Boygenius, the supergroup based on being friends

As they release their debut album, The Record, the indie supergroup Boygenius reflect on their friendship and how they stay grounded

Earlier this year, Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus signed up for a run of group therapy. The year ahead was freighted with the debut album release by their band Boygenius and extensive touring, so it seemed wise to guard against the dangers that had undone so many other bands before them. “Prophylactic therapy,” as Baker calls it. As solo artists, Baker (27), Bridgers (28) and Dacus (27) inspire a level of devotion that borders on zealotry. They are queer-identifying, vocal about issues from abortion to trans rights to colonialism, while their smart, introspective and somewhat melancholic songwriting has handed each of them the peculiar charge of articulating the feelings of a generation.

As Boygenius, the “supergroup” they formed in 2018, the intensity of adoration has only magnified. Perhaps not since Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt united for 1987’s Trio has a collaboration incited such anticipation. The expectation around their debut album, The Record, has been fevered. “I want people to like it because we like it,” says Dacus, sitting beside her bandmates in a photo studio in lower Manhattan.

Back in January, the band chose a therapist who might help them navigate the strange combination of gratitude and anger they have developed towards fame, the infringement of boundaries and the sense of constant surveillance. They also wanted someone who might help protect their friendship as it becomes something more like a job.

“My favourite thing about this band is that it’s a respite for me,” says Baker. “My real-life friendships with you both are among the dearest relationships in my life,” she tells Dacus and Bridgers. “I was super-anxious there wouldn’t be time to cultivate our friendship. I was precious and protective of it.”

But to spend time in Boygenius’s company is to be constantly reminded of the intimacy between them. In their first session, the therapist told the trio she liked to get to know her clients through the eyes of those who already love them, asking that they describe the traits they appreciated in one another. “Phoebe and I looked at each other,” says Dacus, sliding her eyes to Bridgers again now, “and immediately started crying.”

Boygenius began with Dacus and Baker. In 2016, sharing the bill in Washington DC, Baker came backstage and found Dacus reading Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. They fell into conversation quickly, ranging from reading to religion, to their shared experience of growing up in the American south (Dacus in Virginia, Baker in Tennessee). When they parted, Dacus tore a blank page out of her book and wrote down her email address.

What followed was an epistolary friendship and a roving book club. Both were in their early 20s, touring their debut albums, feeling the strange isolation of their position. Baker then suggested Dacus meet Los Angeles-born Bridgers – another friend going through the same thing. The email book club widened to three, and still stands today. On her bookshelves in LA, Bridgers keeps a “Lucy section”.

When they were booked for a triple-bill tour in late 2018,

they decided to record a single to sell on the merchandise table. It was the first time they had all been in the same room, but over a handful of days they turned out six songs. The idea of becoming a band took shape. They called themselves Boygenius – a nod to how often male egotism is recast as creative brilliance – and released their self-titled EP that October.

The trio refocused on their solo careers. Baker and Dacus released their respective third albums to great acclaim; Bridgers became a near-household name through her successful second record and a relationship with Irish actor Paul Mescal. (They are said to have split, but I am warned not to ask questions about the band’s personal lives – a press officer and management hover during our interview.)

Throughout, the three stayed in touch. “What we talk about the most is the shitty parts of this amazing thing that we get to do, we get to not feel isolated,” Bridgers says. “Or ungrateful,” Dacus adds.

Bridgers nods. “I’m the most grateful I’ve ever been. And my anger at the ways that fame is set up has only made me more grateful to be able to articulate those things .”

All have spoken previously about invasions of privacy, secretly being filmed or photographed in public. “I think the imperative thing is [people liking us] with distance and respect,” Bridgers says. “There are sinister manifestations of it, but loving something that somebody made is cool and I feel grateful that people care. Shit that lights a fire in you is the stuff of life.”

They all remember being teenage fans screaming at Broken Social Scene shows, and nerding out over Elliott Smith; they understand the excitement their band inspires. “Honestly, we are our own biggest fans,” says Dacus. “So I can relate to people who like Boygenius because I do, too.”

During their respective last solo album press cycles, they batted back questions about whether Boygenius would ever record again. In secret, they were saving up lyrics that seemed to belong only to their band. During quarantine, the three began sharing tunes. “Phoebe sent us a song and then I was like, ‘Holy shit, this fucking rocks,’ and she was like, ‘We could be a band again …’” says Baker.

At two in-person writing sessions, they each brought songs that they had struggled to complete alone: Bridgers had a memorable lyric about kicking someone’s teeth in. “That was one of my darlings that I hadn’t killed. It’s nice to try to shake something loose that you’ve tried very laboriously to fit into your solo shit.”

“I love figuring out y’all’s puzzles,” says Dacus. “It’s knowing which thing is better and closer, and not being satisfied until it communicates the feeling we’re going for.”

Bridgers’ mind works differently, Dacus notes. “I’ll write a whole song and she’ll be like: ‘Change this one word.’ And it does something.” In the song We’re in Love, she had written about a white carnation; Bridgers insisted she change it to pink “because of a Marty Robbins song where he gets left alone at the prom because his date ditches him. Also because Elliott Smith wanted to wear a pink carnation at the Oscars with his white suit, and they were like: ‘This flower looks stupid, take it off.’”

You can hear these conversations on The Record: there are songs that are distinctly Dacus or Bridgers or Baker, but skewed somehow – a punch that lands a little to the left, an arrestingly new image. They are sometimes funny – hanging Leonard Cohen out to dry for writing “horny poetry” – or defiant. “It’s a bad idea, and I’m all about it,” they sing on $20.

If there is a quality that marks all three songwriters, it is their frankness. As Boygenius, that trait is more pronounced than ever. “This project gets to be really earnest in a way that I think we each undercut in our solo shit a little bit,” Bridgers says, though Dacus makes the case that she’s always “pretty earnest” in her music.

Baker, though, agrees. Weary of the way that “the sincerity of the thing that you’re making then becomes the quality that people define it by”, she has found it liberating to perform with the band, rather than solo. “I can contribute something creative where the whole stakes aren’t on me and my decisions,” she says. “That’s freeing, and it enables you to be a little bit more earnest because you don’t feel so uncouth about it.”

Arguably the most earnest track on The Record is We’re in Love, a song Dacus wrote in tribute to her bandmates. Writing it was easy, she says, but making it proved hard. It felt exposing to speak so openly about what they had come to mean to her.

When she played it to them, Bridgers welled up. Baker recoiled.

“It was too earnest for me. Our friendship was so highstakes, so precious to me, that I couldn’t possibly go there in a performance context. I didn’t know if I could engage with it as music that I’m a part of singing and making.”

She “spiralled out about it” for a while before coming around to the idea. “I don’t know,” she says. “I’m a slow processor!”

It isn’t the only song that captures their bond. The track Leonard Cohen recalls the time they took a road trip in northern California, and Bridgers was so distracted by the urgency of playing Iron and Wine’s 2004 song The Trapeze Swinger to her bandmates that she took a wrong turn. Baker and Dacus were too polite to point this out until their journey had veered some way off course. “You felt like an idiot adding an hour to the drive,” the lyrics run. “But it gave us more time to embarrass ourselves, telling stories that we wouldn’t tell anyone else.”

The song ends like a love note – Dacus singing: “I never thought you’d happen to me.” It’s an earnest line in a funny song, one that reveals the appreciation these three songwriters have for one another: a way to get to know Boygenius through the eyes of those who already know and love them.

We’re our own biggest fans. I relate to people who like Boygenius because I do, too