranger in the Alps:

“From what she’s at liberty to tell us, PB2 could be a goldrush. She mentions a little more of an electronic sound this time, but reassures that anybody who fell in love with ‘Stranger...’ can expect a similar lyrical landscape, strengthened by her experience of working with other people. “Doing boygenius especially definitely changed the songwriting process - the whole ethos of the band was to stop second- guessing yourself,” she says. “I always do this thing where I’m like, ‘Here’s this song, this might suck’. And then I play it and my friends suggest changes, and then I’m like, ‘Oh, I wasn’t serious. I was just being humble, but now you don’t like it…fuck!’. So we talked a lot about not doing that. Just being more… not being a dick, but just trying to be as confident as the people around me.

“There’s bits on this record that do feel weirdly like a sequel,” she continues. “I have a song about being locked out of my house, there’s one about the apocalypse, still lots of death. I basically write the same song over and over and then look to my producers and my bandmates to help me make them sound different. None of it is super surprising to anyone who has listened to my music...”

So nothing on the more uplifting side then? “Ha, no! I mean, the music that I find uplifting is maybe not what other people find uplifting. There are songs which if you were to read them off the page, you’d be like, ‘What the fuck, this is so depressing’. But, listening to them, I think it sounds a little bit more victorious,” she nods”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Lindsay Ellary

Phoebe Bridgers is one of a select few who have the capacity to involve themselves in various musical projects without losing focus and quality. Jack White is someone who amazes me with his work ethic and explorative nature! He went from The White Stripes to solo work, but he has also been in The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather, in addition to producing for other people and being instrumental in Third Man Records. I think that a White-Bridgers hook-up would be pretty awesome – as they seem like two souls who could work very harmoniously with! I am intrigued when it comes to Bridgers and why, when she was starting out, she was sort of already looking at other projects and sort of widening her scope. The afore-quoted NME interview sort of sheds more light:

“Along with the Better Oblivion Community Center album, Bridgers last year also formed boygenius, a supergroup of indie dreams alongside Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, and the raucous tours around both albums saw her blossom into as much a rockstar as a folk singer.

“I feel like both of those projects have made me feel like the boss of my own music in the best way,” she tells NME during a break in recording ahead of debuting new music from the record for the first time at this weekend’s Mirrors Festival in London. “I’m not afraid to have a really weird idea or, you know, take a really bad guitar solo.”

Were you working a lot on the record before you took time out for the boygenius and Better Oblivion Community Center album?

“Truly. My plans got derailed by those two projects, in the best way. I was planning to go into the studio in the summer of 2018, and then I started two bands! And it was awesome and I’m so glad I did it like that, but we really started [on the new album] after I got off those tours.”

Did being in those bands change how you write songs?

“Yeah, totally. Not even just in recording, but I feel so much more comfortable live. I think the main thing which boygenius and I talk about ad nauseum, is that I feel like I just apologise for myself less. I’m not afraid to have a really weird idea or, you know, take a really bad guitar solo. I’m unafraid of getting made fun of anymore. I feel like both of those projects have made me feel like the boss of my own music in the best way”.

It is wonderful Bridgers has worked with other artists, and I think it has really added something special to her solo material. I was keen to find out which artists influenced Bridgers herself, and whether there were particular subjects or sources that motivated her lyrical drive. In a brilliant interview with London in Stereo, Bridgers was asked about her influences and lyrics:

“Who do you think are your biggest influences musically?

I can honestly say my friends are my biggest influences. Conor Oberst has been an influence of mine for a long time, and of course more so now that we’re in a band together. I’ve been listening to The People’s Key a lot, getting production ideas and trying to rip him off as subtly as possible. All my best friends are great songwriters: Christian Lee Hutson, Marshall Vore, Harrison Whitford, Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus… All of them are making my favourite music right now.

And what inspires you most lyrically?

Personal experience. But I think about songs like dreams. They’re kind of about one person, but also sort of this other person, and then they turn into my second grade teacher and then I’m falling off a cliff and then it’s over”.

I have mentioned Elliott Smith a lot but, not to give him too much credit, he does seem to be a muse for Phoebe Bridgers. His album, Figure 8, turned twenty back in April, and it is considered one of his most important works. Maybe the link between Bridgers and Smith is not that obvious but, actually, Smith’s music is paramount to Bridgers. In this interview, the link between Smith and Bridgers is discussed:

“To Bridgers, though, Smith's music is something more than an influence: It's absolutely foundational. "It's like The Beatles to me, and I mean that in every way," she tells me. "If someone doesn't like his music, I actually feel like I'm not going to agree with them about anything. It informs everything I like."

Lindsay Zoladz: I'm 33 now, so I was in high school when Elliott Smith died. I have a pretty vivid memory of it — I definitely wrote a really bummed LiveJournal entry that day. Since you got into his music after he was already gone, I'm curious about your earliest memories of listening to him, and what record you started with.

Phoebe Bridgers: I was in eighth grade. My friend Carla Azar showed me "Kiwi Mad Dog 20/20," which is on Roman Candle. It's a super weird one to start with because it's instrumental. Later, another friend showed me "Waltz #2," which became, and maybe still is, my favorite song of his — I think it just exemplifies his writing. Then I went super deep.

At the time this record came out in 2000, some people were kind of miffed that he'd signed to a major label and started making more elaborate arrangements — like it automatically meant he was selling out. We don't talk about those things in quite the same way anymore, and when you listen to a record like Figure 8 now, that narrative kind of falls away. Was it ever on your radar with him?

Not really. I mean, I hear it's an old folk tale, the idea that someone could sell out. It's such a goofy stance. There's so much less money in music [today] that sometimes getting a car commercial is the only way that you're gonna make money. People don't make nearly as much money as they did in the '90s, so I think it was way more prevalent then. But also, who wants someone to just be lonely and be making records in their basement instead of collaborating with a band and touring and making sounds? I feel that way about it. It's lonely to make records by yourself. I hear a joy in the more jammy songs on this album”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Molly Matalon

I have a couple more points to address before I move to reviewing the track, I See You, and they are slightly darker ones – but I think they are important in terms of Phoebe Bridgers’ work and development. Sexism is something that has blighted the music industry for decades and affected practically every woman. I think the problem for Bridgers has lessened as her career has progressed but, as she revealed to The Skinny in 2018, she has not been immune:

“Bridgers’ notoriety has not come without its frustrations, mostly stemming from the way she's seen herself compared to other women in music right now, whether or not their music bears any sonic resemblance. “I read shit all the time that’s sheer sexism, comparing me to like, Lucy Dacus, like, insert either one of us: 'The Phoebe record blows the Lucy record out of the water,' or 'Lucy Dacus, a fresh take on the Phoebe Bridgers sound.'” It’s an issue that certainly isn’t specific to singer-songwriters.

Take a recent piece from Noisey US in which Kam Franklin, lead singer of the dynamite soul band The Suffers, spoke about how she struggled to get people to pay attention to her group because of comments like: "There’s already one Alabama Shakes," or "There’s already one Sharon Jones." On the plus side, it feels like these comparisons get starved of oxygen quicker than they would have been in the past. Speaking about not only Lucy Dacus, but also Julien Baker, Waxahatchee and Soccer Mommy, Bridgers says: “We’re a scene because we’re all angry about the same shit, and because we all like each other and talk to each other, and because we all send those insane articles back and forth like: 'Oh my god, can you believe this?' I love those people and I’m honoured to be associated with them, but it’s funny when we read shit like that”.

The last thing I want to cross off of the list before moving on concerns Bridgers’ ties with the disgraced songwriter, Ryan Adams – he was accused of sexual abuse (by multiple women) last year. Of course, Bridgers and Adams dated, and she would have learned a lot from him as a musician. It was slightly troubling when Adams was making the news last year and, inevitably, Bridgers was asked about the allegations and whether she faced any issues when they were dating. In the interview from The New Yorker quoted from earlier, that subject was raised:

“When Bridgers was twenty, she briefly dated the singer-songwriter Ryan Adams, who is some twenty years her senior. He produced “Killer,” a three-song EP that Bridgers recorded in 2014 and released on his label, Pax Americana. “We’d had this relationship, and then it soured,” she told me. “I don’t think I even thought of it as abuse at all at the time. I had a crush on him, and he wanted to hook up, and I was, like, ‘Oh, my God, this is so cool, I’m, like, living my best adult life right now.’ Then it went bad, and it was just years and years of thinking about it.” In 2019, Bridgers was one of several women who spoke to the Times about Adams’s abusive and controlling behavior, which included sending predatory messages to an underage fan he’d met online. Through his lawyer, Adams has denied the Times’ “extremely serious and outlandish accusations.”

Bridgers has not heard from Adams since the Times story ran. “There are Twitter accounts that pop up that are, like, ‘You fucking bitch, you sold sex for success’ or whatever, and I’m, like, ‘Is this Ryan?’ That’s never been proven, but every once in a while some weird and specific comment will appear, and I’ll think, Are you starting a million burner accounts and bullying me, or are these just your weird men’s-rights fans?”

I will move on now, as it is time to review a brilliant new single from Phoebe Bridgers in the form of I See You. I am really looking forward to Punisher and, on the strength of the singles (from the album) she has put out so far, it is going to be one of 2020’s best albums.

If one wanted evidence Bridgers has progressed and changed quite a bit since her debut album, the proof comes early on in I See You. There is muted screaming and rumbling percussion. We get a toothy guitar sound that claws and screams, and the whole mood of the introduction is mix of the ardent and the angered. It is a brilliant start, and one is primed for a song that will arrest the senses and open up the mind. Bridgers’ voice has incorporated new elements since her debut album, but the sound is relatively unchanged. She still has this unique tone that can make even the simplest song seem wonderous and full of life. She is, as it is said, laying on the lawn and tired or trying to get into the house. I am not sure whether this is a metaphor, but I took it literally to mean that she has been locked out, or else there has been some sort of emotional conflagration that means she is distancing herself from someone. There seems to be this scent of defeatism that is running through Bridgers’ at the moment. She has been playing dead all of her life – when she gets a good feeling, “It will be the last time”. The composition provides this sonic sense of uncertainty and discomfort that is balanced with Bridgers’ voice; one that contains plenty of beauty but seems to have anxiety nestling in its heart. (I See You lightens in tone as Bridgers explains that when she sees the man/woman, things are better). There seems to be this comfort and safety that comes from the person; a security that she does not get from anyone else. The song moves through different acts. We have come from that great intro through to a sense of isolation and loss; the heroine ends the act with a proffering of this human that is making her more optimistic and fulfilled. To end this first phase, that introduction sound come back: the screaming and evocative sound that, now, has new meaning given its context in the story.

PHOTO CREDIT: Ray Lego for Under the Radar

“If you’re a work of art/I’m standing too close” is a line that intrigued me when I heard it. It is a very clever lyric, and I wonder what it means! Maybe Bridgers feels that, if she starts to rhapsodise and feel too lucky, then they are seeing this person in the wrong light. Maybe some perspective needs to come in – this is just me guessing! Like a lot of Phoebe Bridgers’ work, there is this mix of the emotional and humorous. The heroine sees the brushstrokes of her subject – I love the way her voice/pace changes when delivering certain lines to give them more impact -, and I was caught up in the idea of a lover/friend being a work of art. From the high-brow and artistic, we get a vivid response from Bridgers regarding her subject’s mother – someone that she hates and cannot stand when she opens her mouth. I am not sure why this woman has earned some opprobrium, but I love how earnest and brash Bridgers is in this moment! You raise a smile, and I See You has this real sense of flow and story development. Despite this mother figure being quite ignorant and loud – I can sort of picture the look on Bridgers’ face when she hears this woman speak! -, she seems to be lifted by this restorative person in her life…whether it is a sweetheart or a loyal friend. I do like the fact that we do not know the whole story of this song, and it allows listeners to come to their own conclusions. I immersed myself in the song and was imagining a blend of domestic disharmony – between Bridgers and the mother figure – and the beauty of being with someone who you wholeheartedly trust and feel whole around. Despite the fact Bridgers appears content and sure, the third act of this song seems to find her in a more doubtful mood.

PHOTO CREDIT: Frank Ockenfels

She cannot get her subject to play the drums – whether this is literal or a metaphor for something else? -, and Bridgers only sort of lights up and knows what she wants when she messes things up. The conclusion loops back to this statement: when Bridgers is down or screwing up, seeing this person sort of gives her life and some sort of carapace. Bridgers, near the song’s end, climbs through the window, though not to stand up. She will leave that window open and let the “dystopian morning light” in. I See You is a remarkable song and, in my view, one of the best Bridgers has ever written! You get this fascinating story that runs through, and everyone will wonder what inspired it and how things resolved. To me, we are listening to a woman who is in this new relationship but, despite there being hope, the heroine is still not able to walk without stumbling; she has to face demons in herself and a rather unpleasant person in the form of her lover’s mother. The composition is one of Bridgers’ heaviest and hardest, but it splices beauty and fervency perfectly. Her lyrics are wonderfully quotable and rich - going from the funny and witty to the poetic, before showing real scars and revealing emotions. Phoebe Bridgers amazed me when Stranger in the Alps arrived, but I think she has grown since then and, if it is possible, got even better. She is one of the finest artists in the world, I feel – I See You proves this in spades!

Keep abreast of Bridgers’ social media channels, as she will be delivering some unique gigs from the comfort of her own home. I like the fact that she will be using various rooms as stages and, at this difficult time, artists are having to adapt and do the best with the limitations they have. It is important that we continue to support musicians right now - go and buy as much of their music as we possibly can. I am not sure what the rest of 2020 holds regarding gig plans; I suspect Bridgers will do some more home gigs, and she will be making plans for next year. Make sure you pre-order your copy of Punisher (a link is available at the top of this review), and support one of the best artists of her generation. I will wrap things up in a minute, but I think Phoebe Bridgers is an amazing artist and someone who will enjoy many more years in the industry. I loved her debut, Stranger in the Alps, and Punisher is shaping up to be a truly exceptional album! There are few artists like Bridgers around, and I love how she can work in other bands and have this sort of renaissance vibe to her. 2020 for her, like all artists, has been a strange one, but there is the album to look forward to. It has been great reviewing I See You; one of the best tracks from this year so far. On 19th June, Punisher will be unleashed into the world, and I think we are all…