While indie singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers’ albums are relatively short, they can certainly pack a pretty good punch. I took it upon myself to rank the tracks of her sophomore album, Punisher.
The 11-track album came out in June of 2020 and was full of gut-wrenching songs from the at the time 25 year old. The album is full of heartfelt lyrics that are deeply personal to Bridgers and those around her.
An album such as Punisher is nearly impossible to rank as each track has deep meanings, and each is unique in its own way.
In my eleventh ranking and most others, “DVD Menu” is the unfortunate track to take last place. It’s a beautiful 1:09-long instrumental that opens up the album and transitions gracefully into the subsequent song. However, its lack of lyrics doesn’t help it much when compared to the other ten tracks featured.
Next in the low tenth place spot is the track “Halloween,” which Bridgers wrote with her dear friend Christian Lee Hutson. One of my favorite things about this song is the opening line in which Bridgers sings, “I hate living by the hospital,” which, in my opinion, ties to the song “Souvenir” by Boygenius.
This is a band Bridgers is in with her best friends, which came out two years prior and featured the lyrics “Always managed to move inright next to cemeteriesand never far from hospitals.”
I think it’s a nifty detail for Bridgers to include. It lets the listener in on her life, which she often does by telling her listeners personal details about her life. I believe it adds more personality to her songs.
This song is all about trying to get away from your past and “wearing a mask,” and I think it focuses a lot on how you don’t have to be your past and you can be “whatever you want,” which is the lyric frequently repeated through the duration of the song.
Moving on to 9th place is the title track, “Punisher,” which is, in my opinion, so complex yet so simple. This song uses the tool of fictional storytelling by detailing a fictional scenario in which Bridgers stalks and meets the singer Elliot Smith. The storyline of the song is one that “Bridgers created, which would be the archetype of an overly energetic fan, making their hero, in this case, Smith, feel trapped when they get to meet them.” Genius.com said in an analysis of the song.
Upon the first listen, I imagine it would be impossible to guess that this is the meaning behind the lyrics. I think it’s also nice to note that there is a lyric in which Bridgers talks about going to the store, and in between verses, a bell can be heard that is very similar to the bell that often goes off when you walk into a shop. Bridgers often packs her songs full of small details similar to this.
Number eight in this ranking also coincidently happens to be track eight, “Savior Complex,” which is masterfully written. This song is about being in a relationship where one of the partners has a Savior Complex.
This complex often entails seeking out someone who needs help and then assisting them, which on a surface level sounds helpful and kindhearted, but it can be damaging to the person experiencing it, and it can also lead to them using it as an excuse or an escape from their own problems. The song goes over scenarios such as fires, smoking, and bad dreams.
My favorite lyric from this song is in the chorus following the second verse, where Bridgers sings, “I’m a bad liar with a savior complex, all the skeletons you hide show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.”
“(The song has) a calming but melancholy melody, completed with Phoebe’s haunting voice over the top, and there isn’t one clear, specific meaning,” said Maya Lacy, an avid Phoebe Bridgers fan. “They’re up for interpretation depending on who is listening to the song and what they’re feeling at the time.”
My seventh favorite song from the album is “Garden Song,” which is the song “DVD Menu” transitions to. In an interview with Zane Lowe, Bridgers said this song is about “reoccurring nightmares [she has] on tour.”
She also ties in lyrics to her personal life, such as the line “when your skinhead neighbor goes missing, I’ll plant a garden in the yard” which she said is about when she “had a crush on someone who lives next to a nazi and used to joke about just killing him and burying him in the garden.” which I think is just so fascinating how she tells a story throughout the song about her past and these nightmares she has.
The next track, in sixth place, is “Graceland Too,” which is about her friends Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, who are her bandmates in the earlier-mentioned band Boygenius. At its core, “Graceland Too” is a love song, and Bridgers even describes it so dearly as being “about caring for somebody who hates themselves and how that can be really hard,” which is something she has experienced in her own life.
Bridgers has such a way of putting hard moments in life into a beautifully constructed song, and I think this is one of the best examples of that. Baker and Dacus are featured in this song, as well as background vocals, and somehow, that makes the song that much deeper. “Graceland Too” is a highly popular song among Phabz, the name for Bridgers’ fans.
“I love how it says, ‘said she knows she lived through it to get to this moment’ because to get anywhere in life, you have to get through the hard things, even if you only do that to get to more hard things, which relates to my life a lot at the moment.” Paige Stranahan said.
Finally getting into the top five is the closing track of the album “I Know the End,” which is one of my absolute favorite album closers ever. It’s a very apocalyptic song about the end of the world and the varying signs and things leading up to it. One of the most unique things about this particular song is the wide number of Wizard of Oz references made throughout, such as nods to Dorthy’s ruby slippers and the tornado.
This song also has an absolutely incredible closing verse tying the whole thing together in which she speedily recites in a sort of list form modern things causing the world to end in this doomsday scenario and how she’ll start a new life in the lyrics “I’ll find a new place to be from… no, I’m not afraid to disappear” and she uses this sort of billboard metaphor to signal the true end as if it’s the last thing she sees on the way out.
Bridgers closes this song with a long and almost painfully agonizing scream and then a breathy exasperated repetition of the line “the end is here,” but the final repeat stops before she gets to the here portion, which is poetic in its own way. This closing has also stricken quite the controversy in the past when Bridgers performed it on Saturday Night Live and smashed her guitar while screaming, upsetting a large number of music fanatics.
In the spot for fourth is the song “ICU,” which is a clever play on how the title sounds and is genuinely the phrase “I see you.” It went through many changes between the two due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the fact that it may be an issue, but eventually landed on the original.
This song is about her ex-boyfriend and drummer in her band, Marshall Vore, making it quite interesting to play live. The drums are also uniquely incorporated into this song, most specifically in the lines “I used to light you up, now I can’t even get you to play the drums,” and then, the listener can hear the drums immediately cut out for a split second before the next line picks up when they were very heavy in the previous lines.
Bridgers often does this, incorporating the lyrics she sings with the instruments playing them, making them heavily contribute to the story she is telling and the emotions she means to portray.
My third favorite from this album is the track “Kyoto,” which is all about her awfully complicated relationship with her father.
For such an upbeat song, it is chalked full of heartbreaking lyrics where she goes over the ways her father has treated her in the past and how she doesn’t forgive him for everything, but she then begs him not to “hold [her] to it.”
One of my favorite things about this song is how Bridgers spends the majority of it going back and forth about how she actually feels in reference to her father, and she’s never totally sure if she hates him or not.
My second favorite song is undoubtedly “Moon Song,” which is possibly the most beautiful and deepest song I have ever listened to. This is a song about doing anything you can for someone you love, such as giving them the moon. Throughout the song, you can sort of tell that whoever Bridgers is singing about doesn’t necessarily reciprocate the feelings, at least not to the same extent.
In this song, she uses the metaphor of a dog at the door with a bird in its mouth and how when a dog does that, it typically gets scolded for the action by its wonder, even though it is meant as a loving gesture on the dog’s end.
This metaphor shows up twice in the song, in the beginning as “So I will wait for the next time you want me, like a dog with a bird at your door” and at the end as “When you saw the dead little bird, you started crying but you know the killer doesn’t understand.”
Bridgers talks about the “wanting-to-be-stepped-on feeling”: wanting someone to treat you badly because at least they’ll treat you at all,” and she goes through this in other songs in the album as well.
“The message is gut-wrenching, and it reflects on doing everything you can to win someone over, but it can never work. Its sorrowful lyrics mixed with the instrumentals create a song that leaves a pit in my stomach but in a good way,” Ella Clark said.
Now, my favorite song on this album is “Chinese Satellite,” which is about Bridgers’ issue of believing in God. I think she takes a really poetic take on this matter by referring to God in a way in the choruses as Chinese satellites and tractor beams because she simply can’t see him and bring herself to believe even though she desperately wants to.
She even goes as far as to say, “you know I’d stand on the corner embarrassed with a picket sign if it meant I would see you when I die,” as if she’s talking to God.
I just find the song so interesting as we listen to Bridgers grapple with this issue of self.
Punisher is an album so near and dear to my heart and insanely difficult to rank, but at the end of the day, each song is different from the last and means a completely different thing, giving the album a wide range and a chance for a favorite in any category.
