FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
PHOTO CREDIT: Jenn Five for The Forty-Five
Part Twenty-One: Phoebe Bridgers
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I have not done this feature…
for a while now, and the last person I covered for Modern Heroines was Grimes back in February. The reason I am kicking it back up (albeit briefly) is that the headline acts for next year’s Reading and Leeds festival were announced earlier in the week, and there were no women among the six acts! This compelled a wave of condemnation; many people asking why, again, one of the biggest festivals in the world is struggling to include women! Some might ask that, because they have an all-male headline line-up, that means there are no women who can fit the bill and would be popular enough. In terms of names that could headline and provide a stunning set, there are plenty of options. From Billie Eilish and Lizzo, through to Anna Calvi, Little Simz, and Fiona Apple, there would be no shortage! I also think that Phoebe Bridgers is someone who is not only among the most talented and popular artists of today, but she has a gravitas and command of the stage that would lead to an amazing headline set! In this feature, I am going to bring in some interviews and reviews that show just what an immense talent Bridgers is. If you want to follow her on Instagram and Twitter, then you can keep abreast of everything she is doing. I really like what she is putting out into the world and, before I bring in a selection of interviews from the past few months/year, I want to talk about her two solo tudio albums. Phoebe Bridgers is one of those artists who has already achieved so much in her life. Only just twenty-six, the Los Angeles-born musician is also known for her musical collaborations: boygenius (with Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus), and Better Oblivion Community Center (with Conor Oberst).
I have said before how we do not really have icons like we did back in the day such as Madonna and David Bowie - those artists with a unique style and changing innovation that seduced people and inspired countless artists and fans. Maybe that is unfair but, as there are so many artists out there and the media has changed a lot through the years, it is harder to find these artists that can rank alongside the greats. Like Jack White, Bridgers is someone who can succeed a solo artist, but she can also step into other groups and add so much. She is part of a duo and a trio, and I wonder whether we might see her also join a quartet – there is a supergroup involving Bridgers I have been thinking about that I would love to see! I am joking, but it is amazing to see how ambitious and passionate Bridgers is. Her debut single, Killer, was released on 28th April, 2015 (she did release a song called Waiting Room in 2014 for the Lost Ark Studio Compilation – Vol. 08), and her incredible debut album, Stranger in the Alps, was released on 22nd September, 2017. Almost three years after its release, I am still listening to it, and I just love the songs! In terms of influence, I know Bridgers is a huge fan of her Better Oblivion Community Center mate, Conor Oberst, but I think Bridgers’ sound and voice is very much her own.
Oberst features on Stranger in the Alps on the track, Would You Rather, and one can hear something very personal across the album. Bridgers co-wrote all but one song on the record - You Missed My Heart is a cover -, and the maturity and wisdom one hears on the album is truly moving – considering Bridgers was only twenty-three when the album was released. I have often wondered whether Stranger in the Alps got as much credit as it deserves. It gathered huge critical acclaim, but I think it should have won a load of awards and further recognition. The albums deals with sorrow and challenges, but there is that sense of hope and beauty that connects with the listener and brings them into the album. The immersive nature of Stranger in the Alps is one big reason why it received such positive feedback. This is what NME said in their review:
“Like Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen? Then get ready to fall head over heels in love with Los Angeles’ Phoebe Bridgers. ‘Strangers In the Alps’ is a less a collection of songs and more a collection of feelings, a luscious but deeply sad debut that sees the 23-year-old singer putting her heart on the line and calling for you to do the same.
It’s not surprise to find she’s heavily influenced by fellow Angelino Elliott Smith, with songs like ‘Funeral’ – about the overdose of a friend – and the haunting ‘Demi Moore’ sharing atmospheric, finger-picked emotion with the late singer-songwriter.
A kind of urban folksiness runs deep through the record, and the strummed softness of ‘Would You Rather’ even features Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst. The downbeat vibe is cut through by unmitigated banger ‘Motion Sickness’ but ‘Strangers In The Alps’ is definitely album for the sad times. Get ready to embrace the tears”.
There were some who gave the album a slightly mixed review, and I think many would upgrade their review listening back now. Stranger in the Alps is a truly stunning debut, and I would urge people to go and buy a copy. Between her debut and second albums, Bridgers was involved with two other big releases. The boygenius E.P. was released on 26th October, 2018, and Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus – alongside a select group of musicians – created something wonderful. I hope that boygenius release another E.P. or album soon, as there is something harmonious about them, yet Bridgers, Dacus, and Baker have their own vibe and characteristics that makes the E.P. sound so rich and diverse! I just want to bring in a snippet from the review Paste provided, that shows why the trio worked so well together:
“The Bridgers-backed “Me & My Dog” is the buffed standout at the front of this EP’s trophy case. Loose acoustic guitars build to an inferno, or, rather, a glacier: “I had a fever / “Until I met you / Now you make me cool,” Bridgers sings, swiftly administering the cleverest compliment in rock this year.
Baker takes the wheel on a pair of fortified ballads “Souvenir” and “Stay Down,” The former would fit in snugly on Baker’s 2017 LP, Turn Out the Lights. Baker is very instrumentally savvy, and thumping timpani, focused keys and bear-all songwriting rule on “Stay Down.” It sounds like a song about giving up: “Push me down into the water like a sinner / Hold me under and I’ll never come up again.” But boygenius’ unified voices signal there’s still some hope, even as Baker echoes, singing from her gut, “So I stay down.”
The album ends on an especially magical note. On “Ketchum, ID,” Bridgers, Dacus and Baker assume soprano, alto and tenor and churn up a harmony so handsomely melancholic you’ll find yourself snatching tissues without even knowing why. It’s a fitting epilogue, too, that chronicles the band’s shared experience as touring musicians, and the emotional heaviness following those long nights in unfamiliar places. “I am never anywhere / Anywhere I go,” they sing in unison. “When I’m home I’m never there / Long enough to know.” Those are devastating words, but, at the same time, you get the feeling Bridgers, Baker and Dacus have found some sense of home in one another. Their mutual experiences are what unite them, and that bond bleeds through this music in every buzzing, beautiful bar”.
I think Phoebe Bridgers’ second album is a big step and sounds different to Stranger in the Alps; maybe it is because of the collaborations in-between and the fact that she picked something up from the different artists she worked with. The Better Oblivion Community Center album – I hope her next non-solo album project is not eponymously-named – was released on 24th January, 2019, and Oberst and Bridgers harmonise beautifully throughout. Although boygenius’ E.P. got slightly better reviews than Better Oblivion Community Center, the album is still another sign that Bridgers is among the most accomplished singer-songwriters of this age!
This is what The Line of Best Fit wrote when they reviewed the album:
“Putting the elusive nature of the campaign, which will undoubtedly continue to grab headlines, to one side, the pairing makes perfect sense. Both Oberst and Bridgers are often classed as folk singer-songwriters, but neither resorts to conforming totally to that label. Oberst is just as well known for his influence on emo, as well as his rockier exploits with his band Desaparecidos, whereas Bridgers last year released the highly-acclaimed indie EP, boygenius, alongside Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus. They have in fact worked together in the past, most notably on "Would You Rather" off of Bridgers' debut album Stranger In The Alps, the results of which bode well for the new record.
It should come as no surprise then that Better Oblivion Community Center refuses to stick to typical folk-rock, dabbling at times in sounds ranging from alt-rock to synth-pop. “Exception To The Rule” opens with a pulsating, New Romantic-esque refrain before divulging in a beautiful spattering of synths and Bridgers’ and Oberst’s intertwined vocals. Elsewhere, the duo employ a combination of folk and cascading noise on one of the record’s highlights, “My City”. As both musicians temporarily abandon the jovial acoustic refrain underpinning the verses, they gradually build up to a release of distortion and drums for the final chorus, Bridgers' vocals in particular breaking with desperation. Both artists draw on their own well of influences, and the result is a wonderful myriad of styles.
Despite the wide range of aesthetics on the record, however, there are no two ways about it; this thing is bloody gorgeous. Two of the most adept singer-songwriters in haunting, poignant melancholy, the beauty to Better Oblivion Community Center lies exactly where you’d expect. Whether it be the tragic “Service Road” or the vocal duet on “Dylan Thomas”, there are endless moments on this record that prove just why both Oberst and Bridgers are so highly thought of. It’s the fact they’re able to do it together, and with such obvious chemistry, that makes it so much more impressive”.
Go and buy the boygenius E.P., and the Better Oblivion Community Center album, as they demonstrate the breadth and depth of Bridgers’ abilities. I still think there are reservoirs untapped in terms of where her songwriting and voice can go, not only in terms of themes but genres too. I am going to end with some interviews from this/last year, as I think it is important that Bridgers herself reveals some story and insight. Before then, I want to talk about Punisher. In terms of shifts, it is very different to Stranger in the Alps. More varied in terms of sound, it is a little edgier, and Bridgers’ voice is broader and more emotionally-rich.
PHOTO CREDIT: Frank Ockenfels for Vanity Fair
I adore Stranger in the Alps, and I think repeating that album would have been a mistake. One can definitely feel a lot of the debut album in Punisher, but her follow-up is a different beast. This is how Rough Trade sum up Bridgers’ second solo album:
“Phoebe Bridgers doesn’t write love songs as much as songs about the impact love can have on our lives, personalities, and priorities. Punisher, her fourth release and second solo album, is concerned with that subject. To say she writes about heartbreak is to undersell her blue wisdom, to say she writes about pain erases all the strange joy her music emanates. The arrival of Punisher cements Phoebe Bridgers as one of the most clever, tender and prolific songwriters of our era.
Bridgers is the rare artist with enough humor to deconstruct her own meteoric rise. Repeatedly praised by publications like The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, Pitchfork, The Fader, The Los Angeles Times and countless others, Bridgers herself is more interested in discussing topics on Twitter, deadpanning meditations on the humiliating process of being a person, she presents a sweetly funny flipside to the strikingly sad songs she writes. Fittingly, Punisher is fascinated with, and driven by, that kind of impossible tension. Whether it’s writing tweets or songs, Bridgers’s singular talent lies in bringing fierce curiosity to slimy and painful things, interrogating them until they yield up answers that are beautiful and absurd, or faithfully reporting the reality that, sometimes, they are neither.
Bridgers pulls together a formidable crew of guests, including the Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, Christian Lee Hutson and Conor Oberst as well as Nathaniel Walcott (of Bright Eyes), Nick Zinner (of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs), Jenny Lee Lindberg (of Warpaint), Blake Mills and Jim Keltner as well as her longtime bandmates Marshall Vore (drums), Harrison Whitford (guitar), Emily Retsas (bass) and Nick White (keys). The album was mixed by Mike Mogis, who also mixed Stranger In The Alps.
On the album’s epic, freewheeling closer, I Know The End, Bridgers orchestrates wails and horns, drums and electric guitar into a sumptuous doomsday swirl, culminating in her own final whispered roar. This is Punisher in a nutshell: devastating elegance punctuated by a moment of deeply campy self-awareness”.
Again, Bridgers co-writes on the album – on every song in fact -, and Conor Oberst can be heard on a few numbers, too. Moving from the more Folk and Indie sound of her debut, there is something harder and slightly darker on Punisher. Thematically, Punisher tackles the tension between the inner and outer-self; Bridgers has said how the album addresses numbness and personal loss – Bridgers lost her black pug, Max, in 2019 (she had had him for sixteen years). Though Bridgers tackled loneliness and loss when writing the album, there is plenty of light and redemption throughout the album. Punisher has earned Bridgers the best reviews of her career, and the album ranks alongside the very best of the year.
I think 2020 has been dominated by women, and Bridgers second album proves why she is a modern icon who is more than ready to take on headline slots! The songwriting throughout Punisher is fabulous and so engrossing! This is what SLANT wrote in their review of Punisher:
“Punisher’s best songs are those most adept at bringing all of these themes and sounds together. “Chinese Satellite” starts out wispy and ethereal before building to an apex of lush, cinematic strings, booming drums, and keen electric guitars. Here, Bridgers is in peak form as a lyricist, her moments of devastation shot through with a sardonic smile: “I want to believe,” she declares as a myriad of sounds fades away and we’re left with only those serious, dramatic strings. “Instead I look at the sky and I feel nothing,” is the punchline, and the moment is jarring compared to what initially feels like a real epiphany.
Punisher’s closing track, “I Know the End,” is a travelogue at the end of the world, explicitly illustrating the cloud of uneasiness that hangs over the album. Bridgers sprinkles the song with nods toward an amorphous kind of closure: A tornado comes for her hometown, a siren sounds in the distance, government drones and alien spaceships float off in the sky, and a billboard warns that “the end is near” amid a crescendo of horns and explosive noise. The album ends with blood-curdling screams, until all the sound fades out and Bridgers’s voice is hoarse. The end of the world is a central detail on Punisher, an influence over the uncertainty that falls over these dark but gorgeous songs”.
Since the release of Punisher (go and buy the album when you get time!), Bridgers has done interviews and some live performances (from her home), and I think she is as keen as every other artist to get back to gigs and get out there! Having released an album in lockdown, there is that desire to perform these new songs, and I am sure Bridgers has other songs in her mind that she would love to air. You can visit her homepage for news and updates, but it is clear that Bridgers has a very long and bright future. She is one of the finest artists around, and I think we really learn a lot from interviews. One can glean so much from the music, but I love to hear and read about Bridgers, as she is a fascinating human! I am going to bring in a few interviews that captured my attention to show what I mean. When Bridgers spoke with NME last year, she discussed the progress of her second album and how it differed from Stranger in the Alps:
“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.”
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.”
How far along is the album? Is it finished?
“I don’t know! Honestly… The last record, I wrote the last two songs literally in the final hour. I don’t like to put time limits on myself as much as possible. I think that’s the worst thing that I could do right now.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Jessica Lehrman for Rolling Stone
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”.
The penultimate interview I want to grab from is from The Ringer back in June, as there is a lot to pour over. I was not overly-familiar with Bridgers’ early life and upbringing, and it was great to learn that side of her:
“Bridgers grew up in Pasadena, California, and was always adjacent to the entertainment industry. Her dad was a carpenter who built sets for film and television, and her mother, Jamie, had a variety of white-collar jobs, from receptionist to house manager for a fine arts complex. (Jamie is currently a stand-up comedian. “She has made jokes about me being a musician, and STDs and stuff. She’s pretty raunchy. It’s great.”)
“This whole COVID situation is reminding me a lot of high school, actually. I’m in bed all day. I eat whatever I want. A lot of the time I don’t have energy to reheat something, so I either go back to sleep or make a toaster waffle,” she says. “I feel like it’s weirdly like exposure therapy to my depressed teen years.”
Her parents divorced when she was 19, and in interviews she has alluded to her father’s substance misuse issues (or as she said in GQ, his “drug thing”) and says they have a strained relationship. But she also credits him for filling their house with music, including plenty of Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell, when she was a child. Later she would also gravitate to the brooding of future collaborators and friends like Oberst and the National. She’s always known she wanted to be a songwriter. “Before I knew how to do it. Before I was making anything good, I wanted it”.
There is a lot of great stuff in that interview, but the subjects of the #MeToo movement caught me. Also, Bridgers used to be in a relationship with Ryan Adams and, when the songwriter was accused of sexual assault by a number of women, naturally, many people came to Bridgers for an interview. Bridgers discussed both #MeToo and Ryan Adams in the interview:
“Alps was released right as the #MeToo movement began kicking into high gear after the exposé of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein’s numerous incidents of sexual assault and harassment. While doing interviews for Boygenius, Bridgers would comment that sometimes after she would shoot down condescending “women in music”–style questions from male journalists, she could tell a bunch of other questions were being deleted. “I don’t know if it’s better. I mean I think that more places are afraid to send an old white man to go interview a young woman,” she says. “Hopefully, people are just hiring more women, and even if it’s just because they have to or for a look, they’re editing out the questions that they have seen other people get ripped apart for asking. So it seems like everybody’s on their toes a little bit, and the people who should be on their toes are on their toes.”
While gigging around L.A., Bridgers caught the attention of Ryan Adams, who released her single “Killer” through his label PAX AM in 2015. As revealed last year in an article in The New York Times by Joe Coscarelli and Melena Ryzik, they began a romantic relationship when she was 20 and he was more than twice her age. The article recounted how, she says, Adams became emotionally abusive, and after she ended the relationship “Adams became evasive about releasing the music they had recorded together and rescinded the offer to open his upcoming concerts.” (Through a lawyer, Adams contested the accounts of Bridgers and many other women.).
A year later, she reflects on how her life has changed since the article’s publication. “I guess I just get to talk about that shit a little bit more than I did before, and I met tons of great people through it. It was definitely worse right before it came out. I was afraid it wasn’t gonna come out, afraid we’re gonna get sued. You still gaslight yourself and it’s like, ‘Did any of this shit happen?’” she says. “And then the day it came out, no matter how many people told me to go fuck off and die on the internet, I met so many amazing people and got so many fucking emails that made me really emotional, being like, ‘I was the barista down the street from the studio,’ or whatever. It just made me feel good”.
I will wrap things up in a second, but I will end by sourcing from an excellent interview from The Forty-Five from earlier in the year. I wanted to select a passage that details how Bridgers’ music has helped fans struggling emotionally – and how her music connects to her fans like nothing else out there:
“Elsewhere on the spectrum, there are the fans who connect to the explicit existential angst of Bridgers’ music, and find themselves talking to her about the emotional issues she’s helped them through. “Sometimes I’m talking to somebody for five hours about suicide,” she says. “It’s a lot of pressure.” Bridgers’ writing style is unflinching, and will often cut to the heart of an ugly emotion by writing vignettes around it. It’s not surprising that her listeners find themselves inside the blue and grey landscapes of her music; she deliberately carves space for them in her writing.
“I can’t write too close to an experience, because I feel like I’ll write a way too sincere, ‘Fuck you for not loving me’ song,” she explains of her oblique, evocative approach to writing lyrics. “But if I’m far enough away from it, I can be like, ‘Oh, it’s way sadder to just describe what’s happening, and not say how you feel about it.’ Almost like JD Salinger or something.”
It is a worrying time for all artists, but Bridgers has not been thinking too much about the future in fearful terms. There is always a sense of hope and light in her music and conversations:
While she’s been reflecting on these fears about what comes next for the music industry, Bridgers admits in an on-brand fashion: “I haven’t been thinking about the future that much.” Just like her music, Bridgers is currently living firmly inside the moment, eating her PB & J sandwiches and making short-term plans for a virtual world tour. In the longer term, she says vaguely, “I would like to write, and record. Those are my hopes. And I hope there’s a vaccine.” While Bridgers makes music for endings, her songs also occasionally glimmer with implicit, trepidatious optimism. On “Garden Song”, she sings, “When I grow up, I’m gonna look up from my phone and see my life.” Even when the future feels impossible, she seems to say, it’s coming. The existence of ‘Punisher’ proves that last time she felt she’d run out of songs forever, she was wrong. Hopefully, she’ll be wrong again”.
Phoebe Bridgers is such a prodigious talent, and a restless artist who loves to work with different people. She has released one of this year’s most remarkable albums in Punisher, and who knows where 2021 will take her. I hope she can do as much touring as possible, and you just feel another album will come around, whether that is a solo record or with boygenius; perhaps she will release a record as part of Better Oblivion Community Center. Who knows. What I do know – and many other share this opinion – is that Phoebe Bridgers is…
AN icon of our times.