Lyrically Speaking: Phoebe Bridgers contemplates the power of good love on ‘Sidelines’
Love is an unavoidable thing. Unless you lead a life of total and utter isolation, of total disinterest and total boredom, the feeling is an inevitability in some form or another. It’s a beautiful fact of life. Love can be as simple as enjoying a nice meal, smiling at your friends, watering your plants. It doesn’t have to be so dramatic. That’s what Phoebe Bridgers is saying on ‘Sidelines’, the most tender and straightforward love song she’s ever written.
It’s a topic Bridgers has not only touched on but utterly picked at. On her debut single, ‘Smoke Signals’, she gets her fingers into the complexity and trickiness of trying to know someone down to their bones and still love them. On her latest album, Punisher, her devastating track ‘Moon Song’ contemplates the plain and toxicity of loving when it’s futile and being devotional when it’s one-sided.
Whether she’s pondering the dark side of love with considerations of abuse or heartache or writing odes to beautiful, loving friendships as part of Boygenius, it’s a feeling that the songwriter is clearly hooked on analysing. There’s a sense that she wants to get her claws into it and pull it apart, inspecting each layer with careful eyes.
But on ‘Sidelines’, it’s like two hands landed on top of her scratching talons and said gently, “Stop, leave it be”. Instead of attempting to understand love or pull it apart for better poetry, the tender track is one of surrender as she embraces the feeling and the glory of its simplicity.
That’s not to say that the track isn’t celebratory. In fact, it’s perhaps Bridgers’ most rejoicing love song as she sings about the ways that a good relationship can be empowering and emboldening. “I’m not afraid of anything at all,” she sings as the opening line before slowly crossing things off her list of fears. In the glow of love, the figure in the piece has become unshakable and beautifully assured.
But the real beauty of the song comes when she applies that feeling to the smallest things. The track’s second verse feels like it should be held up as one of the most beautiful depictions of love ever penned as Bridgers stunningly captures the way love can make a person feel more at peace in themselves and, in turn, braver in the world. “I’m not afraid of going back to school / I gave it up the first time, but I’ll try again,” she sings, “I’m not afraid of getting older / Used to fetishise myself / now I’m talking to my house plants.”
With consideration of the other images of love and devotion in Bridgers’ discography, this one feels even more beautiful. In ‘Moon Song’, she writes herself as nothing more than “a dog with a bird at your door”. Or, in ‘I Know The End’, she makes it clear that her image of love is always one of giving or pleading as she writes of the feeling with “A bird in your teeth”. But here, it’s something she’s not just taking or basking in but is something light and innocent and grounding. There are no more cinematic metaphors or cryptic imagery of dogs or masters or offerings, but instead, it’s just her, and she seems to feel more herself than ever.
