11/30/2022 0 Comments Boy genius![]() ![]() Personal confession is a trademark of all of their solo work, but as a collective they encompass the universal. There is no discernible front woman the singers trade verses and then come together at unexpected moments to harmonize. This is the driving spirit of boygenius’s self-titled EP, a record that feels more like a mind meld than like a carrousel of songwriters. In the quieter, more insular world of independent music, collaboration is more typically an act of solidarity among artists who share experiences and musical interests. In that realm, which is fuelled by commercial concerns, alliances are often more about reaching new fan bases than about merging kindred spirits or pushing the boundaries of genre. The collaborative impulse is also rampant in the pop world, where the mainstream charts sometimes look like a collection of hastily executed lab experiments, populated by long lists of guest appearances and clashing sensibilities. Boygenius has forebears in country music: the powerhouse trio of Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe, and Angaleena Presley released their third album as Pistol Annies this month. ![]() The television industry these days is fixated on the hyper-specific voice of the individual auteur, but the world of music has never been so collaborative. ![]() When they set out to name their group, and the album they recorded during four days in Los Angeles earlier this year, they couldn’t shake the boygenius moniker. The phrase was a way to needle their colleagues, and also to preëmptively deflate any self-seriousness regarding their work. (In her most popular song, a wry kiss-off called “Motion Sickness,” she asks a former suitor, “Hey, why do you sing with an English accent? I guess it’s too late to change it now.”) Dacus has an all-male backup band, and Baker got her start as the front woman of a punk-leaning (and otherwise male) band called Forrister. ![]() Bridgers has collaborated with Conor Oberst, the Bright Eyes front man, and she dated the indie-rock mainstay Ryan Adams, who is twenty years her senior. During the process, the term “boy genius”-a half-derisive, half-aspirational expression used to describe the preternatural confidence they’d observed in their male peers-was thrown around as a joke. Earlier this year, they decided to formalize this remote kinship in the recording studio. Instead, they started group texts, e-mail threads, and, eventually, a shared online document where they riffed on their favorite authors, scribbled out ideas for music, and traded notes about negotiations with the indie labels that were courting them. In another time, the three women might have started noodling around in someone’s basement and formed a band. They are dutiful about guitar-rock songwriting without being explicitly reverential to a particular era. But the three share indisputable similarities: they approach indie rock from a deliberate and plaintive perspective that skews more toward emo, folk, and blues than toward punk, and they write the kind of lyrics that warrant close reading. (One of her best songs, “Funeral,” details the experience of singing at the funeral of a boy who died of a heroin overdose.) Dacus has a deep, rich voice and makes more conventional rock songs, which she sings from a calm remove. Bridgers, a Los Angeles native who worshipped Elliott Smith and starred in an Apple commercial at the age of twenty-one, makes folksy, acoustic rock songs whose wispiness cleverly masks their morbid and searing lyrics. Each artist had crafted a distinct sound: Baker, a recovered opioid addict from Memphis, whose musical upbringing was in the Christian church, makes spare and swelling music that draws from the melodies and the ritualized melancholy of the emo world. They’d proved themselves to be careful and accomplished writers and performers, and had begun to attract attention from critics and labels alike. In 2016, the singer-songwriters Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, and Phoebe Bridgers, who were all in their early twenties, were living parallel lives. ![]()
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