In the world of the Softies, to crush is to live. Their songs are pop miniatures where the spectrum of human feeling seems to ripple outward from the bittersweet ache of liking a person so much that your mind is pulled obsessively in one direction, however momentarily. Maybe it is Rose Melberg and Jen Sbragia’s 30-year friendship and indelible, world-of-its-own musical chemistry—two plainspoken voices, two sparkling guitars, and space—that helps communicate that intimacy so effectively. From the initial notes of The Bed I Made, the Softies’ fourth album and first in 24 years, their harmonies have never glowed brighter, and it’s chilling. “I’m drifting at sea without you,” they sing in unison on “Go Back in Time.” But they’ve found their best anchor again.
The Softies are indie-pop legends. From the pre-internet era of fanzines and snail mail on, Melberg’s early California punk bands Tiger Trap and Go Sailor have become talismanic for lovers of DIY pop, earnest emotion, and scrappy minimalism. Tiger Trap started when Melberg was still in high school—her first onstage performance ever was an impromptu song during the legendary International Pop Underground Convention—releasing a sole 1993 LP on K Records and opening for the likes of Fugazi and Beat Happening. The endless succession of raw hooks on songs like “Puzzle Pieces” and “Super Crush” set the vulnerability and Everly Brothers wonder of Melberg’s future projects (and earned her major-label interest—maybe the same ones chasing Jawbreaker?—which the band declined). Sbragia, meanwhile, was a former metal guitarist and Tiger Trap fan who got to know Melberg through letters. Embracing simplicity and oddity, the Softies floated on jazzy chords and negative space that could be incandescent like the Marine Girls or coolly complex like Australia’s the Cat’s Miaow. Their entwined dynamic was so tightly woven that songs about their platonic friendship still sound like romance: “I can’t love you the way he does, I can only love you more,” Melberg sings to her bandmate on their 1995 debut, It’s Love.
The Bed I Made is a lovely introduction to their orbit. The Softies render teen-spirited drama with adult equanimity, just as they convey adult emotions with the possibilities and freedom of youth. “At this point in my life, I have experienced more loss,” Sbragia noted in a recent interview. “But crushes not working out is my favorite songwriting topic, apparently.” Emotional maturity shines through these twilight songs about smartly exiting doomed romantic situations rather than untangling them, about self-possession and having the conviction to speak your mind. “How could I know how to fall out of love?” Melberg sings in her angelic soprano on “I Said What I Said.” “You were kind and fair/You can’t fake feelings that aren’t there,” she reasons on “California Highway 99,” but she still gets away as fast as possible. The negative space of Softies songs has always made them feel viscerally sadder—as if representing the void of the dejection—but here it also makes tiny notes feel bigger and brighter, illuminating the moments when harmonies crash perfectly together in clarity and camaraderie.
In the years since the Softies’ last album, Melberg played in bands like Brave Irene and Knife Pleats, but also dug deeper into her work as a singer-songwriter—releasing incredible, open-hearted records like 2006’s Cast Away the Clouds and 2009’s Homemade Ship, which had more in common with the melodic finesse of the Softies’ one-time tourmate Elliott Smith than Bay Area punk. The candor of her voice and unvarnished language became elemental, its own indie-pop vernacular. Melberg always seems to speak the language of mixtapes, the kind you make with a message: pinpointing precise feelings and stating them so directly and unmistakably that it might feel a little scary. On these new Softies songs, the storytelling is often richer and more visual, too—pink skies and a rose garden serve as markers of time; an old house’s quirks become solid—even when the lyrics are spartan. “Headphones” captures the duo’s daydream essence with the brevity of a Yoko Ono Grapefruit instruction: “Plug your headphones/Straight into my heart/Listen/Listen/I love you.” Many of the songs are in fact about songs themselves, how “country radio reminded me that you and I weren’t meant to be,” or how “every song is just a sigh, a little moment going by, a puff of smoke, a waterfall, a long-distance call.” As ever, an indie-pop song amplifies shy speech, a link in the chain of communication among introverts.
The most beautiful thing about this spare, glimmering music is the assurance and comfort it conveys even when voicing unbearable feelings. The strummed mini-anthem “Tiny Flame” seems to focus microscopically on a relationship that never took flight, but it zooms out too, with guttural girl-group yearning. “It started with a tiny flame/And ended in tears/I hadn’t felt that way in years,” Sbragia sings longingly, anticipating the lingering blow of the rupture. “Baby, when you think of me/Don’t forget/We could have been something.” Those words cut deeper sung from adulthood. But, from the Softies’ wise vantage, there’s also greater strength in a new beginning. “Set a fire, let it burn, and start again,” Sbragia sings, and with help from a friend and a song, she does.
