“The lyrics are beautiful”: the first album Phoebe Bridgers wore out
Some of the best rock and roll songs aren’t really about being the most raucous thing in the world. The genre may have built on being party music for everyone to enjoy, but once people started making tunes that were about what was in their hearts, nothing mattered more than the lyrics behind everything. Although Phoebe Bridgers would never write anything that wasn’t 100% from the heart, she felt that one of the foundations of rock and roll came from the singer-songwriter genre.
Because in the wake of Bob Dylan shifting the world on a dime, it was time for everyone to start thinking a bit differently about what their songs meant. Anyone could throw together a few chords and sing about their girlfriend leaving and call it a tune, but no one could really be taken seriously on the charts when ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ was being played around the same time.
While James Taylor and Carole King had started breaking down the doors for what rock and roll would become, Jackson Browne was a much different breed. Although Bruce Springsteen was on the horizon, no one had ever discussed the problems with romance quite like Browne did on albums like For Everyman.
There were The Beatles and Dylan, who would touch on romantic material here and there, but if those were people’s entries into relationships, Browne puts the listener in the middle of the room on his songs. Rather than making a traditional love song, records like ‘The Pretender’ see lovers at a turning point in their lives, where everything starts to break down, and they wonder what they could have done better.
Even Springsteen had to tip his cap to what Browne was doing, thinking that it was one of the most intimate styles of songwriting that he had ever heard in a while when he first laid ears on it. However, regarding raw heartache and pain and being laid out on tape, Browne unintentionally wrote the playbook that Bridgers would be cribbing from for years.
Although she was an avid fan of many different types of indie rock, Bridgers remembered For Everyman as the record she could never get enough of, telling Line of Best Fit, “I love Jackson Browne, For Everyman was the first record I heard and I wore that out. The lyrics are beautiful, the melodies are beautiful, the album is amazing and he has the best stage banter ever, he’s so casually cool.”
Even though Browne would never reach the heights as his buddies, the Eagles, Bridgers seemed to carry on his songwriting tradition for the modern age much more than Don Henley. Whenever listening to a record like Punisher, it has the same energy as For Everyman, but with the melancholy turned up to 11, it is almost as if the listener is being let in on the harshest pieces of her life without any prior warning.
While listening to this kind of music can take its toll on someone’s soul, both Browne and Bridgers know that it’s not about making the listener feel comfortable at every turn. If anything, it’s about luring them in with the right melody so that it’s equally powerful when you go for that emotional gut punch.
