Sunday's Cool: boygenius Are Friends
'The Record' is a celebration of the disappearing art of being a good friend.
This is Clusterhuck, my newsletter about faith, culture and a flourishing future for all! I’m glad you’re here. I can only do this through the support of my readers, and I’m grateful for every one I’ve got. If you’d like to join, just click here. You’ll get a free seven-day trial, including access to all the archives.
In 1961, 17-year-old Keith Richards was waiting for a train in Dartmouth when he spotted another kid his age lugging around a couple Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters records. The kid’s name was Mick Jagger, and since an interest in American Blues music wasn’t a given for British teens, the two struck up a conversation, then a friendship, then a band, then a legend.
I think about this origin story a lot, because it almost certainly wouldn’t happen today. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards would have been waiting for the same train, listening to the same music on their AirPods, never knowing they were just several feet away from a history making friendship. And whatever else they may be, the Rolling Stones are (and were — R.I.P. Charlie!) friends. They partied like friends. They fought like friends. Rumors that they sometimes hooked up like friends have never been confirmed, but it doesn’t stretch the imagination past any breaking point. “Mick and I were joined at the hip,” Richards wrote in his autobiography. “There was no way we could survive alone.”
I thought about that origin story again, listening to The Record, because it’s mirrored by boygenius’ own genesis. Julien Baker was hanging in the green room and spotted Lucy Dacus reading Henry James. The two started talking books, and formed a bond. Separately, Baker and Phoebe Bridgers started swapping emails about favorite poets. It was 2016, and all three women were on a similar career trajectory, experiencing early success and all the associated tension. Few could understand what it was like to be any one of them, but together, they felt known. “It was not like falling in love,” Bridgers told the New York Times. “It was falling in love.”
And so we have The Record, which is a lot of things. It’s one of the year’s most hyped album releases. It’s a gooey spitwad at the patriarchy. It’s the most easter egg-ridden music project this side of Midnights. But mostly, it’s a tribute to a rare and apparently beautiful friendship between three women whose love for each other manifests in collaborative creativity and vice versa. The album is riddled with inside jokes and references to shared obsessions with the Cure, Leonard Cohen and Sheryl Crow. “Who would I be without you, without them?” they harmonize on the hushed album opener, which sure sounds like it was written by Dacus. “I want to hear your story and be a part of it.”
Those stories are woven throughout The Record as each member gets a turn in the driver’s seat in-between moments where they’ve all clearly got a hand on the wheel. “Emily, I’m Sorry” seems to be a reference to a defamation lawsuit that Bridgers found herself in the middle of, and she sounds ashamed of her role in it. She sings “I’m 27 and I don’t know who I am,” and Baker and Dacus are right there, singing next to her, keeping her head above water. They do the same on the album closer “Letter to an Old Poet,” which rhymes lyrically and melodically with their EP favorite “Me and My Dog,” giving a sadder-but-wiser perspective on a failed relationship with a bad man. The song wouldn’t sound out of place on Bridgers’ Punisher, but its melancholy is mitigated by the presence of her friends. “I’m better than you, and you should know that by now,” she sings — the sort of realization that can only really come from having some honest people in your life to tell you what’s what.
Baker is a hardcore kid at heart, and her headbanging instincts serve boygenius well here, bringing a little crunch and anarchy to the folksy proceedings. “Would you be a Satanist with me?” she sings. “Mortgage off your soul to buy your dream?” Bridgers and Dacus scream along in apparent affirmation, because what are friends for?
And on the album standout “Not Strong Enough,” boygenius admits to their own friendship insecurities. “I can't stop staring at the ceiling fan and spinning out about things that haven't happened,” they sing, alluding to catastrophizing a hypothetical friendship implosion. “I am just lowering your expectations.” These are familiar thoughts to anyone who’s ever felt like a friendship is too good to be true, and has been hurt enough by past betrayals to never quite be certain that your closest friends don’t talk shit about you when you’re not around. Here, boygenius cop to these feelings together. There is absolution in confession.
Because boygenius are friends. They party like friends. They fight like friends. Unlike the Rolling Stones, they’ve been very open about the romantic dimensions to their friendship. Part of this may be changing social norms, sure. But I also think women tend to just be more aware of the porous boundaries between friendship and romance, and less insecure about wading into the mix. And boygenius is also part of a proud rock and roll tradition here. Clarence Clemons used to kiss Bruce every night on tour. Nirvana made out with each other after their SNL performance. Friendship is a big word that encompasses a lot of different energies, and labels like “platonic” can sometimes sterilize a bond that is ultimately too big for convenient boxes, too mysterious for strict definitions. Maybe we’d understand it better if we had more friends.
You hear a lot about modern loneliness, sometimes right here on this very Substack. There’s a lot of reasons we’re struggling to connect with each other more than we used to, but the end result is that friendship is an increasingly bewildering prospect for a lot of people, particularly in America. Bands serve a useful purpose here, serving up close knit friendships on a big stage. It’s fun to watch El-P and Killer Mike pal around as Run the Jewels, but it’s also instructive. Watching the National navigate band tensions in their (very funny) Mistaken for Strangers documentary is illuminating.
But few bands have pulled back the curtain on their own relationships with boygenius’ degree of vulnerability, and fewer still have still found it to be something worth celebrating and relishing. There is no simple fix to our crisis of loneliness. Not all of us will be lucky enough to spot someone reading our favorite book in a green room and find in that person a kindred spirit. But it is lovely to know that these stories do happen. And there is a peculiar joy in knowing that such friendships exist in the world, enriching it, in this case, with a hell of an album and a meditation on the disappearing art of being a good friend.
RNS kindly re-published last week’s Substack about the mass shooting at Covenant here in Nashville, so you can read it there if you’re not a paid subscriber.
Speaking of, thank you to the many of you who reached out online. It’s been a very difficult week here. The tragedy really revealed how small this city is. It seems like everyone is only one person removed from one of the victims.
It appears a few Tennessee Republicans are open to considering red flag laws, which wouldn’t stop all gun violence, but probably would have prevented the Covenant shooter from getting guns. If you live in Tennessee, please consider calling to support the measure.