“But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but it doesn’t really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to make you feel loved.” - Charlie Kaufman, “Synecdoche, New York”
There tends to be a lot of pressure around an artists’ sophomore release, but Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher is smooth and right on target. Her artistic growth as a musician and writer is palpable, and this collection of songs is anything but just another sad record. Produced by sound engineering wizard Ethan Gruska, there’s a subtlety about this record that allows Bridgers’ lyricism to stand at the foreground without severing it from the music. It’s the complete package and a stunning work. But what fascinates me the most is its apparent underlying theme: the many faces of longing.
Some of my favorite music, like much of my favorite art in general, refuses to provide a pat answer or even address a question head on. The gradient of spiritual and emotional experience often seems more like a bog than a current, and art that addresses such complexity seems to me to be the most honest and authentic. Thus, ideas and emotions that are difficult to articulate seem to be best explored through metaphor and narrative. There’s a sweet humility in surrendering our unknowns to the utter humanness of story. It puts us in our creaturely place.
And this is what Phoebe Bridgers does best. Despite her lyrical emphasis on details whose significance would only be most important to her (such as in “Garden Song”: “Off the bridge at the Huntington / I hopped the fence when I was seventeen”), one could hardly label the work as insular. These details transport us to the personal altars we’ve erected in our own lives. I have my own similar rebellious memories from my youth and they are instantly conjured by Phoebe’s, as are the emotional fragments that correspond (“Then I knew / what I wanted”). So did I. The nostalgia doesn’t feel forced but instead works as a vehicle for the existential disquietude that manifests itself most clearly in the second verse: “The screen turns into a tidal wave / Then it’s a dorm room / Like a hedge maze / And when I find you, you touch my leg / And I insist / But I wake up before we do it.” A lack of satisfaction rings through this song. So close to being overcome, but no cigar.
As the first full track on the album, “Garden Song” seems to do the emotional ground work for the rest. Here, we trace longing as being birthed by nostalgia, but Bridgers makes sure not to park it there. “Kyoto” and “Punisher” both wrestle with a sense of yearning within personal relationships: wanting consistency from a dysfunctional parental figure (“Kyoto”) and the desire to meet your hero while knowing that you’d probably disappoint them (“Punisher”).
In “Halloween”, however, Phoebe puts it pretty plainly- “Baby, it’s Halloween / And we can be anything / Oh, come on, man / We can be anything.” Which of us hasn’t felt the pull to start over: new name, new town, new year, new me? There’s a freeing anonymity behind the mask and a powerful sense of transience in the various options of a new face: “Sick of the questions I keep asking you / That make you live in the past / But I can count on you to tell me the truth / When you’ve been drinking and you’re wearing a mask.”
Yet, of the eleven songs, perhaps the chief testament to this theme of longing is “Chinese Satellite”, a piece that feels like a clear progression for Bridgers both lyrically and musically. Here, yearning takes the form of a sort of spiritual, universal desire for cosmic purpose in a disenchanted world: “Took a tour to see the stars / But they weren’t out tonight / So I wished hard on a Chinese satellite / I want to believe / Instead I look at the sky and I feel nothing / You know I hate to be alone / I want to be wrong.”
When mapping the tension between faith and doubt, its fairly easy to fall into two opposite extremes. The first, most common within the church, is a dismissal of both pillars as flimsy, as if faith had no robust dimensions and doubt should be simply swept away. The second, becoming more popular among the ‘ex-vangelical’ crowd, ventures into cruelty and not only mocks those who strive to pursue faith at all, but embraces a worldview entirely founded on skepticism and doubt as being the only reasonable approach. Both are a mistake and neither deal honestly with the stakes. I find “Chinese Satellite” refreshing because, though perhaps unintentionally, it evades these two typical pitfalls. Instead, this song is simply a cry for place within eternity, for transcendence, for anything more. Thus, Bridgers’ moves her search for meaning from a religious context to an extraterrestrial one. “I want to believe / That if I go outside I’ll see a tractor beam / Coming to take me to where I’m from / I want to go home.”
And so “I want to believe” becomes more of a potential X-Files reference and less something within the spirit of Mark 9:24.
But this shift doesn’t alter her core desire- in fact, it’s almost a predictable transference. The journal Motivation and Emotion published an article on the dimensions of extraterrestrial belief in 2017 titled “We Are Not Alone.” As Scientific American summarizes, “…North Dakota State University psychologist Clay Routledge and his colleagues found an inverse relation between religiosity and ETI beliefs. That is, those who report low levels of religious belief but high desire for meaning in life show greater belief in ETIs.” Makes sense. We have faith in things whether we reason through them or not. Kierkegaard might have had a point when he called faith absurd.
Before we go any further with “Chinese Satellite,” let’s go straight to the source. Asked by Apple Music as to the song’s meaning, Bridgers answered, “I have no faith — and that’s what it’s about. My friend Harry put it in the best way ever once. He was like, ‘Man, sometimes I just wish I could make the Jesus leap.’ But I can’t do it. I mean, I definitely have weird beliefs that come from nothing. I wasn’t raised religious. I do yoga and stuff. I think breathing is important. But that’s pretty much as far as it goes. I like to believe that ghosts and aliens exist, but I kind of doubt it. I love science — I think science is like the closest thing to that that you’ll get. If I’m being honest, this song is about turning 11 and not getting a letter from Hogwarts, just realizing that nobody’s going to save me from my life, nobody’s going to wake me up and be like, ‘Hey, just kidding. Actually, it’s really a lot more special than this, and you’re special.’ No, I’m going to be the way that I am forever. I mean, secretly, I am still waiting on that letter, which is also that part of the song, that I want someone to shake me awake in the middle of the night and be like, ‘Come with me. It’s actually totally different than you ever thought.’ That’d be sweet.”
If ever we succumb to nihilism, I believe we can never do so purely. There will always be something in us (the Image of God) calling out, like a mirror that is truly a mirror only when its reflecting something. Longing unquenchable despite our best attempts. It’s who we are.
Each song on Punisher is fed by this same vein: a thirst that manifests itself throughout our personhood, our relationships, our dreams, and our memory. There seems to be no limit to what these pangs encompass. Even in our best, most happy moments we sense that there is some zenith still unreached; that if we could just stretch a little more, grip a little tighter, savor a little stronger, we might truly attain it. The richness of good things pulls on us and the absence of things reminds us of their presence. Strange, but what else can we expect from a broken world within a glass darkly?
Author Marilynne Robinson beautifully explored this phenomena in her book Housekeeping. She writes, “To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing — the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, the very craving gives it back to us again.”
The final track “I Know The End” is a cinematic apocalypse that does indeed feel like a tornado chase. The first half is a soft resignation of loss and an attempt to accept an ending (“I know / I know / I know”) which transitions into a progressively rhythmic, Allen Ginsberg-esque diagnosis of the modern American’s existential plight (“A slaughterhouse, an outlet mall / Slot machines, fear of God”). Peaking with her blood-curdling cry above group vocals provided by her closest collaborators (not to mention the inclusion of a full brass band), the music is soon stripped away to reveal a desperately gasping Phoebe. But if the topography of longing that makes up this album tells us anything, it’s that perhaps Simone Weil in Gravity and Grace was right: “The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through. Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication…Every separation is a link.”
“Swore I could feel you through the walls,” Bridgers sings in “Chinese Satellite”, “But that’s impossible.”
Maybe not after all.