Earlier this year, the three members of Boygenius – Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus – signed up for a run of group therapy sessions. The year ahead was freighted with the band’s debut album release and extensive touring, and it seemed wise to guard against the dangers that had undone so many other bands before them. “Prophylactic therapy,” as Baker calls it.
As solo artists, Baker (27), Bridgers (28) and Dacus (27) inspire a level of devotion that borders on zealotry – drawing frenzied audiences, spawning memes and tabloid gossip. They are queer-identifying, vocal about issues from abortion to trans rights to colonialism, while their songwriting, which tends to be smart, introspective and somewhat melancholic, has handed each of them the peculiar charge of articulating the feelings of a generation.
As Boygenius, the “supergroup” they formed in 2018, the intensity of adoration has only magnified. Perhaps not since Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt united for 1987’s Trio has a songwriters’ supergroup incited such anticipation. The expectation around their debut album, The Record, is fevered. “I want people to like it because we like it,” says Dacus, sitting beside her bandmates in a photo studio in lower Manhattan. The day before we meet, they released a new single, Not Strong Enough, and Dacus has been anxiously checking the response. “Did we throw it into the dark abyss?” she wonders. “Will the dark abyss throw back positive reinforcement?”
Back in January, the band chose a therapist who might help them navigate the strange combination of gratitude and anger they have developed towards fame, the infringement of boundaries and the sense of constant surveillance. They also wanted someone who might help protect their friendship as it becomes something more like a job.
“My favourite thing about this band is that it’s fun for me, it’s a respite for me,” says Baker. “My real-life friendships with you both are among the dearest relationships in my life,” she tells Dacus and Bridgers. Releasing an album feels “like you’re at the top of a big rollercoaster that everyone keeps hyping because they’re excited about you being good at what you do. I was super-anxious there wouldn’t be time to cultivate our friendship. I was precious and protective of it.”
But to spend time in Boygenius’s company is to be constantly reminded of the intimacy between them. Their sentences braid together and they make room for one another’s opinions. And while there are in-jokes, disagreements and diversions, they treat one another with palpable admiration. In their first session, the therapist told the trio she liked to get to know her clients through the eyes of those who already know and love them, asking that they describe the traits they appreciated in one another. “Phoebe and I looked at each other,” says Dacus sliding her eyes to Bridgers again now, “and immediately started crying.”
Boygenius began with Dacus and Baker. In 2016, sharing the bill in Washington DC, Baker came backstage and found Dacus reading Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. They fell into conversation quickly, ranging from reading to religion, to their shared experience of growing up in the American south (Dacus in Virginia, Baker in Tennessee). When they parted, Dacus tore a blank page out of her book and wrote down her email address.
What followed was something between an epistolary friendship and a roving book club. Both were in their early 20s, touring their debut albums, feeling the strange isolation of their position. Baker then suggested Dacus meet Los Angeles-born Bridgers – another friend from the road going through the same thing. The email book club widened to three, and still stands today. On her bookshelves back home in LA, Bridgers keeps a “Lucy section”.
“So when I come visit her, I can pick out my own books,” Dacus says.
When they were booked for a triple-bill tour in late 2018, they decided to record a 7in single to sell on the merchandise table. It was the first time they had all been in the same room, but over a handful of days in the studio they turned out six songs. The idea of becoming a band took shape. They called themselves Boygenius – a nod to how often male egotism is recast as creative brilliance – and released their self-titled EP that October.
The trio subsequently re-focused on their solo careers. Baker and Dacus released their respective third albums to great acclaim; Bridgers became a near-household name through the success of her second record and a relationship with Irish actor Paul Mescal. (They are said to have split, but I am warned not to ask questions about the band’s personal lives – a press officer and management hover during our interview.)
Throughout, they stayed in touch, book talk giving way to finding relief in their common experiences. “I feel like what we talk about the most is the shitty parts of this amazing thing that we get to do, we get to not feel isolated,” Bridgers says.
“Or ungrateful,” Dacus adds.
Bridgers nods. “I’m the most grateful I’ve ever been in my life. And my anger at the ways that fame is set up has only made me more grateful to be able to articulate those things – the ‘Beatles getting out of a car trope’ [footage of the band surrounded by screaming fans]. Personal space. Surveillance.”
All have spoken previously about invasions of privacy, secretly being filmed or photographed when out in public. “I think the imperative thing is [people liking us] with distance and respect,” Bridgers says. “There are sinister manifestations of it that we don’t need to get into, because we have before, but loving something that somebody made is cool and I feel grateful that people care. Shit that lights a fire in you is the stuff of life.”
They all remember being teenage fans screaming at Broken Social Scene shows, and nerding out over Elliott Smith; they understand the excitement their band inspires. “Honestly, we are our own biggest fans,” says Dacus. “I can relate to people who like Boygenius because I do, too.”
During their respective last solo album press cycles, they batted back questions about whether Boygenius would ever record again. In secret, they were saving up lyrics and half-songs that seemed to belong only to their band. During the pandemic, Baker opened a Google Drive, and the three began sharing tunes. “Phoebe sent us a song and then I was like, ‘Holy shit, this fucking rocks’ and she was like, ‘We could be a band again …’”
What is it they admire about each other’s songwriting? “I have this certain reticence at looking under the hood of this band,” Bridgers says, after some consideration. “I know what I love about you both as solo artists, but I think it changes in the band, and it’s just alchemy. There’s a secret fourth thing happening so it’s hard to articulate.”
The Google Drive was followed by two in-person writing sessions. They each brought songs that they had struggled to complete alone: Bridgers had a memorable lyric about kicking someone’s teeth in. “I’d been trying to sneak a curb-biting lyric into a song for years,” she says. “That was one of my darlings that I hadn’t killed. It’s nice to try to shake something loose that you’ve tried very laboriously to fit into your solo shit.”
“I love figuring out y’all’s puzzles,” says Dacus. “I tend to come up with a bunch of options – you know when the eye doctor’s like ‘This, or that? This or that?’ And then it’s knowing which thing is better and closer, and not being satisfied until it communicates the feeling we’re going for.”
Bridgers’ mind works differently, Dacus notes. “I’ll write a whole song and she’ll be like: ‘Change this one word.’ And it does something.” In the song We’re in Love, she had written about a white carnation; Bridgers insisted she change it to pink “because of a Marty Robbins song where he gets left alone at the prom because his date ditches him. ‘A white sports coat, and a pink carnation / I’m all alone in romance …’” Bridgers sings. “Also because Elliott Smith wanted to wear a pink carnation at the Oscars with his white suit, and they were like: ‘This flower looks stupid, take it off.’”
You can hear these conversations on The Record: there are songs that are distinctly Dacus or Bridgers or Baker, but skewed somehow – a punch that lands a little to the left, an arrestingly new image. They are sometimes funny – hanging Leonard Cohen out to dry for writing “horny poetry” – or defiant. “It’s a bad idea, and I’m all about it,” they sing on $20. It makes for a diverse and stylistically singular record; the sweetness of an Andrews Sisters-style three-part harmony giving way to spirited guitar and squalling vocals; songs that slow-drift, songs to weep or drive to.
If there is a quality that marks all three songwriters, it is the frankness with which they write. As Boygenius, that trait is more pronounced than ever. “This project gets to be really earnest in a way that I think we each undercut in our solo shit a little bit,” Bridgers says, though Dacus makes the case that she’s always “pretty earnest” in her music.
Baker, though, agrees. Weary of the way that “the sincerity of the thing that you’re making then becomes the quality that people define it by”, she has found it liberating to perform with the band, rather than solo. “Because I can be one step removed from the identity, and I can contribute something creative where the whole stakes aren’t on me and my decisions,” she says. “That’s freeing, and it enables you to be a little bit more earnest because you don’t feel so uncouth about it.”
Baker thinks she acquired self-deprecation as a protective mechanism. When she looks back through her old songs, there are some that now make her cringe. She acknowledges that they probably inspired a question she is often asked, essentially: “How does it feel to just talk about the worst shit that ever happened to you every single day of your life on stage for money?” she recalls.
Dacus has taken a different approach. “I’ve tried to save myself from feeling bad on stage, repeating to myself things that I hate, because I don’t want to tell myself bad stories about myself. I learned it early on – that I shouldn’t share anything that I wouldn’t want to live through every day since that’s what tour is.”
Baker exhales: “That’s a good idea,” she says. “Damn!”
Learning how to exist in the public eye has been a hard lesson for all of them. Bridgers and Baker speak about points of dissociation: checking out of wherever they are just to get through it; singing emotionally gruelling songs while also “thinking about what I’m going to get from this grain bowl place once I get off stage …” says Baker. It is more unusual, Bridgers says, for her to feel “like I’m with my friends and in my body” rather than floating some way above herself.
Arguably the most earnest track on The Record is We’re in Love, a song Dacus wrote in tribute to her bandmates. Writing it was easy, she says, but making it proved hard. It felt exposing to share, to speak so openly about what they had come to mean to her.
When she played it to them, Bridgers welled up. Baker recoiled.
“I was like, we should not have this song on the record,” she says. “It was too earnest for me. I was feeling really reluctant to engage with earnestness because it felt like our friendship was something that was so high-stakes, that was so precious to me, that I couldn’t possibly go there in a performance context. I didn’t know if I could engage with it as music that I’m a part of singing and making.”
She “spiralled out about it” for a while before coming around to the idea that it deserved its place. “I don’t know,” she says. “I’m a slow processor!”
It isn’t the only song that captures their bond. The track Leonard Cohen recalls the time they took a road trip in northern California, and Bridgers was so distracted by the urgency of playing her Iron and Wine’s 2004 song The Trapeze Swinger to her bandmates that she took a wrong turn. Baker and Dacus were too polite to point this out until the song had finished playing, by which time their journey had veered some way off course. “You felt like an idiot adding an hour to the drive,” the lyrics run. “But it gave us more time to embarrass ourselves, telling stories that we wouldn’t tell anyone else.”
The song ends like a love note – Dacus’s voice, soft over acoustic guitar: “I never thought you’d happen to me.” It’s an earnest line in a funny song, one that reveals the appreciation these three songwriters have for one another: a way to get to know Boygenius through the eyes of those who already know and love them.
• The Record is released via Interscope on 31 March.
