The Boygenius song inspired by Paul Simon
The music on Boygenius’ full-length debut, The Record, has a fascinating relationship with nostalgia. Songs like ‘$20’ and ‘Anti-Curse’ openly reckon with the past and its murky meanings, but past gods are never held in high regard. When Lucy Dacus chants out “Always an angel / Never a god” in ‘Not Strong Enough’, you better believe she means it.
The album’s biggest kickback comes in the only song that directly names a past figure: ‘Leonard Cohen’. Dacus barely flinches while she rips the already-dead Cohen a new one by calling him “an old man having an existential crisis at a Buddist monastery writing horny poetry”. Dacus and the rest of the band clearly aren’t idolising Cohen, but other than that slight, they’re not really dissing him either.
In fact, parts of ‘Leonard Cohen’ quotes Cohen’s own ‘Anthem’ from 1992’s The Future. Specifically, Dacus quotes the line, “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in”. It’s not the only strange album credit making reference to a legendary folk poet, either.
In the album’s liner notes, the band expresses that it is “Thanks to Paul Simon for inspiration on ‘Cool About It’.” That credit likely comes as a way to circumvent the fact that the first line of the song’s verses contains more than a passing resemblance to Simon and Garfunkel’s 1970 epic ‘The Boxer’.
The way that both melodies rise and fall is unmistakable. The “inspiration” credit is as much as Simon gets for the track – he’s not given an official songwriting credit on the song. The only songwriting credits not listed to “Boygenius” exclusively are for ‘Leonard Cohen’, where the titular singer gets credit along with Hodun Yu.
The other references to singers of the past are more oblique. When Dacus revealed that the album cut ‘We’re in Love’ was written about her relationship with her bandmates, she also revealed that a specific reference in the track related back to folk icon Elliott Smith.
“I wrote a song, ‘We’re In Love,’ for them, but there are like one-word changes that Phoebe made that like opened up the whole meaning of the song,” Dacus revealed at the premiere of the band’s video, The Film. “Like the colour of a flower. There’s a carnation line, and it was white, which I just picked, and then she was like, ‘Make it pink,’ because it’s a reference”.
“There’s a Marty Robbins song that my grandmother used to love, and it’s like, ‘A white sport coat and a pink carnation. I’m all alone at the dance…'” Bridgers added. “And Lucy’s song is about trying to connect with somebody in another life — and how would you find that person? ‘I’ll be the boy with a pink carnation.’ Elliott Smith tried to wear a pink carnation with his white suit at the Oscars. And the Oscars were like, ‘It looks corny.'”
Check out ‘Cool About It’ and see if you can hear the connection to ‘The Boxer’.
