Los Angeles singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers has been receiving widespread acclaim for her debut album Stranger in the Alps (Sep 2017): a collection of mostly downcast indie folk songs that showcased her distinctive vocal delivery, mature lyricism, and aptitude for crafting subtle, inward-looking moments of catharsis. After premiering the album’s first three singles ("Smoke Signals", "Motion Sickness", and "Funeral"), Bridgers recently released a music video for “Would You Rather”, one of the album’s more optimistic tracks.
Even then, the duet - with Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst - comes across like a faint silver lining around an ominously dark cloud. Bridgers delivers her typically morbid lines with her signature candidness and melancholic warmth, skillfully depicting a shared childhood that necessitated significant emotional resilience. The song title refers to a game where one discusses hypothetical means of suicide (‘You always say that you'd prefer to drown’). Bridgers poetically describes a troubled childhood (‘You were still in the ambulance/ When the cop suggested/ You're the one who tried to burn it down’) scarred by physical abuse by adults (‘I laid awake/ As someone shoved you up against a wall’).
The song’s chorus - which is shared between Bridgers and Oberst - delivers a casually haunting escape from this trauma: ‘I'm a can on a string, you're on the end/ We find our way out/ Of a suicide pact of our family and friends’. When Bridgers premiered the partly-animated music video for the song on The FADER, her brother Jackson Bridgers (who directed it) cast the song’s disturbing confessions in figurative light (while the song itself remains ambivalent about the extent of its literalness):
"This song beautifully shows that knowing someone means knowing all of their darkest and most gruesome childhood fears and nightmares, but friendship and time can turn those negative emotions into something useful. As we get older and grow as artists, I’m glad this friendship can manifest itself in new ways, even as the nightmares and fantasies of our childhood fade away”.
