What bands has Phoebe Bridgers been in?
Whenever female musicians come up in public places – bars, most likely – there’s usually a strange moment when you’re judging how long it’s going to take before someone says something mildly offensive. Usually this sounds a bit like, “She’s just generic”, “She’s just looks”, or, god forbid, the kicker: “All she does is moan about her breakups”. Unfortunately, Phoebe Bridgers knows this world well.
In all fairness, Bridgers’ gripe isn’t any of the above, naturally; it’s the way it usually appears as fodder for other problematic discourse about women in music, and how there’s a common thread at the moment that paints female musicians as unrelenting moaners who don’t know how to write about anything other than their troubles. Bridgers is often lumped into the same stereotype, but her response isn’t to lean into the satire but to let it challenge her songwriting style in a way that goes beyond simple dismissiveness.
And this means moving away from writing about one-off experiences and into a more complex territory that links all of those feelings to something far more hard-hitting. “I used to have something fucked up happen and be like ‘it’s cool to get a song out of it,'” the singer told Russh. “I think there’s this misconception that being dark is smart and being happy is stupid. So my next challenge is to write about a more complex human than ‘this bad thing happened to me’. Especially because it’s perpetuating this myth about pain and women.”
Where Bridgers stands, therefore, isn’t in the camp that shuns women’s realities, but in the one that celebrates greater specificity when it comes to airing them out, more in a confessional singer-songwriter style than surface-level explorations. In other words, it’s like getting life advice in the most mundane, generic way possible from a randomer you met in the pub – it might sound poetic, but it doesn’t really resonate unless there’s something to hold on to, a nice anecdote perhaps, a tale of woe culminating in a real takeaway that genuinely makes you think differently, even if it’s alcohol-induced.
What bands has Phoebe Bridgers been in?
This understanding is precisely what makes Bridgers so versatile both as a soloist and as an integral member of Boygenius and Better Oblivion Community Center. These weren’t just ways to keep a steady flow of fresh projects; these were excuses to saunter off in different directions and show different capabilities with other musicians, immunising herself from those pesky conversations about what it means to be a “good” female musician in the modern age.
And, if for nothing else, it’s always a good excuse to hang out with her friends. Which doesn’t just begin at working in bands. As she put it: “Getting to make stuff with my best friends… it’s fucking awesome. But my solo music is very communal as well. I show everybody in my sphere my songs as I’m working on them. It might seem like I’m a private person and I definitely am to a certain degree, but I love community so Boygenius is perfect for me.”
Suppose that’s also why it works so well – usually, if you team up with your mates on a project, there’s more scope for shorthand and to get things done in a way that makes sense. For Bridgers, bands like Boygenius aren’t just ways to stay relevant, they’re genuine passion projects with communities that care about music, work that doesn’t feel like work, because it’s organic art that comes straight from the heart.
