You can sense Bridgers building a community through her work, and it’s evident in Punisher’s credits list, featuring her tour manager (Jeroen Vrijhoef, the deep voice in “Garden Song”) and her bandmates in other projects ( Conor Oberst from Better Oblivion Community Center, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker from Boygenius). “It informs everything I like.” It makes sense that she sees in Smith not just a kindred spirit but also an ideology. “If someone doesn’t like his music, I actually feel like I’m not going to agree with them about anything,” she mentioned earlier this year.
Ides Heaven,” “Punisher” begins with its narrator wandering around the city after dark: “When the speed kicks in,” she sings, “I go to the store for nothing.” Backed by piano and occasional waves of digital vocal harmony, she contemplates the facts of Smith’s life: the house where he died, his kindness toward fans, the way his songs still bring people together. He also happens to be the subject of this album’s heartbreaking title track. “Chinese Satellite,” buoyed by a rushing string arrangement, finds her adrift, desperate for a sign, singing the “same three songs over and over.” And in “ Kyoto,” she undercuts a breezy horn section and her most festival-ready chorus by refusing to play along: “I’m a liar,” she sings in its closing line, holding out the syllables so she can’t be misunderstood.Īlong with her double-tracked vocals and graceful, winding melodies, these conversational refrains bring to mind the work of Elliott Smith, one of Bridgers’ clearest influences. Ironically, the most upbeat songs house her bleakest thoughts. If music was a pathway toward spiritual catharsis in earlier songs like “Smoke Signals” and “Me & My Dog,” the same drugs don’t work here. On Punisher, these relationships are mostly fraught, from a fan being murdered outside Dodger Stadium to a couple channeling deeper issues through a fight about John Lennon. The fingerpicked riff is played on a guitar that seems to be dissolving a low, male voice comes in like a record playing at the wrong speed a steady pulse seems to rise from somewhere deep in your headphones.īridgers also writes about this very sensation: the way we hear music, how we devote ourselves to it and form identities around it. Punisher’s first single, “ Garden Song,” is a marvel not only for how seamlessly its lyrics bind fantasies and nightmares, burning houses and blooming flowers, but also for how each element of its slyly psychedelic arrangement travels along with her words.
Self-produced with Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska, these songs are starkly drawn and colorfully embellished, produced in service of each individual story.
This impulse toward the candid, the multi-dimensional, has also come to define the sound of Bridgers’ music. Then she concedes, “But it’s sad that his baby died.” “We hate ‘Tears in Heaven,’” she sings of Eric Clapton’s autobiographical, once-inescapable ballad. It’s why she will infuse a track like this album’s “Moon Song,” an otherwise wistful ballad that takes place at a birthday party, with a banal detail (“It’s nautical themed”) or an outright dismissal of art born from tragedy. It can be sad, but she is also the first to call bullshit on letting one emotion consume her. Her songs can be autobiographical-2017’s “Motion Sickness” bluntly described an emotionally abusive relationship with a since-spurned, one-time mentor-but her writing is too self-aware and wide-ranging to feel confessional. While Punisher is only her second full-length collection as a solo artist, Bridgers has already established a distinct worldview.
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