boygenius: Birds of a Feather

photo: Shervin Lainez

***

Lucy Dacus is a Radiohead fan.

Now, normally, that tidbit wouldn’t be considered breaking news by any stretch of the imagination, but there’s actually a bit of a backstory here.

At the moment, Dacus is relaxing on a green-room sofa at New Haven, Conn.’s Westville Music Bowl with Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers, the other two members of her supergroup boygenius— an anything-but-a-side-project focus that has felt more and more like a true band as the year has progressed. The musicians—who are seated in their onstage configuration, with Dacus, Baker and Bridgers positioned stage left to right—are currently in the midst of a swing through the biggest venues they’ve ever headlined in support of their 2023 full-length debut, the record, and its accompanying EP, the rest, which is slated for release in a few days.

The three singer/guitarists—who hail from slightly different but still tangential corners of the indie underground and formalized their partnership in 2018—have been discussing the often blurred lines between their friendships and their band’s evolution, when the topic of a shared favorite artist comes up naturally.

“We all separately felt connected to Elliott Smith, but I don’t know if there is as much of a community around Elliott Smith because every Elliott Smith fan feels that they’re the only one,” the Virginia-bred Dacus says. “You listen to that music alone.”

“Elliott Smith and Grouper,” the California born and bred Bridgers politely interjects.

“There’s a lot of lore around those guys,” adds Baker, who was raised in Tennessee, finishing her bandmates’ thoughts.

“Two of us will love a band and the other one will have homework to do,” Dacus says. “That’s how community-building works. You give each other homework—to opt into each other’s tastes and influences. Phoebe and I are huge LCD Soundsystem fans. It’s not that Julien wasn’t, but we had to be like, ‘You have to listen to this.’”

“The only song I knew by them was ‘Daft Punk Is Playing at My House,’ which is such a weird one to know,” Baker says. “And then y’all played me some LCD and I was like, ‘This is the greatest shit I’ve ever heard.’”

“Same thing with Radiohead—Julien and I like Radiohead,” Bridgers says, before Dacus pipes up, adding, “I like Radiohead—a lot.”

“But you’re not a Radiohead guy,” Baker qualifies, recalling the kinetic, playfulness the Beastie Boys used to display during their joint MTV interviews. “You’re not out here like, ‘Kid A!’”

“But, I have all of their records,” Dacus lobbies back.

The conversation momentary shifts to Broken Social Scene, before Baker tries on her music journalist hat, circling back to ask her friends to name their favorite Radiohead albums—as if to see what that might reveal about their own approach to music. “In Rainbows,” Bridges says immediately and confidently, picking the group’s 2007 industry game-changer.

“I’ve always said OK Computer, but I need to relisten,” Dacus says. “Honestly, A Moon Shaped Pool is a great record. And the one that I listen to the most, which is chaotic, is I Might Be Wrong, a live recording of theirs. The Bends gets a bad rap. I don’t think it’s in their top three, but…”

“It’s like looking at early humanity or something,” Bridgers says with a laugh. “It’s like, ‘I see where that went.”’

“My favorite Radiohead record is King of Limbs,” Baker then says, citing an oft-overlooked 2011 release.

“You love to say that,” Dacus quips, before Bridges adds, “Julien likes everybody’s newest records.”

“I do love to say that,” Baker says, revealing the tattoo sleave on her arm as she sits back on the couch. “It’s my personality. I love later albums by a band you love. I like listening to a band with a rich or a prolific album history and being like, ‘I’ve never heard that song.’”

“None of us said Kid A, that’s crazy,” Dacus adds, displaying her warm smile, to which Bridgers qualifies, “None of us are Kid A.”

“None of us wanted to be basic,” Baker says. “Not saying your favorite thing is the obvious fav.”

Bridgers, Baker and Dacus are clearly true, geeky music fans first and foremost, which is one of several reasons why boygenius have emerged as one of the post-pandemic period’s biggest stars—naturally tapping into the cultural zeitgeist with a set of honest, introspective originals that can simultaneously exist in a silo and capture the energetic release of life after the lockdown. And though they have catapulted from clubs to a mix of arenas and marquee amphitheaters this year, the musicians are still able to deliver authentic, personal performances that, despite some eye-popping production, still feel a bit D.I.Y.

“We would be doing the same thing if we were in smaller venues,” Dacus says. “We’re glad people agree that it rocks, but we would be having as good a time if we were in the same size venues as 2018 because that was the best time.”

“And that was the blueprint I had in my brain,” Baker says. “I’ve never played venues this size—even when I was opening for bands that I thought were huge. I have no scale for this. It’s a young crowd—so different from the heady, adult[1]listener shit that I’m more used to. There’s more of a theatrical-ness to it. Everybody dresses up. People are dressing like our photo shoots.”

“You used to not be able to wear a band shirt at the concert and now it’s definitely, ‘Wear your homemade shirt at the concert,’” Bridgers says.

“And it’s so sweet,” Baker says. “But it’s also shit people never would have done for a ‘Julien Baker show.’”

The connection boygenius have felt with that dedicated fanbase is one of the reasons they decided to release a six-song EP of original material just months after their first and only LP. The project started with a few tracks that, Baker says, “fell to the wayside” while recording their full[1]length set—“Afraid of Heights,” “Black Hole” and “Powers,” the latter two of which were only half completed when the trio left Rick Rubin’s Shangri La studios after working on the record. They eventually rounded out their second 2023 offering with a few other choice compositions, including Bridgers’ “Voyager.”

“I thought that was going to be on whatever I do next,” Bridgers says of the cut, which she debuted during a solo show in England. “And then I was like, ‘No.’ It’s a subject that I want to shoot in the head by releasing everything about it. What’s funny is that we had a bunch of songs that we started for the album, but these are like fake songs for the record.”

“I wrote ‘Black Hole’ the last week we were recording,” Baker says, looking over to her left. “When I told Lucy I wrote a song, I thought your head was going to explode. You were like, ‘We cannot track another song because we have 25 song skeletons. We are trying to pay attention to the ones that made it on the record.’”

They also admit that they had some good-natured, ulterior motives for flooding the market with additional material. “In this world, you have to game everything,” Bridgers, who opened some shows on Taylor Swift’s massive Eras Tour, admits. “Taylor does a lot of that, where her vault tracks are incredible. The Beatles set a bad precedent for demos. There’s shit that I’ve sent these guys that we just never talked about again. Now, I look forward to playing those [EP] songs the whole set because I’m on auto-pilot—a very fun auto-pilot, but it shakes you awake.”

“I like having our crowds expect something different from us,” Dacus adds. “The live show isn’t just listening to the record—it should be different. It’s nice to bring something new to the table. When I write a song, especially when I’m on tour, I like to play it that night to keep myself scared. It just makes it more fun for people, keeps them guessing—the mystery element is exciting. It makes the live show less predictable.” ***

When Baker, Dacus and Bridgers first came together, they had no intention of making boygenius a proper group, let alone a career-defining project. The three musicians had already been trafficking in similar circles for a few years, and both Dacus and Bridgers opened for Baker while she was out supporting her first album.

“Julien is the lynchpin of boygenius— she hyped Phoebe and I to each other,” says Dacus who, like Baker, grew up in a Christian community in the conservative South. “We eventually all met, and we booked a tour before we thought about being a band.”

In advance of that 2018 run, the three musicians decided to record some new music to tie things together. They initially thought about maybe just doing a 7” but ended up each bringing in both an almost baked song and some more embryonic ideas, crafting the six-song boygenius EP at Los Angeles’ Sound City Studios in just four days. The whirlwind sessions also served, to quote the famous line, as the beginning of a beautiful friendship, as they bonded over their shared experiences as queer, thoughtful singer/guitarists in a male-dominated industry. They selected the name boygenius as a jab some of the “overly confident” men they had all too often been subjected to professionally.

“We had a little bit of a ‘love at first sight’ experience with each other, where we worked pretty similarly on the EP, even though we’d just met,” Bridgers says.

“Y’all weren’t as close, but I was close with both y’all,” Baker, who still stands between her bandmates onstage, adds. “I had a day of mutual-friends-meeting anxiety where I was like, ‘I hope they don’t think each other are annoying.’” (She had no reason to worry and, now, Bridgers says, “We just tease her all day.”)

The tour, which was billed as Julien Baker & Phoebe Bridgers with Lucy Dacus, moved through a mix of large clubs during a finite few-week period. Each musician would play a set of their own material and then, at the end of the night, the trio would come together to encore with their new boygenius tunes.

The EP and the run both earned rave reviews and helped expose the newly minted group to each other’s fanbases. But, soon after, they each naturally returned to their solo work and, of course, the pandemic hit.

Then, things got a little loopy for a bit—especially for Bridgers, who released her sophomore album in June 2020. Titled Punisher, the LP turned out to be a rare breakout during an era when much of the music industry was in a freefall. The following February, Baker issued her third record, Little Oblivion and Dacus dropped her third LP, Home Video four months later. Curiously, all three records featured boygenius reunions, though the tracks were actually recorded in a single day and spread out over the ensuing albums. (boygenius lent their services to Hayley Williams’ “Roses/Lotus/Violet/Iris,” too.)

During all that, and with the future of touring still very uncertain, Dacus, Baker and Bridgers also quietly regrouped behind the scenes. Bridgers sent the first missive, despite being in the midst of a career high that would soon include a powerful SNL appearance, Grammy nominations and sessions with everyone from The National to Maggie Rogers and Swift.

“A week after Punisher came out, she sent ‘Emily I’m Sorry’ to our group chat and said, ‘Can we be a band again?’” Dacus says. “Julien quickly followed up with six voice-memo ideas. We thought it would happen way more quickly than it did because this was June 2020, and we said, ‘This will probably be over in a month or two.’ So we just waited and talked for a long time.”

In April 2021, Dacus and Baker got vaccinated on the same day—“the day of inoculation”—and flew to LA to meet up with Bridgers. They then took a road trip to Northern California to work on material in a shared house, where they came up with just under half of the record in two weeks.

“The big project—more than writing this record—was getting close again,” Dacus says. “We FaceTimed during the pandemic, but it’s not the same. If you had a pie graph of how much time we actually spent writing, it’s probably 5%.”

“We didn’t wake up and start working,” Bridgers says. “We woke up, talked about what walk we should take and then, after dinner, maybe we would talk about music for an hour.”

“There was a lot of communal inhabiting,” Baker adds. “When we’re in the same room, work gets done if it’s a topic that’s interesting to all of us. It happened so incrementally that it was hard to perceive. It’s not like, ‘Alright we have band practice.’ Phoebe would show me a chord progression, and we’d both take a walk and talk about it. Or Lucy would be like, ‘Hey, I’ve been thinking for two days about this one bridge part that we don’t have a lyric for. What if you said this?’ The task was more about prioritizing each other and making space and time for the petri dish of collaborative creativity to grow—feeding it all the ingredients it needed.”

“It was kind of like fishing,” Dacus chimes in. “You just go and wait and, some days, you don’t catch anything. But some days you do.”

“We’d work in a set time period and, while we were hashing things out, latent themes would start to reveal themselves,” Baker says, before looking at her bandmates. “You’d be like, ‘I guess I was thinking about relationships, or I was thinking a lot about friendship, death, hope or politics.’ But, once we made the file folder of songs, I was like, ‘This is what I’m doing.’ The musicality of it—the practice of it, the planning and looking forward to it—was something that I went to. It was a communal practice to connect me to other people that I like. I tend to idealize things and I think it’s OK to idealize something beautiful that you get to live out with your friends.”

The members of boygenius ended up taking an additional writing trip in August 2022, then tracked the 12-song set at Shangri-La with co-producer Catherine Marks in early 2022. Yet, despite speaking to the moment, they also gave themselves some strict guidelines.

“One of our goals was to not make a pandemic record—to not just talk about isolation,” Dacus says. “We didn’t want it to be dated. If it contains any of that, that’s great. But, in 10 years when, hopefully, nobody is actively thinking about COVID, I hope the record just stands on its own.”

“It’ll remain pertinent to the subjects that are covered without having to situate them in that context,” Baker says.

Bridgers is a little more candid. “Nobody made any art about [the pandemic], and that is insane to me,” she says. “The media and social media took that place— scratched that itch. If it was the ‘70s, everybody’s album would be about it. But we were sick of it two weeks into it. And there were a lot of ways to talk about it that were really trite. So it’s weird when people think of Little Oblivions, Home Video, Punisher or [Fiona Apple’s] Fetch the Bolt Cutters as COVID records. That’s just what you heard in COVID.”

“Maybe the homiest thing about it was the idea of it being an escape for us personally,” Dacus muses. “It was the light at the end of the tunnel for us as individuals.”

Once the world opened up, Baker, Dacus and Bridgers made one appearance in 2021—a San Francisco benefit that mixed solo material and boygenius tracks—and then started preparing for their supergroup to reactivate. The first inkling most fans had that boygenius were not just about to return, but return as tried-and-true band, was when their name appeared on the poster for Coachella 2023. Then, they dropped the record on Interscope in late March, marking the first time any of the three musicians had issued an album with a major label.

They also hit the road hard, kicking things off with a last-minute appearance at Carnegie Hall for the annual Tibet House Benefit, barnstorming SXSW—including a stealth spot in the airport—and then heading west for Coachella.

However, unlike their 2018 tour package, this go-around, the three friends were focused on making boygenius feel like a cohesive group, playing together throughout the night and sticking to music that they worked on together.

“It’s obvious that we’re a band because, when we’re onstage, that doesn’t feel separate from us hanging out,” Dacus says.

Baker then asks in a cerebral manner, “Ontologically, does having more than one person in a musical group make you a band or is a band defined by how you act?’” Later, she adds, “In all the other bands I’ve been in, its like, ‘OK, Julien, you write the guitar parts because you play the guitar parts.’ Everybody brings their flavor of expertise and stays in their lane. But, this band is interesting because we are a three-headed hydra. We challenge each other to step outside our lane, be it being more lyrically precise or paying attention to certain details. I’m used to being in a band where the guitarist wants to take a ridiculous solo.”

“That’s still you,” Dacus quips, to which Baker responds with a laugh, “I’m some kind of monster. Where’s my solo?”

“It’s exciting—instead of being this Voltron that assembles in the final act of the episode, we’re that entity the whole time,” Baker says. “It’s nice that, from the very beginning, I can step away and watch you guys. There’s so much space for me to be a spectator to y’all and to our band. It’s how bands worked when I first started playing music. That feels a lot better than being responsible for the brunt of the attention the entire time and having something collapse with my name on it.” ***

On Oct. 2, boygenius headlined a sold-out show at New York’s Madison Square Garden, a major accomplishment for any band, especially one who cut their teeth in the indie underground.

Making the Garden feel like a big club, the group swung from sweeping indie[1]rock to coffee-shop folk, showcasing Baker’s guitar heroics, in particular, throughout their concert. Their stories are deeply personal, yet the entire crowd seemed personally invested in modern classics like “Not Strong Enough,” “$20,” “Emily I’m Sorry” and “True Blue.”

At one point, they moved onto a B-stage in the middle of the arena, playing to a crowd in the round, and they also invited opening act MUNA out for a sit[1]in. Baker noted from the stage that, since their audience had been so respectful, the venue’s security guards had started handing out tissues to fans instead.

“All of us have had a really obvious slope of professionalism—touring in a Prius and then touring in a van,” Baker says. “The pandemic was this massive leveler. We had all this time to dream about all these production ideas with no time stamp on when we were actually going to be able to bring those things to fruition.”

After confirming their MSG play, the three musicians took a field trip to the arena to watch Bridgers sing a song with SZA; Dacus admits that she had a near panic attack.

“I was like ‘This is too tall,’” she says.

“The one thing Taylor did for me is, now, I can look out and go, ‘Yeah, that’s some people,’” Bridgers says. “Brain broken forever.”

In May, Dacus and Baker also got to experience some stadium success when Bridgers brought them out for a surprise appearance during her Eras Tour support set. They slid onstage wearing spare Punisher costumes without much fanfare; Baker says the cameo was relatively last minute.

“If you had asked us any earlier, I would have had enough time to freak out about it, but it was so close to the show that I was like, ‘Sure let’s go,’” she says. “It was the chilliest way to play to 60,000 people. But, I will say, that’s the most eyes that have ever looked directly at me at one time in my life.”

“It was surprisingly low stakes because no one was anticipating it,” Dacus adds. “The crowd was just waiting for Taylor to get onstage. For it being 60,000 people, it wasn’t that big of a deal.”

“I get more nervous when my eyes can focus on the last person,” Bridgers says.

“That’s what Hayley [Williams] was saying,” Baker adds. “She was like, ‘When I played those gigs, there were so many people it was almost like there was no one. They become one behemoth organism.’”

boygenius also got used to playing festival-size stages when they co-headlined Re:SET this spring, though the traveling event’s unique rotating format guaranteed they would miss fellow headliner LCD Soundsystem in every city.

“But we did dance in James Murphy’s DJ tent at Coachella, and we partied hard with him,” Bridgers says enthusiastically.

“I danced for three and half hours, stone-cold sober, and that was a seminal moment in my development,” Baker adds.

Since Coachella, an event that has also horse-shoe curved from punk to high[1]society intrigue, boygenius have learned to grapple with their newfound celebrity status and passionate fanbase.

“I feel like it’s the same for boygenius and my solo shit—it’s weird now because people dig into what I must mean lyrically and in what context, being a public persona or whatever,” Bridgers says. “But that’s just annoying. It doesn’t really change the way that I write. A lot of our fans are kids and it used to freak me out. I was even followed once by a guy who was like, ‘I’m following you!’ I was like that’s horrible. It’s fine to go to a bunch of shows in a row but to actually follow the bus is terrifying. Our tour bus, thank God, is not getting followed.”

“It feels something like the Dead, which I like, but we don’t change the show up as much as that jamband thing,” Baker says. “It’s like, ‘Why are people coming to five or six shows in a row?’” (Both Bridgers and Dacus got a whiff of jam stardom in December when they performed a memorable take on “These Days” with Trey Anastasio and Jack Antonoff at the Ally Coalition benefit, and Bridgers, who grew up playing folk festivals, has been known to sport a Dead T-shirt here and there.)

“My mom is a musical-theater person, and I grew up around that,” Dacus adds. “I would go to her shows as a kid if I didn’t have a babysitter and I would see the exact same show 13 times. And it would still be engaging. I still rewatch movies. So even if nothing is changing, I get why people come again. It’s comforting. You’ll listen to our album more than once, hopefully.”

Bridgers doesn’t quite agree, saying, “I feel like, statistically, there’s been a drop off. I used to go on tour and there would always be someone who went to the last five shows. It used to be a higher majority of people going to different shows. I would see old faces in a new city every night. I keep up with some of them still. Maybe it’s because we are playing bigger venues, but I also feel like it’s because a lot of people are watching the show on the internet every night. People don’t feel the need to go to multiple shows as much.”

“When you talk about how COVID influenced music, I think people have a tendency, in a nostalgic way, to assign it a redemptive arc,” Baker says. “Once we realized this precious thing could be taken away from us, people came back to see live music. But, also, everybody experienced their whole life through a mediated-bias screen for over a year. Now it’s like, ‘No wonder there’s the threat of impermanence that makes you want to constantly archive, that makes you feel like you need a courtroom stenographer right next to you to prove that your life is happening.’ It’s the result of having no other witness in isolation and having to see everything happen to you through a screen.”

While boygenius’ future plans are open, the musicians are excited about a world where the band is simply another outlet that will evolve with their solo endeavors.

“boygenius is a fitting place for me to write songs about boygenius,” Dacus says. “There are some songs that I’ve written that feel very personal to me that I wouldn’t make Julien or Phoebe sing on because it’s not their experience. But y’all wouldn’t mind even if I did make you sing them, so that’s just a personal choice.’”

“It’s also nice to not be on the treadmill,” Baker says. “We just get to steer our own ships for a little without being on the record/release/tour cycle.”

“I can’t imagine not sending y’all my demos as soon as I make them,’ Dacus says.

“It’s nice that it’s episodic,” Baker says. “I know we will be friends in the future. We will be in each other’s lives musically— creatively informing each other.”