{"id":136,"date":"2023-04-02T14:07:39","date_gmt":"2023-04-02T18:07:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sabriafreeman.com\/nmc\/webdev\/project-three\/news\/?p=136"},"modified":"2023-04-02T14:07:39","modified_gmt":"2023-04-02T18:07:39","slug":"the-record","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sabriafreeman.com\/nmc\/webdev\/project-three\/news\/the-record\/","title":{"rendered":"The Record<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n

Boygenius<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

2023<\/h6>\n<\/div>
\"boygenius<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n

By Cat Zhang<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GENRE: Rock
LABEL: Interscope
REVIEWED: March 31, 2023
Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus devote their debut record to their singular bond. Each amplifies the other\u2019s songwriting, enriches the detail, and heightens the emotion.<\/h6>\n\n\n\n

The steadfast devotion between the women of\u00a0Boygenius\u00a0is a subject worthy of a dog-eared literary classic, one that\u2019s passed from friend to friend until the pages come fluttering off the spine. In 2016,\u00a0Julien Baker\u00a0spotted\u00a0Lucy Dacus\u00a0reading Henry James\u00a0in the green room of a venue and felt an immediate affinity; the two became friends and developed mutual, unspoken crushes as they wrote each other lengthy correspondences online. A month later, a similar kinship transpired between Baker and\u00a0Phoebe Bridgers, who traded favorite authors and poets in their own email thread. They were three young singer-songwriters of shrewd sensitivity, tentatively navigating early-career acclaim;\u00a0\u201cThings were happening for us all at the same time and I think we\u2019ve gravitated to each other,\u201d Baker has\u00a0said.\u00a0Cut to 2018, when they got booked together on a triple bill and headed into the studio, thinking they\u2019d record one song. They emerged with six. By all accounts, making that initial\u00a0Boygenius EP\u00a0was an ineffable experience, the consequence of which should not be diminished through careless simile:\u00a0\u201cIt was not\u00a0like<\/em>\u00a0falling in love,\u201d Bridgers states. \u201cIt\u00a0was<\/em>\u00a0falling in love.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not just that Boygenius poke fun at the degree to which male artists are lionized\u2014in the EP artwork\u00a0imitating Crosby, Stills, & Nash; their recent\u00a0recreation\u00a0of Nirvana\u2019s 1994\u00a0Rolling Stone<\/em>\u00a0cover; and the new album\u2019s working title contenders like\u00a0In Rainbows<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0The White Album.<\/em>\u00a0It\u2019s not just that their commitment to making music together pushes against the competitive forces of patriarchy, in the same spirit as women-led supergroups from\u00a0Wild Flag\u00a0to\u00a0the Highwomen. It is that the three women seem to actually love each other, as expressed on their long-awaited debut album, ultimately titled\u00a0The Record.<\/em>\u00a0It\u2019s a kind of love that rejects the ingrained impulse for women to route their emotional, spiritual, and erotic attention away from their peers and toward men\u2014what the feminist poet Adrienne Rich diagnosed in a\u00a0famous essay\u2014but also troubles the commonly accepted division between romance and friendship. Boygenius are teammates, confidantes,\u00a0soon-to-be onstage make-out partners; the songs on\u00a0The Record<\/em>\u00a0are largely for each other, about each other, littered with inside references.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This time, Dacus, Bridgers, and Baker bring in the best guys in the business:\u00a0Jay Som\u2019s Melina Duterte on bass, Autolux\u2019s Carla Azar on drums,\u00a0Illuminati Hotties\u2019 Sarah Tudzin as engineer, and Catherine Marks on co-production. The Pulitzer-nominated novelist Elif Batuman wrote the introductory essay; Oscar-nominated actress Kristen Stewart directed three Boygenius music videos. Boygenius embrace how we are always responding to and being formed by others, and how this porousness can enrich our lives. As they wonder on the album\u2019s opener, in braided unison: \u201cWho would I be without you, without them?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWith You Without Them\u201d is a kitchen hymn sung under soft morning light; it is a song about history, inheritance, and in that spirit carries on with the swooning folk harmonies last heard on the EP\u2019s closer, \u201cKetchum, ID.\u201d Dacus, Baker, and Bridgers express gratitude to the preceding generations who shaped the people they love\u2014their father, their father\u2019s mother\u2014and ask to take part in this lineage, sharing storylines until they and their intimates become a kind of family too. \u201cGive me everything you\u2019ve got\/I\u2019ll take what I can get,\u201d the trio sings a capella, then reciprocates the request: \u201cI\u2019ll give everything I\u2019ve got\/Please take what I can give.\u201d The first four tracks of\u00a0The Record<\/em>\u00a0were written independently, and \u201cWith You Without Them\u201d is so evidently by Dacus, a ditty she\u2019d sing while washing dishes; it shares a bloodline with her\u00a0Historian<\/em>\u00a0cut \u201cPillar of Truth.\u201d Here and elsewhere, her voice provides a warm and sturdy foundation, cradling the others\u2019 like a well-loved rocking chair.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Boygenius 2023 By Cat Zhang GENRE: RockLABEL: InterscopeREVIEWED: March 31, 2023Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus devote their debut record to their singular bond. Each amplifies the other\u2019s songwriting, enriches the detail, and heightens the emotion. The steadfast devotion between the women of\u00a0Boygenius\u00a0is a subject worthy of a dog-eared literary classic, one that\u2019s passed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":101,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sabriafreeman.com\/nmc\/webdev\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sabriafreeman.com\/nmc\/webdev\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sabriafreeman.com\/nmc\/webdev\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sabriafreeman.com\/nmc\/webdev\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sabriafreeman.com\/nmc\/webdev\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sabriafreeman.com\/nmc\/webdev\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":137,"href":"https:\/\/sabriafreeman.com\/nmc\/webdev\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions\/137"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sabriafreeman.com\/nmc\/webdev\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sabriafreeman.com\/nmc\/webdev\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sabriafreeman.com\/nmc\/webdev\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sabriafreeman.com\/nmc\/webdev\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}