Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus
Before I’m able to get out a single question about boygenius — the new supergroup featuring singer-songwriters Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus that will play their dreamy, melancholy rock songs at the Ryman on Sunday — Baker asks me a question: “How do you feel about the midterm? Can I just ask?”
This is Baker’s first chance to vote in a national election since moving from Memphis to Nashville, where she’s been for about a year now. Like many other locals, politics are on her mind.
“I think this is the first time I’ve ever said this,” I tell her. “Taylor Swift has saved the day.”
“Oh, God, yes,” Baker responds.
Just a few days before my phone conversation with Baker, Swift took to social media to endorse a political candidate for the first time. She not only urged her millions of followers to vote in this week’s midterm elections, but she added that she’ll be voting for Phil Bredesen, Tennessee’s Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, adding that his opponent Marsha Blackburn’s “voting record in Congress appalls and terrifies me.” After Swift’s post, voter registration surged. Nonpartisan voting information website Vote.org told Buzzfeed News that 65,000 voters registered using the site’s tools in the subsequent 24 hours. (The site had reported only 56,669 registrations in the entire month of August.)
“This is not saying anything specifically about Taylor Swift — I don’t like to talk on people or whatever,” says Baker. “But that just goes to show that when people finally recognize and inhabit their responsibility, how massively important that is.”
Baker has never been shy when it comes to sharing what she believes in. Since releasing her debut full-length Sprained Ankle in 2015, she’s spoken about her experiences as a queer Christian woman growing up in the South, and her somber music lays bare her struggles with depression, alcohol and faith. That bold attitude also informs her work with boygenius.
Like so many of today’s good ideas, boygenius was born in a group text. When the three friends found out they were booked to tour together, they were excited to dream up fun, collaborative ways to make the tour special.
“Originally, we were thinking we would just do one song, and then somebody was like, ‘Maybe we could each bring in a song and do a cover,’ ” says Dacus in a separate phone interview. “Once we were all together, we were like, ‘Wait, the ideas don’t stop coming!’ The only reason the album is six songs is because we didn’t have more time.”
The songs themselves aren’t necessarily rebellious or confrontational. The group’s self-titled EP, due Nov. 9 via Matador, boasts both heartrending and stirring harmony-heavy gems about complicated relationships. The name, however, is the trio’s cheeky collective middle finger. Three women, all with successful solo careers of their own, calling themselves boygenius? It’s perfect. And when I tell Baker I love the name, she gets excited.
“Dude, OK, I’m so glad you think it’s the best name, because it’s very controversial,” she says. “It was an inside joke when we were recording the record. Obviously, we confided in each other and shared experiences about touring and working with other artists, and being in the world of music, and how that had played out for us all. And we discovered that we had all had the similar experience where we had a person in our lives who was this archetype of the artistic male who was a brooding artist whose eccentricities are sort of encouraged or at least permitted by everyone around them because they are a ‘genius.’
“I feel like you don’t see women get away with that behavior,” Baker continues. “When women do eccentric things, when women are extreme or when they just have an eccentric personality, that becomes either a point of derision or something used to make them a novelty or to delegitimize them and turn them into a caricature.”
Pop music is full of talented women, but in many cases audiences expect that there’s a man behind the scenes writing the lyrics, producing the music or guiding a female artist’s personal brand. Boygenius was purposefully male-free, Baker says. And Dacus admits there may be something to learn from harnessing the troubling male ego so many celebrate to a fault.
“Even though it is toxic, we discussed feeling envious of the [male] confidence that comes with being told that you’re a genius from a young age, because those people do listen to their own ideas,” says Dacus. “It’s a form of self-love — if you can harness, like, an 80th of that energy, we’d have a lot more confidence in our sharing of ideas and our creative pursuits. When any of us were being doubtful, or not really believing in ourselves, we’d remind each other to harness the boy genius of each of us.”
This record shouldn’t feel radical, but it does. While top-tier tours and festival lineups continue to be predominantly male, Baker, Bridgers and Dacus banded together to make music, intentionally (but without fanfare) leaving men out of it, then winking at their male counterparts’ exclusion — via the band’s name. The end result is a memorable collection of pop songs that blends the artists’ talents while also leaving room for each to shine in their own light. It’s beautiful, really. You could even call it genius.
