The song Phoebe Bridgers called a “Wizard of Oz analogy”
For the final track of her sophomore album Punisher, Phoebe Bridgers wanted a full-circle moment. Something that would bring all the emotion, uncertainty, angst, and introspection of the album together. What she eventually came up with was ‘I Know the End’, an exorcism of apocalyptic proportions. But the song didn’t start out that way.
“The lyrics were totally different, it was kind of just about depression,” Bridgers told Steroegum. “Then as I went on tour and my depression changed to be tour-related, it just took forever to feel right. I started writing an outro and was like, ‘What song should I tack this on the end of? I took ‘I Know’ and changed a bunch of the lyrics to make it make sense. There was this whole Wizard Of Oz analogy that kind of died, it’s still a bit in there. But yeah, it’s a song reworked so many times that it was the first and last song that I wrote.”
“The drive [depicted in the song] is up to northern California where my grandparents used to live. I feel like I’ve done that drive so many fucking times in my life,” she added. “California’s huge: You go into the middle of it, through the middle of the state, and it’s so different than LA. Kind of like a Wizard Of Oz situation, it’s the idea that you just keep driving and there would be some sort of magical place at the end of it. Some sort of alternate reality.”
“I was driving up one time with my friends in high school, to go to Outside Lands I think, and there was a Space X launch — one of the first ones that I ever saw, that nobody knew about, and it looked like a weird fucking spaceship in the air floating,” Bridgers said. “And everybody on the internet was like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ There were at least 20 minutes where we were all like, ‘There’s aliens here.’ I happened to be driving on the coast so I saw it over the beach, which was pretty surreal.”
“It’s just, you’re not really talking about it. You’re recording the song. The first time I sang it, everyone commented on the lyrics. Then the fifteenth time you’re recording something on it you’re just goofing around, which is sort of a form of therapy — you sing it so many times you forget,” Bridgers concluded.
She added: “I’m looking forward to someday having people sing it back to me in a crowd. I think that would be so fucking fun. It happens with the ‘Scott Street’ outro. There’s something so victorious about singing fucked up lyrics with a bunch of people.”
That full-audience catharsis would eventually become a focal point of Bridgers’ concerts. “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. 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.”
Check out ‘I Know The End’ down below.
