Phoebe Bridgers’ favourite lyric of all time
From the very start of her career, Phoebe Bridgers has been penning lyrics that balance beauty and brutality in equal measure. With a soft sound and an angelic voice, her gutwrenching lyricism comes like an unexpected punch to the heart as she seems to manage to capture sharp and painful feelings with such relatability. As she revealed her favourite lyrics of all time, it’s easy to see where she got it from.
Even at 16, when she wrote her track ‘Waiting Room’, Bridgers’ pen was sharp. “I wanna be the power ballad that lifts you up and holds you down / I wanna be the broken love song that feeds your misery,” she sings on her track about outright, all-encompassing devotion. However, within that lyric, she also seems to set out a kind of manifesto that captures her own career.
Really, Bridgers songs can be split into those two camps. Tracks like ‘Motion Sickness’, ‘I Know The End’, and Boygenius hits like ‘Not Strong Enough’ or ‘Salt In The Wound definitely flit into power ballad territory. While still emotional enough with a grip that “holds you down”, they’re big, soaring songs made to be sung along to or seen on big festival stages. Then on the flipside, Bridgers is a master at the broken love song, leading the way as one of the most beloved songwriters at work today, capturing vulnerability in perfect poetry.
You could build a whole playlist of Bridgers’ broken love songs. ‘Smoke Signals’, ‘Scott Street’ and ‘Savior Complex’ would all have to be in there. So would ‘Moon Song’, which perhaps stands as her opus for that feeling. She’d agree with that. When asked by Ari Melber, she said her favourite lyrics from her own work was the simple hooking line from that song; “If I could give you the moon, I would give you the moon.”
The line references the famous quote from It’s A Wonderful Life, “You want the moon? Just say the word, and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pull it down.” But while keeping the same gesture of devotion, she translates it into plainer language. She also adds a slight tone of sadness to it, painting herself as wanting to give something to someone who perhaps doesn’t want it as she removes the question.
In ‘Moon Song’, much like the rest of her sad love songs, Bridgers clearly sees the emotional power in plain speaking. That becomes evident when she’s then asked for her favourite lyric by another artist. “Don’t confront me with my failures, I have not forgotten them,” she quotes from Jackson Browne’s track ‘These Days’, made famous by Nico.
Really, ‘These Days’ is the ultimate straight-talking song. “I’ve been out walking, I don’t do too much talking these days,” it begins, laying out life as a series of facts and letting the listener read emotions in between the lines. Even when feeling does find its way into the lyrics, it doesn’t lay it all out. “These days I seem to think about / How all these changes came about my ways,” is sung, but with no deeper dive into what the “changes” might be or what emotion they might leave behind. Instead, Browne’s lyrical pen says just enough and leaves space for interpretation.
It’s that school that Bridgers seems to have studied at. While her lyricism is more explicitly emotional, it still masters the same sense of reservation. Rather than saying exactly and clearly what is going on and how she feels about it, her work is littered with codified images, cultural references and simple phrases that leave breathing space for our own emotional interpretation. She invites her listeners to make the song their own and find ways to relate it to their own life, just as the world, including Bridgers herself, has with ‘These Days’.
