The perfect album for troubled times, according to Phoebe Bridgers: “It’s no apologist”
Not every album is necessarily meant to be a pick-me-up. As much as people like to go back to artists like The Beatles as their main source of inspiration when making optimistic songs, no one will go to the most intense black metal because they want to think about sunshine and roses. Music is all about working every part of the emotional spectrum, and when things seem to be the most dire, Phoebe Bridgers always falls back on the album Life in the Dark by The Felice Brothers.
Of course, Bridgers has always known a thing or two about the darker side of singer-songwriting. Despite the ray of sunshine that came across on The Record by Boygenius, some of Bridgers’ best material usually has people in shambles after they listen to it, as if she took your entire heart, stomped it to pieces and then gave it back to you by the end of her song.
The Felice Brothers were never that far away from that style of singer-songwriting, but Life in the Dark is a bit of a harrowing listen from back to front. Most protest records seem to have a certain agenda that they want to preach to you, but half of the record is more about living in troubled times and finding out how to adapt to everything.
While a lot of people would claim that all they wanted to do was complain about the state of the world, that’s not really giving the album that much credit. There’s a lot of material on the record that looks at the sad state of modern-day America, but it’s important to acknowledge that things are fucked up rather than just try to fix every one of those problems yourself.
For Bridgers, it’s that honesty on the record that actually gives it its longevity, saying, “I feel like it’s not apologist. It’s not like it’s fine, and we all love each other. It talks about how fucked up it is to live in America. It’s really dark at times, but we all live here, but there’s some goodness and poetry on it that are redeemable somehow.”
That kind of balance between light and dark is a lot more important than a lot of people realise when talking about the state of the world. It’s easy for anyone to just sit down with a guitar and talk about where everything went wrong or how much their music has fallen from grace in the world, but it takes a lot more bravery to say that there are a lot of problems with the world, but it’s still worth pushing yourself forward.
That’s the kind of mentality that also runs through some of Bridgers’s greatest work. Across an album like Punisher, she doesn’t sugarcoat any aspect of the pain she feels, but there are always those few lines that help remind us that there is beauty left in the world and that it’s worth protecting.
And even as troubled times continue to be redefined over the years, many songwriters could take a hint from listening to albums like Life in the Dark. Sure, that darkness can be more than a little dour, but the phrase about the night being darkest just before dawn has never applied more than this album.
