boygenius: Baker Bridgers Dacus LLC

Yeah, a lot of neighborhoods are sick of their parks and outdoor spaces being commandeered for the summer.

Which I can kind of understand, I think people got sick of seeing Grant Park blocked off for almost half of the good weather portion of the year between Lolla, the marathon, private events, etc etc and it's spreading out to other parks. It seems less about the event itself, but how they lose park access for 2+ weeks on either side of the festival as well. As much as I like seeing more festivals that aren't the Lolla behemoth pop up, I get the annoyance of prolonged park closures during our precious good weather months.

Yeah, like this stupid urban NASCAR boondoggle.

Every week a park is shut down, that's another week people can't have picnics, graduations, sports, family reunions, just quiet time to themselves.

I totally understand that, though I did enjoy Pitchfork at Union Park last year. But I feel like that's a tension a lot of places, people using cities as playgrounds and playgrounds as party zones. Maintaining public access to public places is pretty crucial.

enjoyable acoustic version of Not Strong Enough up there, but i hope when i see them we get a full band rock version.

my song of the year so far, probably.

Simon Pegg just picked 'Salt In The Wound' as his final track on Desert Island Discs, which was surprising and great to hear. They've definitely made it now.

Took my 15-year-old daughter to see them in London yesterday. The sound wasn't the best (I kept wanting to shout 'turn the guitars up!' like a doofus) and I felt very old and straight but that's all good it was such a lovely atmosphere. They said that, collectively, it was their biggest show so far but I've not been with a crowd that hushed and reverent for a while (which feels weird when it's a crowd of 40,000). I had an absolute blast.

Very much regretting not organising myself to get to one of the Halifax gigs. Edinburgh would be very much doable at short notice, but I really don't fancy that somehow.

"very old and straight" is a good way to describe how i felt when i saw them.

the LGBTQ+ percentage of the audience at the show i saw in the U.S. was many times more than any other show i've ever attended, anywhere. it was amazing to see.

That was a bland review upthread. I just went for a walk through the woods and everything caught up to me - just how gorgeous the atmosphere was yesterday, how that trio of people made everyone feel.

My kid came out as queer a couple of years ago and I've been on a bit of a journey with being a queer and trans ally in my work at school and well, I'm struggling to articulate how yesterday made me feel, without wanting to come across like some dumbass benevolent patriarch or whatever, but yeah, it made my goddamn heart swell.

I had a very similar feeling seeing them in Vancouver with trans kiddo.

with my trans kiddo, I mean.

Thinking about the (now locked) phoebe bridgers haters thread, and while I don't intend to relitigate the issue here, it struck me as odd to think about how bridgers frequently attracts those kinds of responses but baker and dacus largely do not. Part of that it just profile level and the fact that bridgers feels more celebrity-adjacent (dating paul mescal etc), but it's more interesting to imagine that it's also partly reflective of their diverging songwriting personas.

Of the three, bridgers' songwriting feels most obviously "gen z" to me (scare quotes intended) - that mix of deadpan and archness, both numb and emotionally needy. Like, I can imagine her letting a friend know she had just had serious surgery by writing "in the hospital, nearly met my grandma again lol", whereas baker if she sent a message at all would be like "you need to pick me up", and dacus would probably be giving her friends advice from her hospital bed without mentioning where she was. To be clear, this is not what I actually think these people would do in these circumstances, but rather what the narrator-characters of their songs imply to me.

Like that line in "cool about it" where bridgers sings "Once I took your medication to know what it was like" - which is presented as evidence for how deeply attuned to the other person and their reality she is, even though it's also a totally fucked up thing to do, and of course she knows that. Like, if the song generally is about the difficulty of walking back intimacy after a relationship ends, then bridgers' verse adds another layer: "there is no document of intimacy which is not at the same time a document of narcissism".

I got into this band the way I get into most music these days: a song on a playlist or a Discover Weekly, a tickle that becomes an itch and so on. I knew Julien from her associations with Frightened Rabbit and knew of her confessional style; I had a vague sense of Phoebe Bridgers and no knowledge of Dacus at all. I very rarely look for live stuff or interviews so had no visual sense of the band at all. It wasn't until my daughter got into them and they became this intense lockdown thing, that I filled in the character backstories and what they meant to the fans.

Since then I've developed a vicarious appreciation of the closeness of things, most of which operates outside of the music yet seems utterly inseparable from it: the characters to each other, the 'characters' to the 'real' people involved, the relationship to the fans. Your second paragraph speaks to this: how porous the boundaries seem, how the band seem to blur the line between drama and 'real life'. Seeing them live cemented all of this and I wasn't really prepared for the emotional wallop of it and what it meant for me and the people there. The trio appeared on stage very briefly, at the end of Muna's set and it was like 30,000 people spontaneously burst into tears. It was extraordinary but also contributed to an ongoing feeling that this simply isn't sustainable; that they're playing that is so combustible it's bound to explode at some point. Julien is too damaged. Phoebe is just a chaos engine. Lucy will tire of being the third who walks beside them. Etc etc. I know it's all part of the mythos they've built but there it is.

Now, I am well aware this may be entirely personal and a shit ton of projection because of my relationship with my kid but I can't decide if this is just new to me and it's a 'welcome to true fandom, where the hell have you been?!' or a novel situation worthy of thinking about some more. Your post emboldened the latter reading but I may well be talking complete bollocks so forgive me if so.

tl;dr - a daft old man is worried about the boys.

It was extraordinary but also contributed to an ongoing feeling that this simply isn't sustainable; that they're playing that is so combustible it's bound to explode at some point. Julien is too damaged. Phoebe is just a chaos engine. Lucy will tire of being the third who walks beside them. Etc etc. I know it's all part of the mythos they've built but there it is.

wow, amazing

in the hospital, nearly met my grandma again lol

lol

great post Tim F

They killed on SNL tonight.

Here's "Satanist"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hniH8I8c-m0

No one has ever done less holding a BC Rich

I enjoyed both songs. Old man me was also won over to them in part awhile back hearing Bridgers talk about music and her family and such on her Sirius XM radio show.

I just watched SNL and I really wanted David Letterman to walk out after they performed so I could get a handle on the relative heights of the band

wait I thought he was in the band..?

Big ol’ Variety interview

https://variety.com/2023/music/news/boygenius-hitmakers-group-of-the-year-interview-1235813944/

Just gorgeous

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01NExGVZHbc

https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/boygenius-going-on-hiatus-1235596363/

Only reaching #31 on the ILM end of year albums poll must have been too much for them.

Not strong enough to be a band

I felt like that was kinda built into their thing. They were always going to go back to solo careers and/or other collaborations.

(which the article also says, if I'd actually read to the end)

Every band is on hiatus when they are not touring or recording.

Yeah, in all honesty they probably didn't need to make an announcement. I pretty much figured once the tour was over, their next projects would be their own individual albums.

(Actually I should reel that back in - saying that at a private show is not exactly an announcement to the press.)

really like their new Gretsch signature guitar, based on the Broadcaster but without a Bigsby and has a trapeze bridge instead

https://gretschguitars.com/boygenius

My favorite of their three lovable Grammy speeches last night. (This was the third one, so they'd already got most of the thank-yous out of the way.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-YIAw1Arrk

did they play "Layla" every time someone went to the stage?!

or just boygenius!?

I think the cues were pegged to the categories (so, "Rock Song" gets "Layla") — but I didn't pay enough attention to say for sure.

Wish at least one of those had been televised. (Or, I mean, part of the main broadcast. I guess those pre-show awards were streamed somewhere?)

xp

It made me think of Bridgers' great Clapton diss, tho.

It's pretty awesome to see how massive they've become and how I'm sure whatever they do next they'll individually be stars in their own right even more.

gotta believe PB will move up to arenas now and Dacus / Baker to, like, 5000+ theaters and amphitheaters, right?

Makes me glad to have seen Baker and Dacus in smallish venues pre-boygenius. Not yet had the chance to see Bridgers.

Neat tribute in today's Double Jeopardy round.