Phoebe Bridgers: A Deep Dive into Songwriting

Phoebe Bridgers is an American songwriter, singer, and producer who has, in recent years, gained mainstream recognition with the release of her sophomore album “Punisher” in 2020. The following year, she was nominated for four Grammy awards, including “Best New Artist” and “Best Alternative Music Album.” Since then, the 28-year-old artist has collaborated with many other musical icons including Taylor Swift, Lorde, and the 1975, further establishing herself in the indie-rock/indie-folk genres.

What really makes Bridgers' voice stand out is her unique songwriting style. Through her lyrics, she is able to capture devastatingly vulnerable moments in her own life and translate them into songs relatable to millions around the world. In an interview with the LA Times, Taylor Swift, one of this generation’s most highly acclaimed singer-songwriters, talks about their collaboration and her appreciation for Bridgers’ music.

“I think that the specificity of Phoebe’s lyrics, and the vulnerability she expresses in her voice when she delivers them, is what makes her music so deeply impactful and moving for me as a fan. You feel like she’s reliving a precise memory or delivering a secret message to someone and you get the privilege to read it or hear about it.”

Bridgers first began writing music in her early teens, learning to play the piano and the guitar by 11, and joining various bands throughout high school. As her music has developed into her own distinctive style of sad ballads, her songwriting has become associated with unflinching honesty and melancholic melodies. But interestingly, the “Motion Sickness” singer has a different take on sadness. “I think sadness is very funny to me because it’s the least singular thing on earth, it's the human experience […] so I think taking it a little bit less seriously has always been funny to me.” She talks about adopting this mindset during her songwriting process: “I have like dissociative tendencies while writing. When I'm too emotional when writing it always ends up really bad, but when I'm a little bit more removed and not feeling it 100% while writing, just writing whatever comes. Those tend to be the heaviest songs”

The inspiration for her writing? Bridgers says that she often draws from very specific details in her own experiences. For instance, Bridgers recalls penning a lyric in her song “Garden Song,” that goes: “The doctor put her hands over my liver and told me my resentment’s getting smaller.”
“I just went to a nutritionist in Los Angeles who literally was like, ‘Oh, I sense that you’re less resentful.’ So I just said what was happening and people are like, “Oh my God, what planet are you on that you made that up?”

From there, Bridgers says she hand writes all her lyrics and then whisper sings them into her phone voice memos with her guitar. “I have a hard time typing them on a computer. Maybe it just doesn’t make me feel cool… and I write faster in cursive” she told the Rolling Stone Music Now podcast.

Bridgers shares that her songwriting is very a slow and deliberate process. “I have to love the last line to move on to the next line” and from there, the draft will go through rounds of revision by herself and editors. She also mentions learning some tips from longtime friend and bandmate Conor Obers for her most recent album: “I started writing with him and then adopted the way that he writes entirely. Literally, he has one page of lyrics, next to the new page of lyrics. So as he’s making changes, he’ll write completely different lyrics on the next page. And I did that for this whole record.”

Moving forward, Bridgers says she’s trying to challenge herself by writing happier songs while still staying true to her appreciation for honest lyrics. "I think that, like, peppy love songs get kind of a bad rap as being dumb. And I think my next challenge in my life is to, like, have a, like, way to write about happiness that doesn't make me cringe."

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