The Phoebe Bridgers song she compared to My Chemical Romance
The mix of influences and reference points that goes into the music of Phoebe Bridgers is staggering. She’s almost certainly the only person who could join Taylor Swift on stage and walk to the microphone while Disturbed’s ‘Down With the Sickness’ plays over the loudspeaker. That mix of mainstream-friendly pop, butt rock, indie singer-songwriter music, and acoustic folk is essential to the Bridgers blend, and the shades of grey found within those genres all filter into her singular identity.
It’s no surprise that a fair bit of emo also creeps in there as well. For someone so obsessed with skeletons, it shouldn’t be any kind of shock. But while Bridgers was crafting her iconic Punisher ending track ‘I Know The End’, a very specific emo-friendly band came to mind.
“This is a bunch of things I had on my to-do list: I wanted to scream; I wanted to have a metal song; I wanted to write about driving up the coast to Northern California, which I’ve done a lot in my life. It’s like a super specific feeling,” Bridgers told Genius about the track. “This is such a stoned thought, but it feels kind of like purgatory to me, doing that drive, just because I have done it at every stage of my life, so I get thrown into this time that doesn’t exist when I’m doing it, like I can’t differentiate any of the times in my memory.”
She added: “I guess I always pictured that during the apocalypse, I would escape to an endless drive up north. It’s definitely half a ballad. I kind of think about it as, ‘Well, what genre is [My Chemical Romance’s] ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ in?’ It’s not really an anthem — I don’t know. I love tricking people with a vibe and then completely shifting. I feel like I want to do that more.”
Once Bridgers got the vibe down, it was just about putting all the pieces together. “It kind of came together naturally. I was basically like, ‘I want a huge outro’ and Conor [Oberst] was like, ‘You know who plays crazy guitar for shit like that is Nick Zinner.’ I knew that already, because he was on Better Oblivion,” Bridgers told Stereogum. “Sound City is such a weird environment. It’s not like any other place I’ve ever recorded. It’s like, Jackson Browne is randomly there one day. Then it’s Tomberlin, Jim Keltner. Jim played on the fucking album basically just because he was around and I asked him if he wanted to play on this. It’s just kind of a magical place.”
“It was easy to build an outro like that. The group vocal happened on a day where there were enough people. ‘Oh, it’d be a good day to do a group vocal today.’ I’m sure it took forever, but I didn’t think twice about putting a million things on it,” Bridgers added. “It was hard, actually, to take stuff off and pare down because we got too excited. It’s compressed sounding still, but it was worse, because the beginning of the song is sparse and it sounds loud and nice and as more things get put in you have to turn them down and it’s all the sudden this weird wash of nothing. We got a little bit ahead of ourselves.”
