Love Songs for a Haunted House
The rawness in your throat after crying all night.
The whir of airplanes that cross over your house at all hours, everyday.
The words sulking in the air between you and someone you love, never quite meeting either of your mouths.
How an empty house speaks in the middle of the night. Footsteps of people no longer there, the glow of blood spilled and bleached away.
How a ghost can feel like a warm hand in your hair. How haunting becomes intimate, private, blurs into a love story if you unfocus your eyes for long enough, if you go untouched and unwanted for long enough.
I write down these feelings, these sensations, these muddled echoes, when I listen to Phoebe Bridgers. I try to distill what I’m hearing, try to name the way her music bruises, crushes, lingers. I’m trying to tell you why I love her so much, because you asked, and I want you to know, to understand that to reduce women’s art to ‘sad girl music’ is patriarchy in an ironic costume, that there’s something more, something precious and thorny and immense about her music, about what she does. I write down these feelings and I feel like I’m seventeen all over again, discovering her for the first time, listening to Stranger in the Alps in my high school’s library, staring out the window at nothing, forgetting about my physics homework and the pen in my hand, forgetting about my anxiety pressing its knuckles against my throat. I want to tell you how that moment felt for me without overdoing it, without drenching the whole thing in hyperbole, making it ripe for your ridicule. I know it’s just an album, just a song, just music, and when you’re seventeen everything feels gigantic and each feeling seems to belong to you alone. I know the experience isn’t unique or particularly revolutionary. But I’m telling you anyways, because I want to, I need to.
Everyone knows the line by now: “I hate you for what you did / and I miss you like a little kid.” Everyone knows it, and feels the truth of it like a gash in the atmosphere, a quick punch to the stomach. It’s such a simple lyric, such a straightforward way to open a song and an album, and yet. And yet, the precision of the words hurt in a way you don’t expect them to, not on “Motion Sickness,” the fastest, most rock-y and relatively ‘upbeat’ song on Stranger. But you find yourself repeating that line, humming it, clinging to it. Because, yes, exactly: I hate you for what you did, and I still, still, still miss you, just like a little kid. Phoebe is a witch, I think, because these are wounds that everyone knows intimately, and yet we struggle to find an easy way to describe specifically what the composition of those cuts are. She does it, and it’s so easy, and clever, and brutal. So maybe there’s nothing simple about it.
I was blue: I was gray: I was a sheet of ice, melting for a moment, before freezing into my most comfortable state yet again. I was always returning to that place of fear, of abstract desire and amorphous ache and locking myself away. I was reading Bluets back then because I was obsessed with Maggie Nelson, and fragmentation, because I was indulging in blueness in all forms: “Can a reflection be a witness?” She asks. That her friend suggests we “sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.” Every time I turned on Stranger, I opened a mirror, felt its flood of secrets gather and rise between my palms, cracked glass in my mouth, shards of blue language in my skin. I felt witnessed in my despair; I felt that the songs were obsessed with witnessing-the-blue, with breaking loneliness open and trying to see through the vein, to get to the other side.
For a while, I loved “Chelsea” most of all: “For a chemical imbalance, you sure know how to ride a train / Your revolution is a deathbed, and the music is your maid.” I loved the way her voice seemed to soften and sweeten, how you entered the space —blue, sacred—so completely, listening.
You feel like a ghost, listening to Stranger in the Alps. A shadow or a reflection or some in-between creature that amalgamates from grief, love, loneliness, and follows, haunts, Phoebe, or her narrator, around. You feel unreal and yet attached to a beating heart, somehow, but maybe only by a thread, an umbilical sort of closeness. It’s not ‘sad girl music.’ It’s a haunted house and isn’t every haunted house also a place where we tried to love each other, to see each other, to make things okay, even if okay never quite arrived. Nostalgia tastes indistinguishable from loss. Grasps for love are smoke signals, are “hatchets coming up lavender,” dead matter reverberating in green and purple bundles of tenderness. I would listen and think, yes, Phoebe, I do want to “stay at a Holiday Inn where somebody else makes the bed;” I do want to relinquish control over my own desperate hulking body, my screaming clumsy heart. The irony of the ghost being that you cannot breathe, but not-breathing maybe feels as close to a full breath as you can ever get. You get to let go of yourself even as you trail your old self around.
Where does love go? When we stop witnessing it? Stranger in the Alps keeps returning: to the cold spot in the wall that we brush our hands over in the middle of the night, to the Silverlake reservoir, to the Chelsea hotel and all its flickering, decadent memories. We think we’re uniquely terrible; we think we’re killers, all of us, scaring ourselves with our own intimacy with rot.
I think of “Scott Street” now. Of running into someone you used to know, used to love, used to break yourself against and over, and now, you see someone entirely different. You see an image of an image; a palimpsest of everything you used to yearn for all the time. Another piece from Bluets that I used to constantly think about: “Perhaps it is becoming clearer why I felt no romance when you told me that you carried my last letter with you, everywhere you went, for months on end, unopened. This may have served some purpose for you, but whatever it was, surely it bore little resemblance to mine. I never aimed to give you a talisman, an empty vessel to flood with whatever longing, dread, or sorrow happened to be the day's mood. I wrote it because I had something to say to you.”
I wrote it because I had something to say to you.
Not to be an empty vessel or a talisman. Not to make something you could carry around and do nothing with.
Once, I wrote an essay that seemed to be about orchids, but was actually about a boy. I wrote it to him, but felt the need to disguise its every ugly, wailing need or wound in something-anything-else, in floral imagery. I could never just say things outright. He read it, I found out later, but I also realized that he didn’t quite understand it. How could he, really?
I didn’t feel these things so I could have a story, I thought. I wrote the story because I felt things. I was just trying to talk to you. I’m always trying to say things to people without saying them, and it’s not the best strategy, but I wanted them to put the ashes together, offer myself up without having to claim my own needs, my own wanting. I wanted, still want, to communicate without having to actually risk anything, and so writing can become the way to deny myself the right to plain human desire, can lend me plausible deniability about the fact—inexorable—that I want, that I need, that I feel anything at all.
Phoebe writes about people—often, men—who seem to want to fossilize her and her sadness into, uncannily, their own reservoir of feeling, one that they can return to whenever they want. They want her to be a fixture of the past, a remnant, a green light, a shard of washed-up sea-glass. They want her to be not so much a muse as a ghost that belongs to their language, to their stories—but what I love so much about Stranger is how there’s never a one-sided haunting. It’s smarter than that. It’s more nuanced than that.
“Scared yourself by talking about Dahmer on your couch.”
Back then, “Killer” crawled into my spine and nestled there, stinging, discomforting. I’m serious: that song fucked with me, unnerved me even as I adored it, even as I felt myself identifying so strongly with its sentiments that I could barely admit it aloud. “Hungry for blood / stupid in love”: that parallel, pieced together in a tender voice, with soft seemingly romantic instrumentals, described me most of the time. Or rather what I felt I would be, given the chance, if I allowed myself to inhabit my hunger, to indulge my appetite for anything at all—I kept it smothered and confined, quieted each longing down, told myself that gushy things like love and romance were not for someone like me, weren’t mine to ever experience. I denied that I wanted any of it, vehemently, to myself, always. I didn’t want to want anyone. I didn’t want to ask for someone to want me back; that request felt like the most selfish, ridiculous question I could ever ask. How could I be so entitled to think I even held a kernel of anything lovable in me? How could I ask someone to look for it? Tend to it? Believe in it?
Admitting I wanted love felt akin to confessing I’d murdered someone. Ridiculous, but true. I felt uniquely terrible. Uniquely unforgivable for—what? Existing, mostly. Wanting anything at all. I felt like a killer and sometimes like a bloated stinking corpse and to hear that song nudged me into a corner, where I had to actually recognize that feeling, identify it, locate its pressure point, try to start to unravel its ligaments.
“And I have this dream where I’m screaming underwater / And my friends are all waving from the shore”
No one quite hears you. Words emerge from your mouth and float away, dust, only made visible in a particular arrangement of afternoon light. The sun has to face the right way at the right angle or they’ll never come out of their hiding place. What you work up the nerve to say—the words just flutter around like irritated moths, and the sentences never come out right.
But the truth is: if someone did hear you, you’d turn and run.
Stranger in the Alps also touches upon breathing a lot:
“When I think too much about it I can’t breathe”
“And I laughed until I couldn’t breathe”
Did you know: you can forget how to breathe. It’s a condition called ‘central hyperventilation syndrome,’ like sleep apnea but more extreme: those affected completely stop breathing while asleep. I prefer the colloquial name, though: Ondine’s curse. A reference to an early European myth, in which Ondine, a water-sprite, tells her future husband, ‘I shall be the shoes of your feet ... I shall be the breath of your lungs.’ She makes a pact with her uncle, a king, that if her husband ever deceives her, he shall die.
In summary: devotion. Unequivocal, unwavering. A hunger to not simply be someone’s only lover but to be their only everything, the thrum of their blood and the tremor of their heart, their ribs expanding and contracting, lungs incensed with wanting. How such a conception of love can be, ultimately, lethal, can ask far too much to be a sustainable bonding.
Ondine’s husband does deceive her, though. He cheats on her with his former beloved and she leaves him, only to be caught by a fisherman. When she finally meets her husband again, at his wedding to his new love, he kisses Ondine and he dies.
What happens when someone takes up all the space in you, every room, every dark squirmy corner, when they are the lights flickering overhead and the water rushing from the sink. What happens when you forget what you are without them. When you cease to carry on when they leave, when their absence doesn’t only hurt; it debilitates.
Explaining why she covered “You Missed My Heart” on Stranger, Bridgers said, It’s an extra level, I have to get inside it.
That’s what I’m trying here, what lurches in me when I write about music. When I listen to a song so much I begin to dream its lyrics, subconscious obsessions coagulating into a weird, murky soup. I wake up with the shape of the words in my mouth, metallic. Nothing else can get in while the music clangs on. With these songs, with Phoebe, it’s not enough to just listen. I need to climb in, look around, get inside it.
I hate the way music made by women is always reduced to autobiography, to pure diary entry, emptying it of all creativity, narrative experimentation, expansiveness. I also think it’s hilarious, because how can you ever read any music as being a diary entry? The music starts to transubstantiate the second it’s released into the world. I don’t know Phoebe. I don’t know what her songs are really about to her, but that’s not the point. Nothing belongs to me; I listen and appreciate and extract, the listener is the interpreter, the translator, and the artist has done their job, has created a secret language they have no obligation to explicate. The death of the songwriter is never so easily surrendered—I listen to Taylor Swift, so, I know how obsessively fun it can be to try and untangle someone through their lyrics—but what I mean, ultimately, is that my Stranger in the Alps is infinitely different from yours. From anyone’s.
Calluses overtook my fingertips, learning guitar, learning Stranger in the Alps—all of it, after only half-heartedly playing the ukulele for a few years. I tore my hands apart trying to play each song, attempting to conjure that familiar blueness, that blue ink, as Nelson calls it, trying to piece together water, which, ultimately, all words are made of.
It’s embarrassing to say that sometimes you need to sing yourself lullabies, but you do. You can only stay holding hands with a ghost for so long. You have to, at some point, start to flicker awake. Yes, loneliness can anchor you to yourself, can be a mother, but so too can vulnerability, the raw boldness of it, outstretched, openly given to the world. I didn’t know that yet, didn’t know to even hear that piece in Phoebe’s songs, but now I do. Now I hear the attentiveness of “Smoke Signals” as a love letter and a ghost story; I hear her voice differently.
When I met you, a blue rush began.
When I listen to Phoebe: a blue rush, warm and cold simultaneously, humming in my throat and blood. Prying open my heart and telling me to try to remember its insistent beating, to know that fear is not the only thing. That to risk your precious, sacrosanct loneliness is sometimes actually very much worth the terror.
