Song Exploder - Phoebe Bridgers - Scott Street

Episode Date: November 11, 2020

This episode is a little different. It’s a re-issue of Phoebe Bridgers’ Song Exploder episode from January 2019, along with a brand new segment where she and I talk about dealing with writer’s block.Phoebe Bridgers is a singer-songwriter from Los Angeles. In September 2017, she released her debut album, Stranger in the Alps. One of the breakout songs from that album was “Scott Street,” a song Phoebe co-wrote with her drummer, Marshall Vore. Coming up first in this episode, Phoebe and Marshall break down how that song went from an unfinished cassette recording, to an acoustic demo, and then finally to the album version.And then, after that, after you hear "Scott Street" in its entirety, Phoebe and I talk about writer’s block: what causes it for her, and how’s she’s dealt with it. So stick around after the full song to hear that conversation.songexploder.net/phoebe-bridgers

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway. You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. My name is Rishi Kesh Hereway. This episode is a little different. It's a reissue of Phoebe Bridger's Song Exploder episode from January 2019, along with a brand-new segment where she and I talk about dealing with Writers' Block. Phoebe Bridgers is a singer-songwriter from Los Angeles. In September 2017, she released her debut album, Stranger in the Alps.

One of the breakout songs from that album was Scott Street, a song Phoebe co-wrote with her drummer, Marshall Vore. Coming up first in this episode, Phoebe and Marshall break down how that song went from an unfinished cassette recording to an acoustic demo, and then finally to the album version. And then after you hear Scott Street in its entirety, Phoebe and I talk about writer's block, what causes it for her and how she's had to deal with it. That interview is presented by We Transfer. WeTranser's been at the center of the creative process for years. They make Tools to Move Ideas, and those tools have helped me, Phoebe, and countless other musicians and creators.

So stick around after the full song to hear that conversation, and check out how We Transfer can help you at ToolsTo Move Ideas.com. But first, here's Phoebe Bridgers and Marshall Vore on the making of Scott Street. I'm Phoebe Bridgers. This is Marshall Vore, drummer of Phoebe Bridgers. We met in late 2014, became fast friends hung out every day. We started talking about music.

I remember we were just hanging out a lot and then you would just be having an idea or something and you'd be like, what do you think of this? Or I would do the same thing. Like, I have this idea, what do you think of that? And it seemed like some songs ended up coming out of that together. And so we started writing a lot of songs and this one, it's an idea that Marshall had.

I, like, had a guitar and was sick. sitting on Phoebe's bed, playing the chords. I had just got a cassette machine and I thought it was cool. So there's a cassette demo of it. Walking Scott Street feeling like a stranger. I just kind of had these lyrics from my phone, which were the first opening lyrics of the song. I first started writing those lyrics in 2014.

I was walking from my apartment to my friend's house and I was just singing what was happening. I grabbed my mail on the way out, and in between us was an ARCO gas station where we would buy stuff. Got a stack of mail and a token. It's a shower beer. It's a payment plan. And that's pretty much all that there was. Just a few lyrics and then the little tag that is, do you feel ashamed?

I, like, fell in love with it, but it was really only like half a song. It was like something that I would play around the house, what little bit was there. And then it wasn't until much later that Phoebe sort of threw a lasso around it and made it into something usable. You grab the guitar and we just hashed the rest of it out. I, like, made up completely different chords that I thought were cooler. And then that tag, the Do You Feel Ashamed lyric? You were kind of thinking of that as like a pre-corpor. and then it would open up into some big chorus,

but I told them not to. I really like songs where it makes the listener kind of fill in the blanks. And I just felt like some big chorus would italicize the subtext in a way that I didn't like. And then he was like, okay, okay, but just like hear me out and played it again. It was like, do you feel ashamed when you hear my name?

And then he goes, I hope you do. This is so ridiculous. And that was exactly what I meant. Any commentary on what was just said felt completely unnecessary and actually kind of took away from the point to me. So I kind of stopped you from like overriding it. Definitely. There was a lot of like moments that were not very understated or pretty.

But the do you feel ashamed lyric comes from a place when I had this like really crazy time in my life. I was 25. I had played a show, and I was standing by the curb waiting for the van to pick me up. And then a fight broke out, and my leg was broken. Basically, these guys tripped over me, and they snapped my leg in half, and everybody ran away. So there was, like, an entire year where I didn't walk or play music or do anything. And I just started dating someone.

And so they more or less took care of me through the time that, it took me to go through this whole leg thing. And I remember during that time, like, not seeing any of my real friends and being very upset. And I remember the person I was dating telling me, like, your friends aren't here for you. Your friends don't love you. And years later, when me and this person broke up and I would talk to my friends, they were trying to see me the whole time. This person was telling them, like, Marshall doesn't want to see you.

And I remember waking up to this thing that, like, this person, did love me, but they were also working against me. And so I just wonder if they're ashamed of that kind of thing and if they've grown up. So then we wrote the second verse. We wanted it to be a dialogue. Phoebe made that verse into like a conversation that you would be having with someone from your past.

It's so sad and weird to play catch up with someone who was so intimately involved in your life for so long and it was entirely imagined. It was like, what would a conversation like that be? What would the person be asking? I asked you, how is your sister she got makes me fizz that... Running into somebody that you spent all that time with and realizing that the world has changed

and it's not the same world that it was even a few years ago is a really heavy thing to deal with. I made the demo kind of to map out what my idea of the structure was. and I played it for my producer, Tony, because I really wanted to put it on my record, and he was like, this isn't a real song. And I, like, a couple weeks later was like, I'm going to just experiment.

I'm going to play the exact same thing again, because I think this is a real song, and I think it is good. And I did, and he got really excited and, like, did not remember me showing it to him for the first time when he didn't like it. So then we wanted to remember. chord and started with guitar. The acoustic guitar is a J-45 that Glenn Campbell owned.

Glenn Campbell's a country singer from the 60s and 70s. It's like my favorite guitar that exists in the entire universe. It's like so dead. Like it doesn't ring at all. And that's what's so great about it to me. Scott Street feeling like a stranger with an open heart open container. I love doubling my vocals. 85% of the music I listen to is Elliot Smith, and he does it so aggressively. And I loved it. I loved the quality that it gives a voice.

Spending money and I earned it. It takes some of the emotion out of my voice, which can be melodramatic sometimes, especially when talking about my feelings, which I do often. And so it was a way to take it out of that zone and be more expressive in, like, the production. There's helicopters over my head.

Night when I go to bed. Harrison, my guitar player, came in and played on it, and he did the helicopter noises. What Harry was doing was he was playing a chord, with the volume down on the guitar, turning up the volume and shaking the neck as hard as he could. So it was going,

we were like, maybe that's stupid if we make it sound like a helicopter. And then we ended up doing it, and I loved it. I have a theory that the jokes you make in the studio are actually just kind of the best ideas, but you're just shoving them aside. Or if you get made fun of

or having the idea, you can claim it was a joke. Whatever your joke idea is is probably just a genius idea. you're a little nervous about. When we went to record drums, we were like, oh man, it should come in on the weird offbeat where I say drums. Asked you how it's playing.

And we're like, maybe that's stupid. You said it's too much shit to carry. And it ended up being my favorite thing about the song. I love the idea of something kind of turning into another universe. Like you set one tone, and then the tone just like completely shifts. Those were the Optagon drums. Optagon was a toy piano.

I think it was made by Mattel, if I remember correctly, and it has these like discs that go in it, but they're made of like laminated paper. It's all floppy. And you put them in, and they have different sounds on them, so you can select just the drums from these discs, and you can adjust the tempo until it kind of grooves with your song.

And if you put them in upside, down, they play backwards. Rob Moose did all the strings on my record. He plays with Paul Simon. He plays all over Bonnie Bear's stuff. It was important to keep it sparse at the beginning to me. I am a real sucker for a big build song. All I had to say was, yeah, I wanted to be really sparse

in the beginning and then open up. And so, yeah, we just put Rob in front of a microphone and he did a bunch of stuff that we really liked. The squeaky, weird string hits are Rob's specialty. I really gravitate towards people who have a completely different go-to thing that I do, like an instinctual thing that's just so far out for me. And Rob's definitely like that. Like, it's just intuitive for him to do stuff like that. And then Tony Berg, the producer of my record, told me I needed an outro. So I like went into the vocal booth, wants to sing the melody.

And then a bunch of people went in a different time to sing harmonies. We layered it on top of each other. It was like this very victorious feeling thing. Tony handed us each like a cowbell, a bike bell, all these crazy toys because he loves the Beatles. And he was like giving us these seed pods that had dried out and we was like, shake these, narrow the microphone. And then take this train whistle and blow the train whistle every other time.

When we were done recording the outro, and it was so giant and like all the crazy bells and whistles and everybody singing together, it was just this very emotional day. We're listening to The Ruff, and Tony twirled around his producer chair with a single tear rolling down his face. And he said, it's as if you're looking back on your life and it was just a failure. Which was his version of a compliment. Marshall, who had never sung a harmony before, sang a harmony on this recording. Marshall never really sang until we met. And then when we started singing together,

our voices started kind of sounding exactly the same. So I love that quality on the recording. When you hear... When you sing something like, do you feel ashamed when you hear my name? That could mean so many different things and so many people. But for me, I think,

particularly about this one person and this one really bizarre, surreal time in my life that I went into as a younger guy and I came out of it all as an adult. The craziest feeling ever is being in a relationship that's like all consuming. It's your whole life for years. And then just the wake of that, it's so crazy that people can be completely estranged from their exes after being best friends for years that someone would think of you and feel ashamed of what happened. And that's just the only feeling that's left. But now my association with the song is like singing it every night and listening through other people's ears. A highlight of the show for me is like people singing along the end.

What I like about this song is it's not really telling you why you're sad. It doesn't say a lot about what you're supposed to feel. And I'm just so glad people got it. Here's Scott Street by Phoebe Bridgers in its entirety. Since Stranger in the Alps came out, Phoebe has released another album, Punisher, which came out in June 2020. Plus, she's a part of the band's Boy Genius and Better Oblivion Community Center. So between all that, she's made a lot of music. I feel like I'm constantly played by Writers Block, and so partly for my own benefit, I wanted to find out how she manages to be so prolific.

Have you ever had Writers Block? Yes. I feel like I experience it 100% of the time and then when I do write I have imposter syndrome. You know what I mean? Like it doesn't even feel like I did it. So yes. When was the first time that you ever felt something that felt like writer's block?

Probably right after I wrote my first ever song, I was like, well, I've written one song and that'll never happen again. And so how long did it take for you to write your second song? I think I've always had the same writing style where it takes me like years to write one song because I'll have a little idea and then I'll kind of work on it for a while, forget about it for six months, and then start it again. So I don't even remember what my second song was, but I definitely remember it taking forever to even have written like five. I feel like there are these different stages of writer's block. Like it's a nuanced thing. There's a version of writer's block where you don't even have an idea.

but the writer's block still exists even after you get that idea. It's like reading a book where you're like, is this happening? Do I like this? I'll write half of a song and then feel like it's never going to be finished. Actually, Scott Street was like that for sure.

Scott Street floated around. I think we actually played a totally unfinished version of it at a show. And we were pretty excited about it. And we were like, ah, does everybody like our new song? And they're like, yeah, it's okay. And then we got bummed and stopped working on it. And then when we went to record it, we wrote the whole outro.

But yeah, it can take all sorts of forms. I've played unfinished versions of my songs that shows before so often. A writer's block basically is fear. Is that right? Do you think? I think so. I'm trying to have a different relationship with it now, which is, you know, if you really can't get over it,

if you sit down and you just have these obsessive-compulsive hatred of yourself, thoughts, just get up, do something else. Clean a drawer for 10 minutes, but not the whole day, because that's what I tend to do. If I have to write, it's the first time in six months I've gotten my car cleaned.

I have these avoidance behaviors that never cease to amaze me. It is really incredible how productive you can be in all other things other than what you're supposed to be making. If you ever wonder why I'm tweeting nonstop at like 2 a.m.,

it's because I almost wrote something. Have you found that the drawer cleaning thing does actually work? Yes, totally. If you actually limit the time you take doing it. Like, I'll have like an audiobook or something to entertain me for a half hour and then I make a deal with myself, I will sit down again when I am done. And it totally works. The thing that is the most soul-sucking, honestly, is looking at your phone. Like I said, tweeting, that will just delete your ideas. But if you actually do a task in the physical world, it shakes your brain up enough to come up with something else.

I feel like there's an element where you just have to take your eye off of it just enough, but you can't do it too much. You can't occupy your brain with whole other thoughts. So as soon as you look at your phone, you're thinking about something else actively, but cleaning a drawer, you're still on autopilot a little bit. Yeah, and I relate my dream brain to my writing brain, a lot. Like, I feel like they occupy the same space. And I really value, like, writing down my dreams. But it's really hard not to look at your phone first thing in the morning. And if I look at my phone first thing in the morning, I just can't remember my dreams at all. So I have to put my phone on the other side of the room, which has been hard in quarantine. But I think my best ideas are like, when I left my phone on the bus or it's dead. And you get over that second of discomfort where you're like, I want to occupy myself. It's hard.

to admit to yourself that you need to be distracted too. What is the question or the fear, if you could articulate it, that manifests when you feel writers block? Because you've clearly done the thing that you're afraid that you can't do again. And at this point, you've done it many, many, many times. What is the actual voice saying to you that makes you feel like you're blocked? Again, I think I separate myself from the things I create a lot. And the voice is, oh, the last time you wrote something good is because you showed it to this person and they made this suggestion. Or the last time you wrote something good, it was not really you. It was like your subconscious. And I feel like I blacked out the first time I ever wrote a song.

And it doesn't feel like creating something. It kind of does feel not like a higher power or whatever, but it kind of does feel like a separate part of yourself. Like your normal brain doesn't really right. It's like a different subconscious thing. So yeah, my logical brain experiences heavy, heavy writer's block and then this thing that I feel like I have like no control over writes music. I don't feel like I have all the ingredients just sitting there writing. And also, I feel like I write really stupid stuff all the time. That's the other part of it is when you sit down to work on something and what you're writing is not good. It's kind of soul-sucking, but I need to write the first couple rounds to get to the good place. So far, everything we've talked about sounds

like it comes from yourself, that it's all internally motivated. Have you ever had an experience where you felt writer's block because of something external? No. I think that when the external world is really, really active, I tend to write some of my best stuff, like on tour. When someone tells me where to stand all day and I have a half hour of space, I've planned that half hour. I've been like, oh, I'm going to sit with a guitar. And these kind of endless days of being at home, the world is your oyster kind of. You can clean a drawer all day or you could write,

but nobody's making you. There's a Carmen Maria Machado quote where she says, you have to feel like you're having an affair with your art. It should keep you up at night. You should sneak around and squeeze in a half hour to do it. It should feel exciting to do that. And I think that's what I like about being busy is it makes you kind of fall in love with it again.

And it doesn't really feel like work. Do you think that writer's block is something that you'll get over? Or is it something that you've just learned to manage? I'm way better at managing it than I was. I think liking my newest songs is important. You know, I've proven myself wrong so much at this point that I kind of have hope for future of writing. But I think it'll always be a part of my life, but I'll get better at managing it for sure. Phoebe, thanks so much.

Yeah, thanks so much, man. Thanks so much to WeTransfer for supporting Song Exploder and artists like Phoebe Bridgers. WeTransfer is all about empowering creative people with tools to move their ideas that are also incredibly easy to use. Yeah, I'm like really, really bad at the internet, and it's great for people who are. You probably already know We Transfer as a simple and free way to send files. I can share ideas with my friends, and it's just convenient and great. They've also got three great apps, Paper, Paste, and Collect.

Paper is one of my favorite apps. It's a digital notebook that lets you make drawings and write notes all in one place. Collect by WeTransfer is an app that helps you save, organize, and share everything that inspires you, video, images, and more. Paste by WeTransfer is a presentation. tool that makes it easier than ever to present and collaborate on your vision. So if you're trying to find your way to the next step on your creative path, we transfer will help you along that journey. Go to ToolsTo Move Ideas.com to learn more. For more on Phoebe Bridgers, visit songexplotor.

You'll find links to buy or stream Scott Street, and you can watch the music video for it. Song Exploder is made by me, Rishi Kesh Your Way, with producer Christian Coons, production assistant Olivia Wood and illustrator Carlos Lerma. Tao Wyn was guest hosting the podcast in January 2019, and she interviewed Phoebe and Marshall. I'll be back next week with a brand new episode with Billy Elish, along with her brother and collaborator, Phineas.

Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of creative, independent podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at Radiotopia.fm. If you'd like to support the podcast, you can get a Song Exploder T-shirt at Song Exploexpl dot net slash shirt. You can also follow the show on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at Song Exploder.

Song Exploder is now also a TV series on Netflix. There are four episodes that you can watch now and four more episodes coming December 15th. Check it out at Netflix.com slash Song Exploder or just search for Song Exploder in your Netflix app. My name is Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.