Every great supergroup needs an origin story, and who better to tell it than the girls in the band? Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, and Lucy Dacus phoned in from Pasadena, Nashville, and Charlottesville, respectively, to describe how Boygenius came to be, how to answer that “women in rock” question, and how they feel about playing in Brooklyn on midterms night:
The definition of a “boygenius”:
Bridgers: Men are taught to be entitled to space and that their ideas should be heard because they’re great ideas and women are taught the opposite. That they should listen instead of speak and all that stuff. So a “boygenius” is someone who their whole life has been told that their ideas are genius. I also think genius is a weird, toxic word to use for anybody because it’s unattainable or it comes with, a lot of the time, abusive tendencies.
How Boygenius happened, and who introduced who:
Dacus: I’ve known Julien well for years now. We opened for her in D.C., before any of our music came out and we just kept in touch over email, constantly recommending books to each other, seeking each other’s wisdom, and she has always told me about Phoebe. So Phoebe and I only met this year and it was very quick friendship. The three of us have only ever been in the same space for recording, you know, like we’re all independently so busy touring all the time. Recording, writing, trying to get in time with our loved ones. So yeah, we’ve only been in the same room for five days in June.
Baker: We were all going to tour together so it seemed obvious that we would perform together. We would do something to make it special. Phoebe and Lucy, both the artists they tour with, they engage with them pretty heavily.
Bridgers: The tour came first and then we were like, why not record like a seven inch for tour promotion? It’d be so fun and it would be fun to sing together. And then like as stuff started happening we’re kind of like, “Oh shit, it would actually be so fun to be in a real band” and you know, we haven’t like talked about like a second record or anything. But that was totally not even on the table before we all met each other or before we all started working together and now we all literally think about it as like another band, which is pretty special. But it was kind of an accident. It was just like, “Oh, we’ll do a cover song and maybe one original song for this thing.” And then it turned into like, “Oh shit, our dynamic is so sweet together.”
On the recording and songwriting process:
Baker: While our music is very different stylistically, I think we all have similar emotions to end quandaries that we’re trying to get at and with different literal vocabulary and musical vocabulary. It was easy to get on the same page, but we didn’t necessarily approach it with a thesis.
Dacus: Not only do we bring what we’re able to bring the equation, we can call upon the favorite parts of each other, you know, like we’re familiar enough with each other’s work, so we bring our own style and then we have access to the tools of the other two people. Julien is really an amazing instrumentalist and she has an incredible ear for tone and arrangement, and Phoebe is a super-creative idea machine. Both of them are incredible lyricists. We’re all sensitive in similar ways. It’s been so much easier than I even thought it would be. I can’t really explain why that is. Like maybe it was just the right time, right place.
Baker: We each sent a handful of songs to our email chains and we listened to each other’s songs, and then had a sort of workshop thing once we were all together in one place.
Bridgers: We were all surprised to feel a real, true, unfettered creative energy. And a safe space, for lack of a better term, to fully flesh out our ideas and even if they weren’t the best ideas, we did not feel like if something we tried didn’t work, it wasn’t like embarrassing or a failure. I think it was like the easiest recording experience of my fucking life.
Baker: It was really great. I think it was very spontaneous, which is challenging for me as a very meticulous, calculated person. But something that I also crave in a sort of, I guess contradictory way.
About that girl-group thing:
Baker: I guess that fits within the larger phenomenon of people referring to music as female-fronted, acting as if someone’s gender can sort of categorize them as a genre and then sort of erasing the rest of their stylistic qualities. That’s the thing that happens. So I’m always trying to find, between how much do I resist categorization, categorization based on my identity, intentionally, as a protest of the idea that those things are somehow out of the ordinary or that they should be remarkable or that they’re awful in some way. And the other side of that, which is choosing to draw attention to those very characteristics of my identity because visibility and representation are so crucial to model, that this is a possibility for a younger generation of people.
Bridgers: Nobody thinks twice about five dudes starting a band, but as soon as three fucking women start a band they’re like “girl band!” or like “girl project!” On my Spotify, my related artists are 100 percent women and that’s great. Like, totally check out another woman after listening to me, but like go to fucking Dave Grohl’s thing and I guarantee you there’s like two women, if that. People treat it like it’s fucking separate. But also gender is not an unimportant part of our band. We very much thought about that. We’re all friends. We wanted to do it. But as soon as we got in the room together it was like, “Oh, we’re like a girl supergroup. How do we toe this line?”
https://www.vogue.com/article/boygenius-oral-history-lucy-dacus-phoebe-bridgers-julien-baker
