The song Phoebe Bridgers calls “next level amazing”
Phoebe Bridgers has become the figurehead of the 2010s sad girl indie movement. Her 2017 debut album, Stranger in the Alps, blended influences from folky guitar and devastating Elliott Smith-style lyricism. Her music is often drenched in vulnerability, as she rightfully laments, “Jesus Christ, I’m so blue all the time, and that’s just how I feel, always have, and I always will”.
With her indie folk guitar and gloomy, nostalgic lyricism, Bridgers quickly endeared herself to a new generation of indie fans as well as some major mainstream giants like Taylor Swift, SZA, and Fiona Apple. Alongside featuring on tracks and stages alongside huge artists, she forms a third of the indie girl supergroup Boygenius alongside Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, who released their debut album, The Record, earlier this year.
Bridgers has also toured with Soccer Mommy, the moniker of Sophia Allison. Existing in a similar sphere, Soccer Mommy creates similarly vulnerable music soundtracked by indie rock guitars. Reflecting on the music, Bridgers told The Line of Best Fit that, while they were touring together, she looked forward to hearing one song in particular: ‘Scorpio Rising”.
The song featured as an album-only track on Soccer Mommy’s 2018 debut, Clean. Over soft strums, Allison tells the story of a summer love inevitably slipping away, blaming the changing planets, her Scorpio rising sign, and her parents. The track is simultaneously full of longing and mourning.
Bridgers loved the track so much that, before it was on streaming, she sought it out on NPR First Listen: “I hate navigating anything that’s not Spotify or iTunes, but I went on the NPR First Listen and listened to ‘Scorpio Rising’ 18 times in a row. It isn’t a single, but they close the set with it, so they know how strong it is. It just hit me really hard every night I heard it, and now I get people to put on headphones and hear it.”
Bridgers also praises the album as a whole, which she calls “amazing”, but she specifies that ‘Scorpio Rising’ is the track that is most representative of Bridgers’ admiration for her melodies and voice. She continues: “The lyrics are so casually fucked up and sad, it reminds me of a summer of loving somebody, and then they turn around and say they don’t care about you anymore, and you remember all this stuff. And she doesn’t even have to say that in the song. It’s literally all experiential imagery, and you get that from it”.
Bridgers recalls particularly admiring Allison’s use of astrological imagery, as she explained: “And dropping the phrase Scorpio Rising into a song is the most next level, amazing thing. For one, Scorpio is unanimously the worst sign or as hippie-dippies would say, it’s the one that’s the hardest to deal with. And two, I just love the sentiment that she’s not just defined by her parents or how she was raised or her rising sign, I think it’s such an interesting way to talk about yourself.”
On ‘Scorpio Rising’, Soccer Mommy mastered the art of contemporary soft indie rock that has become the defining sound of Gen Z. Like Bridgers, her music pairs emotive imagery with dreamy instrumentation to create soft, sonic collages that somehow capture moments in time.
Listen to the track below.
