Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus spent the last few years of interviews generally demurring on when their group, Boygenius, would ever be collectively super again. There’s been a little bit of a Boygenius time-out, of course, since the trio’s fairly spontaneous debut EP came out in 2018 and the release of their first full album as a collective, “The Record,” on March 31. But it hasn’t been for a lack of thought and effort going on behind the scenes, as the waiting world has now learned. As Bridgers says in an interview with Variety, “We realized the other day that we’ve been making this record for longer than we haven’t been, as friends,” since she dates its origin point to the week after she issued her “Punisher” album in 2020.
Just how thought-through “The Record” is on multiple levels becomes evident over the course of a conversation with the three members, each of whom has gained a lot of perspective on matters like how their writing processes and vocal styles stand out from or blend in with one another’s. On the eve of “The Record” coming out — and also on the eve of “The Film,” the piece they did for three of the album’s songs, with Kristen Stewart directing — they talked about what they’re still discovering about their band, creatively, as well as what it was like translating some of the music into video form.
With the short film that Kristen Stewart directed for you, what are the songs that are part of it, and do you think of it as conjoined music videos or something more deeply connected than that?
Bridgers: It’s “20 Bucks,” “Emily, I’m Sorry” and “True Blue,” which are the first three songs we put out (from the album), so I feel like people already associate those songs together. They are all different moods, which was cool to represent. I don’t know if it’s clear cut, but they’re connected in a way that is maybe like a little bit more than what a music video usually asks for. It does feel more like a film than a music video. They’re all interrelated in some of the details that they share.
Obviously you thought Kristen would be simpatico as a director — did you feel it turned out that way?
Bridgers: Yeah, she was incredible. She was insanely hardworking. I don’t wanna make it sound like we had any lower expectations. I just fucking have worked with so many people, and she’s 100% the hardest working person I’ve ever made anything with — very, very, very committed to it being as good as it was in her head.
Baker: Her genuine interest and investment in these songs was evident. She would text us ideas, like non-sequitur ideas, over the period of weeks (beforehand), and then even at night after we had just been on a long shoot day, she would text us. It was clear that as a creative person, she really is capable of giving a lot of focused attention to whatever is inspiring her at any point. And it was neat to see somebody be inspired by something we made and then use their expertise in a different medium to construct three universes around songs that exist, in the same universe in the world of the record. To see her excited, it made me understand the songs in a different way.
Dacus: She was really concerned about making us happy and making sure that we would love this for our whole lives, but also she was making her art, and I see so much of her in the final product. She also got performances out of us that are a little more like acting than some of us have done before.
Bridgers: Yeah, just straight-up acting, which I personally have never done before.
Dacus: She modeled it for us. Before a take, she would be like, “Now do this,” and then we’d see an incredible actor do our blocking for us.
Bridgers: It was so wild to see her do that. It’d be like, the ghost of Julien would pass over her … and then be, like, barking at a truck.
Baker: It was really sweet. Especially when we were shooting “20 Bucks” — because that was like the most involved that we were with my individual direction — when I saw her talking to the kids, giving direction, I was like, “Oh, you’re actually very patient and this is your craft. You’re good at explaining it. And you understand this is uncomfortable for me.” It felt like a encouraging environment for something that was outside my whole lane.
Speaking of videos, there was another video that came out for a song on the album, “Not Strong Enough,” that is less ambitious and has the three of you clowning around in SoCal locations. People love watching it and seeing how different you are in the roller-coaster scenes — specifically, Julien’s matter-of-factness.
Baker: I thought we were all gonna make straight-face. And then I was committing so hard to it that I (kept it up) while everybody else was having fun.
Dacus (to Baker): You’re doing Cool Guy. Like, “I’m too cool for this.”
Julien: Yeah, I am really, but it’s funny because I’m so not.
Some people were wondering whether you just had your mind on business at that moments.
Baker: [Jokingly.] Always on business.
Dacus: I was gonna say never.
Baker: I’m thinking about rehearsal.
Bridgers: Which Lucy and I never think about. I haven’t picked up my guitar for Boygenius (rehearsing since the record was made).
Baker: I’ve been playing the songs a little bit, but playing them in the way that I used to teach myself other bands’ songs. Relearning a song that came together as a studio experiment, for me, is just like learning the songs of a band I like, and it’s really neat.
Man, I got really excited. I went on a run and I was like, “This is a great record to run to” — I was jamming.
Don’t you have to vary the pace of your run, between the extremes of the bangers and the ballads?
Baker: Look, I thought I might have to skip “Emily, I’m Sorry,” because the BPM is so low. But it’s weirdly, perfectly timed for like a slow, heavy jog downhill. I also love to act like I’m in a movie when I’m running, so that song is really (suitable).
Bridgers: Yeah, no choice but to act like you’re in a movie, is how I feel about that. [Bridgers was effectively the sole writer of “Emily, I’m Sorry.”]
Of course you had some experience writing together for the EP about five years ago. Coming back into the co-writing process for this album, did you have a philosophy in mind about balancing the songs that are dominated by one person and the ones where the singing and songwriting are more equal?
Dacus: I think yes, but it might have even just been unspoken that we want to be equally represented on the record. That’s kind of just true in general for all the stuff we do together. There’s no lead singer of the band. We’re all doing everything together. We all have equal input. Even on the songs that are led by somebody, we think through them together. I think that it ended up with a nice balance. We had a bunch more songs that we were working on that didn’t make the record. And I think part of deciding which songs to keep on is like, “Oh, well, we can’t have seven songs that are all Julien.”
Baker: Totally, yeah.
Wherever the lyrics are represented — whether it’s in lyric videos or lyric booklets — there is handwriting or color-coding to indicate who wrote what. In “$20,” you can see the verse-by-verse tradeoff, whereas in other songs, there will be as little as a single word here or there that someone changed or suggested. Did you basically do light edits on each other’s more solo-oriented songs?
Bridgers: For sure.
Baker: Yeah. But there were some that I was like (to the others), “This song should change completely.” And it’s not like a light edit; it’s like, “Please help me rescaffold this entire song.” It’d be something good where I have all the ingredients and I don’t know how to assemble them.
Dacus: Yeah. I thought of it less like we’re presenting a draft and then we collect edits from the others, and more like we’re all building up raw material and assembling together. I don’t know why that feels different than just editing.
Bridgers: Yeah, and I don’t remember a single moment of an ego about somebody wanting a lyric to go or stay. It felt like very unanimous-brain, to improve with small changes each other’s work. It felt like for the greater good of the song, not just differing opinions on lyrics. I feel like we got lucky and we’re very in line with that shit.
Baker: I was thinking about this yesterday. It’s important that the ego isn’t there and it doesn’t go straight to defensiveness when someone is like, “Maybe this line could change.” My immediate reaction is not defensiveness and protectiveness of the art, because I’ve already surrendered it to being a communal endeavor. So I know that people are gonna have a hand in it, and I wouldn’t have surrendered it if I didn’t fully trust y’all. We would be sitting in the control room making a decision, maybe not even about a lyric, but also about, “Should we do this riff twice? Should we take out a piano here?” And if at the end of it someone is (emphatically) like, “I don’t know, I really like it and I want it there,” that’s like, “Yeah, so then put it in.” There was never a point where I was holding some sort of weird, empirical, artistic preciousness higher as a value, or my own ego and putting my name on this, over the process of making something that gratified myself and my bandmates.
Can you put in the words how you think your voices work together in harmony? Because they are so different. Sometimes I’ve talked with sibling acts about blood harmony and that kind of thing, but non-blood harmony is just as interesting, in the not-so-perfectly matched complementarity of voices.
Bridgers: Yeah, we should call it “bloodless harmony.” [Laughter.] Well, I think it’s just straight-up easy, because you can pick out the timbre of our voices so quickly. I feel like I never confuse Lucy with Julien. I sometimes confuse me and Lucy, or me and Julien, because I kind of toggle between a lower register or sometimes I’m the higher register. But you can tell if I’m really straining for a note. If the high part is really straining for a note, it was me and not Julien. [Laughter from others.] But I think we got really lucky, just the way that we sound. I think that’s the whole reason we started this band — the project has just been giving back to us more than we put into it the entire time. So, like, we open our mouths and start singing the first time and we’re like, “Oh, whoa.”
Baker: When we were doing the thing where we had to sing just a cappella (the album’s opening track, “Without You Without Them”), I was like, “Oh, this is it…” I don’t sing very much by myself these days —like, just in my house, or performing alone. So singing with others and having the instrument literally be your body is a really embodying experience. And then to have that be kind of like the entire agency of your expression (in a non-instrumental number)… It’s really nice to have it sit in a complementary way with y’all. It feels easier to access.
Dacus: Yeah, I feel like the effortlessness of it makes me want to work at it. Even though we’re saying that it’s easy, we’ve put so much work into this record, but that is appealing to me because of like all the ways in which it’s easy and makes sense.
Bridgers: Exactly. It just makes it more fun to work.
If you’re willing to indulge an exercise, could each of you sort of speak to what you feel like the other two are really great at — like, strengths that may not be the very foremost part of your wheelhouse, that you recognize in them?
Dacus: Mine is that Julien and Phoebe are way more willing to be discontent than me (and express that). Like, in the studio, they’ll be like, ”That’s not right.” Whereas when I’m recording, I’ll have a little bit of that, but then I’ll really quickly jump to: “Eh, it functions, and it’s good, and you know, it’s gonna be somebody’s taste.” Phoebe and Julien will be more meticulous and more serving of their own tastes and will spend the time. Whereas if I spend too much time on something, I start to worry I’m being selfish…
Bridgers: Yeah, I have no fears about that.
Dacus: And you come up with stuff and end up at conclusions that you don’t regret and that you can stand by.
Baker: I was going to say about you, Lucy, what you said about me and Phoebe! Because I don’t think of myself as a person who’s willing to sit in discontent very much. I would sacrifice this for not wanting to (create tension)… I find myself managing other people’s expectations of the project, no matter what it is. And I feel like that’s something y’all have helped me not do, and to be more present, too — each of you really showing up and not being like, “I’ll fix it later,” squirrelled away. Y’all are better at open processing. Y’all will process creatively with each other in a way that I can’t, or…
Dacus: Yeah, Julien needs to go away.
Baker: I need to go away and think before I can be witnessed, or before I’m trusting myself with my thoughts. And I think it’s OK to have a bad idea — duh — but I also care about being thoughtful with the things I bring to y’all. And it’s nice to see y’all letting the process happen in real time without having to suspend it. Sometimes I do that too much. I gotta make it perfect before I show y’all, because I really care about you and what you think of the music. So I don’t want to show you the work in progress. I want to be like, “I made the noise! Here it is.”
Bridgers: I would say that Lucy and Julien are way better in their writing at documenting what’s currently going on. I think I always write from the past — I’m looking back at something. I’ve written, like, one song in my life that was an active situation.
It also takes me forever to write. This process was really cool just because we realized the other day that we’ve been making this record for longer than we haven’t been, as friends. And that (period of time) is documented in the music because of Lucy and Julien — and a little bit in my contributions, but mostly because of their writing. And I just think that really adds a super interesting layer to this album. At a certain point, it starts talking to itself.
A couple of quick questions about your upcoming touring. Will you be doing solo material as part of those shows or keeping it focused on what you’ve done as a band?
Baker: Yeah, no solo material for those sets. They’re shorter because they’re festival sets. But that’s not a bad idea.
You’ve added some dates around the festival dates, including a warmup show in Pomona, but basically, Coachella will be the first time a massive amount of people have seen you, live or at home, on this album project or at all. Does it excite you that you’re going to come out of the gate with a show as big as Coachella?
Baker: Uh, excited, terrified. Who’s to say?
Bridgers: Yeah, both. But our band rips.
Baker: Yeah. It’s like I have nightmares about it, and it’s a dream come true.
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