Lucy Dacus, Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker on being a band before they were friends, music industry men behaving badly and Sinéad O’Connor’s ‘purity’
was released in 2018, but, much like Bridgers’s career, it took lockdown to become a phenomenon. They had no long-term plans for the project: each artist had a busy musical life. Still, journalists kept asking about Boygenius, and it became clear that fans wanted to hear them work together again.
So it’s a surprise to discover they weren’t particularly close before Boygenius. Bridgers contrasts their group with bands such as Radiohead, who grew up together and for whom music was an extension of their friendship. She, Baker and Dacus had run into each other on the road and decided it might be good to tour together. But they needed something to sell at the merchandise stall. They put together the Boygenius EP very quickly. They were a supergroup before they knew one another.
Dacus feels safer confronting hard themes when it’s in conversations with her bandmates, she says. “I guess that influences the music. The music feels like almost an offshoot of that happening – at night, after a meal.” They’ve all done their part. But Bridgers was one of the first to speak out about the treatment of women in the music industry when, in 2019, she contributed to a New York Times exposé headlined “”. When I spoke to her in 2020 she brought up the subject unprompted; I’d asked if she felt that people treated her differently since she had become famous, and she thought back to her early encounters with Adams.