‘Summer’s End’: Phoebe Bridgers’ greatest cover
Whether it’s on the songs from either of her solo albums or in her contribution to the record as part of the triumvirate supergroup Boygenius, Phoebe Bridgers has very quickly established herself as one of the most cutting, insightful, poetic and emotional singers and lyricists working today.
While so many of her lyrics deal with her relationships, both romantic and platonic, and her own internal struggles, she has a knack for capturing a universal experience with an ironic wit and a cool distance. In songs like the emotional ‘Motion Sickness’ or the sparse and intimate ‘Georgia’ from Stranger in the Alps or else on ‘Graceland Too’ from her fabulous follow-up Punisher—a song supposedly written about her fellow Boygenius Julien Baker—Bridgers has cultivated an atmospheric signature style which allows her lyrics and vocals plenty of space to cut to your core and get lodged deep down inside of you.
She’s a great storyteller, as evidenced by her Lost in Translation-esque ‘Kyoto’, and especially on her best song, ‘I Know the End’. The final track on, and fitting crescendo of, Punisher, ‘I Know the End’ is full of Springsteen-ian imagery and is a complete powerhouse performance. The lyrics sound like the burnt-out memory of the dream from ‘Thunder Road’; it’s the story of lost love in America, taken all the way until the wheels have fallen off and burnt. Bridgers ends the song, and the album, with a wordless scream that tells the story of the lyrics just as well as any of the words do.
With the ability to write a song such as this one, it should be no surprise to find out that Bridgers has a huge love and respect for The Boss, or that she has covered his songs ‘Stolen Car’ and ‘I’m on Fire’ in concert.
Bridgers may be a Stranger in the Alps, but she is no stranger to singing other people’s songs in concert. Over the years, she has covered tracks by a wide and diverse range of artists from Gillian Welch (‘Everything is Free’) and Sheryl Crow (‘If It Makes You Happy’) to Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers (‘It’ll All Work Out’), Elliot Smith (‘Say Yes’), and Ednaswap (‘Torn’), among plenty others.
And it’s not just on stage where Bridgers has explored a wide range of songs and singers. She’s recorded covers of Wheetus’ ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ and The Cure’s ‘Friday I’m in Love’, Billie Eilish’s ‘When The Party’s Over’ and Merle Haggard’s ‘If We Make It Through December’, as well.
Two of her greatest studio covers are of Tom Waits songs, ‘Georgia Lee’ from the Come On Up to the House: Women Sing Waits album and her single release of ‘Day After Tomorrow’. It is a brave singer who chooses to tackle the indomitable Tom Waits, an artist who is so unique and stylised and impossible to better, but just as she does with all of her covers, Bridgers brings her own style to the songs and makes them work in her voice, rather than reaching to try and recreate the original. Both of her Tom Waits covers are breathy, emotive performances which bring out the current of emotion that surges through both songs and create an evocative, atmospheric haze that the words can float away on.
In 2021, Bridgers brought that same breathy and emotive style to another beautiful song from one of the greatest songwriters of all time.
John Prine was writing songs that get to the heart of things and cut you like a knife from before the time he ever stepped into a studio. He would write songs in his head while out walking his route as a postman and head down to the Fifth Peg in Chicago after his shift to try them out on stage. Including songs like ‘Hello in There’, ‘Sam Stone’ and ‘Angel from Montgomery’, John Prine’s 1971 debut album introduced the world to a man who could make you laugh and cry and think and live and die with just just a few chords and a few words. A man who truly put the human in humanity and who put his heart and soul into his songs.
By the time he made it to his last album, The Tree of Forgiveness, in 2018, he had written some of the greatest songs in the popular canon. ‘Sweet Revenge’, ‘Storm Windows’, ‘That’s the Way The World Goes Round’, ‘In Spite of Ourselves’, ’Linda Goes to Mars’, ‘Jesus, the Missing Years’. The list of great John Prine songs is endless. John Prine was a genius, and his last album is bursting with evidence to back up the claim.
Maybe the best song on it is ‘I Have Met My Love Today’, or maybe it’s ‘No Ordinary Blue’. It could be ‘God Only Knows’ or ‘When I Get to Heaven’, but most likely it’s ‘Summer’s End’.
When Bridgers released her cover of the song in 2021, John Prine was fighting for his life with Covid-19. Almost a month to the day after the song was released, he passed away at the age of 73, but as long as people keep singing his songs, his genius will live on. Bridgers taps into that genius in her rendition. The song is the perfect foil for her atmospheric style and is a moving, deeply affecting reminiscence on the passing of time.
Both Bridgers and Prine write in the space between tears and laughter, lightness and dark, and they can each evoke equally polarising responses from the audiences, often all at once, when they want to. They both deal with heartbreak and hope, and in her performance of John Prine’s ‘Summer’s End’, Phoebe Bridgers really captures all of the heartbreaking hope in the song.
