Throwaway Style is a monthly column dedicated to spotlighting the artists of the Pacific Northwest music scene through the age-old practice of longform feature writing. Whether it’s an influential (or overlooked) band or solo artist from the past, someone currently making waves in their community (or someone overlooked making great music under everybody’s nose), or a brand new act poised to bring the scene into the future; this space celebrates the community of musicians that makes the Pacific Northwest one of a kind, every month from KEXP.
This month, legendary indie-pop duo the Softies sit down for a career-spanning interview—going over each of their full-length albums, the one year (out of 30) they spent living in the same city, and the long break that preceded their 2024 comeback album, The Bed I Made.
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I try my best not to toss around the terms “legend” and “royalty” willy-nilly, but if there is a band in the storied history of indie-pop that have earned the right to be assigned those honorifics, it’s the Softies. Not only did the duo—originally formed in Northern California—set a new template for what could be achieved artistically in the much celebrated (and equally maligned) subgenre, but they are also veterans of the scene outside of their beloved two-piece. Portland’s Jen Sbragia (guitar/vocals) is also notably a member of All Girl Summer Fun Band, while Rose Melberg (also on guitar and vocals)—a longtime British Columbia resident—has been in too many bands to list here and has notched four solo releases onto her already-dizzying resume.
It has been opined—most recently in a feature on the Softies written by veteran music journalist and Rolling Stone mainstay Rob Sheffield—that Melberg was the catalyst, the patient zero, for the contemporary subgenre known as “sad girl indie.” Your mileage may vary on that style of music (it should be noted that “sad girl indie” began as a decidedly pejorative indicator), but there’s hardly any denying Melberg’s bonafides in being a pioneer there.
Rose Melberg’s charmed life as an indie-pop icon actually began here in the Pacific Northwest, where in the summer of 1991, she traveled from her childhood home of Sacramento to attend the vaunted International Pop Underground Convention (IPUC) in Olympia. The first night of the five-day extravaganza—organized largely by K Records co-owners Calvin Johnson and Candice Pedersen—was a bill at the Capitol Theater unofficially dubbed “Girl Night,” a woman-centered, volunteer-promoted showcase that has reached “you had to be there” supershow proportions. A 19-year-old Melberg performed in front of a live audience for the first time that night. (She told long-running indie-pop zine Chickfactor that she could barely contain her nerves.)
Not long after her return to Northern California, Melberg linked up with a pal from high school, Angela Loy, and formed Tiger Trap alongside Heather Dunn and Jen Braun. Tiger Trap, the name Melberg performed under—originally intended for IPUC as a duo but the singer/guitarist ultimately had to take the trip and play the gig solo—was derived from the inaugural strip of the all-time great comic series/existentialist masterpiece Calvin and Hobbes. (A common note of misinformation states the band was named after the Beat Happening song, the opening track of their sweeping fifth album You Turn Me On.) After a smattering of singles for seven-inch releases and assorted compilations—including a great split single with Bratmobile—Tiger Trap released their magnificent self-titled LP in 1993.
As long overdue as an in-depth, feature-length essay on Tiger Trap is, as sorely as it’s needed in the world, I’ll try to keep this as contained as possible, since we have enough ground to cover as it is with the Softies: At twelve tracks and clocking in at a neat half-hour, Tiger Trap is as perfect an American twee-punk album as ever gotten—and is perhaps the most sterling example of the microgenre since the band’s spiritual predecessor, Talulah Gosh, roamed the rainy high streets of Oxford, England. The album was produced by Calvin Johnson, recorded at Seattle’s Avast! Studios, and released by K Records, the gold standard of indie-pop in the ‘80s and early-’90s.
A lot of adjectives—cleverly used to undermine the efforts of women who have the audacity to pick up guitars and appeal to themselves—have been levied on this band, most of them in the form of backhanded compliments, to describe Tiger Trap. Cutesy. Naive. Girlish. Songs like “Puzzle Pieces,” “Words and Smiles,” and eternal mixtape staple “Super Crush” capture the adrenaline-and-dopamine-spiked feeling of being smitten by someone you find to be a cutie; an emotion every single person in the world has experienced whether they’d admit it or not.
Crushes, jealousy, and heartbreak makes for pretty universal musical territory—especially for a band of barely-twentysomethings. Sure, it was a counterpoint to the revolutionary gender politics of the burgeoning riot grrrl movement (that sprung into action literally the same time as Tiger Trap), but a worthy counterpoint. Just because Tiger Trap weren’t on the radical end of the feminist spectrum doesn’t mean they weren’t speaking to a resonant, lived-in human experience.
Melberg first met Jen Sbragia at a Tiger Trap show. Says Sbragia, “I just approached Rose because I knew there was a possibility in this genre and in this scene, which was refreshing for me because I had previously liked metal bands and big [rock] bands.” Much has been made about the wave of woman-led and all-woman punk/alternative bands in the early-1990s, which inspired and empowered an entire generation to make music their way. Tiger Trap, by virtue of being the toast of the DIY scene, provided this empowerment on a purely grassroots level. Melberg notes she met Sbragia at a time when, of all the members of Tiger Trap, she received the least attention from the band’s passionate fanbase.
“You know,” says Melberg, “Heather, the drummer, was dynamic and exciting and everybody wanted to talk to [her]. And Angie was a great guitar player and super hot. Jen [Braun] had that rock and roll vibe. But I kind of felt like not everybody wanted to come up and talk to me. And Jen [Sbragia] really seemed like she was zoning in on me.”
Melberg mentions that it meant a lot to her at that particular moment, because Sbragia seemed like a very nice and really cool person who was interested in being her friend—which she needed more of at the time, “more and better friends.” Sbragia underscores this point by inferring that she wanted to brag a little about knowing Rose Melberg, which, over three decades later, feels prescient considering the “cult icon” status Melberg has cultivated for herself. Especially when taking into consideration that, back when she was the 20-year-old singer/guitarist for Tiger Trap, she evaluated herself as being “at the bottom of the hierarchy of cool.”
After a few more shortform releases—the Sour Grass EP, another split single with another great band (Albuquerque indie-pop noisemakers Henry’s Dress) and a few more singles and compilation appearances—Tiger Trap broke up, rather acrimoniously at that. “The end of Tiger Trap, it was [brought on by] many things,” says Melberg. “Tiger Trap got a lot of attention pretty quickly, and we were not really prepared—or we didn’t have the resources emotionally—to deal with that kind of attention and [those] expectations.”
Tiger Trap absolutely suffered from the circumstance known commonly as “too much, too soon.” Over the years, Melberg has mentioned to other press outlets that Tiger Trap started getting interest from major labels, and the Los Angeles Times reported in 1994 that the band’s self-titled debut had sold over 10,000 copies—a stratospheric number for an indie in the pre-internet days; especially for a label like K, which was large in influence but comparatively small in terms of infrastructure. But formal success didn’t alleviate tension in the band; if anything, its skyrocketing popularity probably exacerbated the problems.
In the midst of what Melberg describes as “explosive” conflicts, she mentions that the members of the band were very young and weren’t equipped to accommodate the other members’ emotional needs. “I mean, this was 1993,” she says. “We were not as cultured; we didn’t have the self-help memes that we have now that teach us how to regulate our emotions. Therapy wasn’t normalized.”
Decades on, there’s a noticeable sadness in Melberg’s voice when speaking on the dissolution of Tiger Trap. She describes the quartet as her dream band, one she took a lot of effort to assemble. The latter weeks of Tiger Trap’s existence left Melberg feeling miserable, and she felt the band was unsustainable. Breaking up the band was an act of self-preservation. And thankfully, Melberg’s friendship with Sbragia began to blossom shortly after that, as Sbragia reached out to Melberg after hearing Tiger Trap broke up. Little did either of them know at the time that they would embark on both a lifelong friendship and a creative partnership that would last decades.
At the time of Tiger Trap’s breakup, Sbragia was publishing a zine (which Melberg read) and played guitar in a two-piece band called Pretty Face. “I had just started playing guitar after many years not playing guitar,” says Sbragia. “Rose was supportive of me starting this band, and then, [her and I] got together for the first time, just pulling out guitars. It just seemed like a normal thing to do while hanging out with each other.”
According to Sbragia, Melberg had a few songs “in the wings.” A couple of them were Tiger Trap tunes that never made it to the recording stage, others written shortly after the band’s disintegration. Melberg joins in, saying, “That’s what you do when you make a new friend. The first thing you do is dip your toe into the water: ‘Can we make music together?’ That’s what you did back then [as a musician]. Everything was a possible [opportunity to form a] band. What else are you going to do when you hang out other than play music?”
The other thing you do is listen to records, which Melberg points out immediately after. Sbragia speaks wistfully of those early days before the Softies were an honest-to-goodness band, sailing in a sea awash with red wine and the music from seven-inch singles alongside their guitars. “I didn’t bring anything to the table as far as music influences,” Sbragia says. “I liked a smattering of riot grrrl bands and Green Day. I didn’t really know a whole lot about cool music, really. But I was ready to learn.”
That was the moment in our conversation when Melberg asked Sbragia, “Do you remember hearing Marine Girls for the first time?”
Of all the bands in the vast lineage of indie-pop, the easiest to draw a line between (while still retaining the same level of individuality and quality) are the Softies and Marine Girls. Early adopters of the DIY pop movement, Marine Girls developed a singular sound—alluring in a decidedly homespun way, like a cross-stitch piece you can’t help but hang in your doorway—and arguably created the template the Softies would perfect over a decade later and into the 21st Century. It also created a star in singer/guitarist Tracey Thorn, who became a generational touchstone with Everything But the Girl (and later, sketched out a successful writing career). Again, as much as I would love to go deep into their albums Lazy Ways and Beach Party, I’m almost 2000 words into this Softies feature—so instead I will humbly direct you to Janice Headley’s great episode on Marine Girls for our podcast series The Cobain 50.
Melberg shares that a friend of hers from Portland named Phil put Lazy Ways, Beach Party, and Thorn’s 1982 solo EP A Distant Shore on a tape for her at the end of a Tiger Trap tour, which created a fondness that would later develop into inspiration.
While developing her post-Tiger Trap songwriting style under the influence of Marine Girls, Calvin Johnson made her a mixtape full of songs by Cambridge, England twee-punks Dolly Mixture, and she was awash with ideas that could take her into the next phase of her life as a songwriter. “So, I was like, ‘Shit, maybe I could be in a band that sounds different and not have any rules,’” says Melberg. “And that’s what the Softies were like. Can you be in a band with two people? Of course you could; there were Kicking Giant and Heavens to Betsy. It never felt weird to call ourselves a band or consider what we were doing [anything less than] totally valid. The environment at the time was extremely supportive of do[ing] whatever you want.”
A light layer of melancholy coats It’s Love, but I would not necessarily call it a “sad” album. That’s mainly because no matter the depth of heartbreak and resentment and souvenirs of love lost, Melberg and Sbragia’s lyrics are always wrapped in pretty, sunny major chords and vocal harmonies as shiny and fragile as thin gold bracelets lightly kissing a tiny wrist.
“It’s Love really started coming together in Portland,” says Melberg. Both she and Sbragia moved there in 1994. She adds, “Those early Portland days, we just sat around the house and drank coffee and wrote music all the time.”
Before moving to Portland, Melberg rented her childhood home from her parents, who had moved to the Sacramento suburbs. Her friends still lived there, so she and Sbragia went down to California, set up in the dining room, and recorded their debut full-length with Dustin Reske from the shoegaze-leaning pop band Rocketship. It was pretty surreal for Melberg to record in the home she grew up in. “I had a million memories of family stuff in that dining room,” she says.
From donning precipitation-soaked jackets and putting damp moving boxes in the trunk on “Hello Rain” to waiting for someone who never comes on “Perfect Afternoon,” It’s Love carved a new lane in the American indie-pop scene that scores of bands in the exploding twee movement followed. Two singers, two electric guitars. No rhythm section? No problem! Songs like “Heart Condition” and the album’s title track coast like taking a sailboat downriver; “This House” can flood tear ducts without its singers having to utter a word. There’s even an indelible cover of Talulah Gosh’s “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction (Thank God),” just in case you have doubts as to the scene the Softies are a part of.
“I would push Jen to the edges of what I thought was possible,” Melberg says of recording It’s Love. “[As far as] her doing things she hadn’t done with harmonies and stuff like that. I always knew she could do it, but there was a learning curve because what we were doing was pretty new to us.” Melberg had concerns that she was pushing Sbragia too hard—especially after reading an excerpt from the journal she had brought along—but felt a reward in the joy her friend would express when she nailed a take.
Sbragia says, “It was hard to sing in front of Dustin because I loved Rocketship and I had no vocal training.” She remembers the initial struggle of getting it right and ultimately deciding, “Who cares?” I would definitely concur with the opinion that indie-pop is more about the emotion of the song than making sure the vocal takes or guitar parts achieve some sort of perfection. Melberg speaks fondly of Sbragia finding her “superpower” of being able to sing one melody and play a different melody on guitar, which takes the kind of dexterity an enormous percentage of singer/guitarists frankly don’t have.
The trilogy of Softies full-lengths that marked their first period of activity were released on K Records; arguably the flagship beacon for the American indie-pop scene. (The band also put out a self-titled EP on Slumberland, perhaps the only U.S. label that historically rivals K in DIY pop relevancy.) Between 1985 and 1995, it’s tough to argue that there wasn’t a better platform for a band like the Softies. Of course, label founder Calvin Johnson has been K’s figurehead since he started the label in 1982, but Melberg makes sure to give props to Candice Pedersen, who was an equal partner alongside Johnson in the ownership of K from 1989-1999.
In fact, Melberg notes she started ordering K releases from the label’s catalog, coincidentally, around the same time Pedersen (who initially worked as a “paid intern” for K) acquired an ownership stake. She became a Beat Happening fan through their split EP with Screaming Trees and the inclusion of their song “Pajama Party in a Haunted Hive” on the celebrated Sub Pop 200 compilation. “And then, I started ordering stuff from [K] and anything I bought, I would write fan mail to any band I loved. I just wanted to make connections in that community. I just felt like an outsider in Sacramento [while] growing up there, and I was really looking for my people.”
Circling back to Tiger Trap, Melberg mentions that they had interest from other labels before the band decided to release their self-titled album on K, and she chose K because, “I needed to be around other weirdos. I didn’t quite feel cool enough to be on Lookout! [Records] or even Slumberland at the time. K was freer and weirder. They were my people at the time and Candice was so loving and supportive of us; I always felt really loved by her. Calvin had Thanksgiving [dinner] with my family in 1993; he went so far back in my story.”
The support Melberg felt from K through her time in Tiger Trap and much of her run in the Softies went a long way for her. She felt emotionally supported and never denied that her bands were a priority for the label. In the early years, K booked the Softies’ tours. Even moving on from K, Melberg says she never lost sight of K’s impact and importance. “It’s important and interesting to a lot of people, this label and culture around it,” she notes.
Sbragia and Melberg are entering the fourth decade of their friendship, but for all that time they’ve been confidantes and—at least for a good portion of it—musical partners, they had only lived in the same city for a year. In that year, the Softies recorded half of It’s Love, a seven-inch for K titled He’ll Never Have to Know, and their self-titled 10” for Slumberland. Melberg and Sbragia both joked about how, when they lived in Portland for that twelve-month period, they were so prolific because they didn’t really have anything else to do.
“We just had dumb-ass jobs and… coffee, weed, beer, guitars, repeat,” Melberg says with a chuckle. “And it was my first time living away from home. It was a wild time.”
By the time the Softies had convened in Avast! Studios, Melberg had moved to Vancouver, B.C. She says the choice in studio was made because it was where Tiger Trap was recorded and studio founder Stuart Hallerman engineered the Calvin Johnson-produced full-length. Prior to entering the studio to record their second album Winter Pageant, Melberg and Sbragia would alternate taking the trip down from Vancouver or up from Portland; the former says most of the writing and rehearsal sessions involved her traveling north (about a six-hour drive).
“A lot of these songs had to do with me really missing Portland,” says Melberg. “Feeling left out from Jen’s life in Portland, being afraid that I was going to lose Jen to her new friends and [feeling like] we didn’t have enough time together, and still trying to keep the band going.” Melberg describes her mind state during that period as “an absolute tear of constant emotional turmoil,” but says she was reassured by Sbragia always showing up, ready to write, ready to record, every bit as invested in the Softies as ever.
On the surface, Winter Pageant scans as a breakup album. And let’s be real here: every Softies album has its fair share of romantic heartbreak jams—I might be stretching the definition of “jams” here; more like “quality crying-into-your-pillow soundtracks”? But with a close read of the lyric sheet, songs like “Over” and “Tracks and Tunnels,” respectively, anticipates the devolution of a friendship and laments not being able to cut the distance quickly enough.
Sbragia most clearly remembers the pressure of being in an actual recording studio—rather than dragging an eight-track into Melberg’s childhood home. “And I remember trying so hard to sing and crying,” Sbragia says. “And then, it’s like, ‘Now I can’t sing ‘cause I’m all goopy from crying. We need a break.’ Why do I only remember the struggles?”
Unsurprising to anyone who has spent any meaningful time listening to the Softies is the revelation that crying is part of the process. Melberg recalls doing all of her lead vocals for Winter Pageant in a single, 12-hour session. (“We would go hard,” she says about the laboriousness of recording their albums.) And after that long day of recording the vocal parts for these pensive, blue songs, Melberg let go of the buildup of emotions by having a hearty cry when the session was complete. “I do that a lot with recording vocals,” Melberg says. “It’s very emotional. It takes a lot out of me.”
There’s also the mastery of what are colloquially known as “sad chords” and the instrumental flourishes throughout their catalog, but on Winter Pageant specifically. It’s easy for tiny teardrops to form like the glockenspiel parts on opener “Pack Your Things and Go.” And it has been emotionally tough for me personally to get through the title track without sobbing, which has made for a pretty tear-soaked month of research.
Being a fan of the Softies is an exercise in embracing your emotional sensitivity on the same level as the artists themselves. The vulnerability we are conditioned to suppress in our day-to-day existence wells up to the surface when Rose Melberg and Jen Sbragia pull out their guitars and step to a pair of microphones. It takes a special kind of power to bring that out of people.
A somewhat off-handed description of the Softies has grown into a guiding ethos of sorts: “Pop music for punks.”
Says Melberg about the unsanctioned motto: “We both come from punk and other subcultures of youthful delinquency. And that’s who we really are. K Records definitely helped me reframe what I thought of as ‘punk’ back then, when Beat Happening and Fugazi were playing [shows] together at [historic Bay Area punk venue 924] Gilman Street.” She credits the DIY movement in music with expanding the boundaries of punk for her, and notes that the most “punk” thing about the Softies is the raw emotion that is so steeped in vulnerability that it often makes people uncomfortable.
“Maybe that’s punk in a different way,” Melberg continues. “Knowing that Kurt Cobain loved Marine Girls [for example], I don’t think I knew this at the time, but a lot of the cool punks loved this weird music because it wasn’t [the sort of] pop music a lot of people thought of. The pop [groups] I loved at the time were weird British pop bands that sounded like shit. I liked noisy, difficult pop.”
Melberg says she liked a few of the things on notable indie-pop label Sarah Records, but a lot of it was too gentle for her. She acknowledges the cognitive dissonance of a founding member of the Softies being even slightly put off by any music that sounded “too soft,” but in her estimation, the Softies always sought to create a little discomfort in their music; emotionally if not always sonically. “I didn’t want it to sound gentle,” she says. “I wanted it to sound tender.”
She laughs ever-so-slightly when she says, “We don’t really understand how we managed to maintain this sweet relationship with all these really young punks and hardcore dudes—and gals, and people—they see something [in us] and we trust them. You probably know more than we do, so we trust you that we’re punk because you say we are. And I like that.”
Melberg and Sbragia joke around a little at the suggestions they’ve gotten to make them more “successful”—”Turn the treble down a little bit, slow it down a little bit,” “Have you thought about adding a bass?”—before Melberg makes it clear: “We don’t want a hit. We want to be weird and difficult.”
And then, what really might be the guiding ethos of their band: “You know, when white dudes would come up to us at shows and tell us what we should be doing, we knew we were doing something right.”
By breaking out acoustic guitars and continuing to add small traces of other instrumentation (piano, xylophone, keyboards, and even bass guitar), Holiday in Rhode Island helped set the tone for the rising indie folk movement of the remainder of the new decade. Every strummy tearjerker of the ‘00s owes some sort of debt to the Softies deceptively ornate third album.
Although Melberg was living farther east in British Columbia around the period this album was recorded, her Vancouver friends (who helped record the two full-lengths by Melberg’s twee-punk/indie rock band Gaze) brought their mobile ADAT recording device to Galliano Island to record Holiday in Rhode Island. “So we were in paradise, basically,” says Melberg. “But Jen was in hell. She had boyfriend problems.”
Sbragia laughs at Melberg’s intentionally dramatic line read, but admits she was hurting in the moment. Her boyfriend at the time was in Australia and she was sure he was cheating on her. She admits to being stressed out to the point of physical illness. Melberg herself admits to being reluctant to add arrangements to the album (“I was a purist. I was a punk.”), but she ultimately acquiesced. The album doesn’t sound busy by any stretch of the imagination as a result.
As far as the songwriting goes, Holiday in Rhode Island found Sbragia and Melberg’s vignettes of heartache infused with a little cinematic flair with its arrangements, as well as even more emphasis on narrative. The aforementioned “sad chords” of closer “My Empty Arms” makes for yet another Softies tune extremely hard to get through without crying, while the final lyric on “Favorite Shade of Blue”—”I have a yellow and navy sundress / It reminds me of you”—might seem innocuous on the surface, but in the context of the song is devastating enough to register on the Richter scale.
Whenever women—especially young women—write songs about being sad, the concept is buried under the misconception that they’re not writing about universal experiences. The subject matter is reduced to “girls whining about their broken hearts,” when the truth is everybody wallows in heartbreak sometimes; everybody dwells on getting dumped for someone (they perceive as) cooler and better-looking; everybody has someone they love so much (platonic and otherwise) they find it hard to see how they measure up.
The Softies are women who put these common feelings to music best played at reasonable volume. They’re not the virtuosos their friend and sometime tourmate Elliott Smith was (nobody is). They don’t set their feelings to pop-punk like scores of bad emo bands do. Their setup is engineered for maximum emotional impact, and their talent as guitarists and songwriters is often overlooked by shallow surfaced opinions upon seeing two women with guitars and no rhythm section. The music Rose Melberg and Jen Sbragia made in the ‘90s and the first corner of the turn of the century stands the test of time because, frankly, if you can’t find yourself in it, you probably should look a little deeper.
As was the case with many bands—including the aforementioned Beat Happening—the Softies never broke up, never discussed going on hiatus. It just happened. As the saying goes, life got in the way. Melberg gave birth to a child in 2002 and in that period, she estimates she lived about a 10-hour drive away from Sbragia. She wrote and recorded a couple of solo albums (including 2009’s wonderful Homemade Ship), got divorced, and moved back to Vancouver. “[Jen] had twins, so she had to go pretty hardcore on parenting for a lot of years,” Melberg says. “For like 10 years, she was doing that. I was in a million bands in Vancouver.”
Even a cursory glance at Melberg’s Wikipedia page reveals that since 2010, she has been in half a dozen bands, released almost twice as many solo/collaborative singles and compilation loosies, and produced Lisa Prank’s best album, 2019’s Perfect Love Song.
“I was drumming, I was singing, I was traveling, touring, [making] solo records,” Melberg says. “I made so many records in that ten-year [period] while Jen was super focused on raising these humans. We would talk about it sometimes; we would say, ‘Well, of course we’ll make another Softies record someday.’ We didn’t mean for 24 years to pass.”
Melberg notes that the break was necessary when she, and later Sbragia, became a mother. But they didn’t want to rush back into making music together again (“We both needed to need it,” says Melberg, crucially). An unfortunate catalyst for the Softies saddling up and riding again came in the thick of the pandemic: both Sbragia and Melberg lost their mothers in a relatively short time span. Even in the near-quarter-century they weren’t making music together, they were still friends, and they found themselves being deeply present for each other during their period of grieving.
It was clear to Melberg that music was coming back into Sbragia’s life in a big way; not just as a fan but as an artist. She decided she would test the waters to see if her friend was ready to start writing and playing together again.
There was a flicker years prior that turned into the spark which reignited the Softies, and it was the first time Sbragia heard Tony Molina’s 2013 album Dissed and Dismissed. “Rose played it for me,” Sbragia says. “In her kitchen, in 2017 or something, [maybe] 2016. I hadn’t been listening to music. I had no idea what was going on. And to hear these [songs], this genre-blending of squealy, crunchy guitar, but [in] a short pop song. I just lost my mind. ‘Why didn’t I think of this? I could be doing this. I want to do this.’”
Sbragia points out that she didn’t start writing music again right then and there; she had to allow her inspiration to incubate, gestate, “percolate.”
Part of the storm clouds of artistic revelation gathering in Sbragia’s mind came from Melberg and her husband creating playlists for her. Melberg herself had been artistically dormant for a while, though not quite as long as Sbragia. And in the rush of discovering their collective inspiration, the world got closed off in the midst of a global health crisis. Their mothers passed away. It was a grey and lonely time for pretty much everybody. They decided the world needed a Softies record more than ever.
Melberg clarifies: “Not that we are therapists or that we are solely responsible for helping people feel things. We just [thought it would] be cool if we could share some of [our music] to resonate with people and we can all normalize that we’re all kind of fucked up right now.”
The Bed I Made, released in August on Father/Daughter Records, spotlights an evolved Softies—the product of 24 years of growth in the background. It’s not an instance where they’ve adopted a radically different, “new” sound; it doesn’t get much more timeless than the setup Melberg and Sbragia made for themselves three decades ago.
Much like their 2023 split cassette with Tony Molina—sold on their joint tour, where Molina recorded versions of three Softies songs and the duo played Sbragia’s beloved Dissed and Dismissed in its entirety—the Softies of The Bed I Made are much more outwardly confident singers while their guitar playing is largely a little more layered and complex, often taking the form of flowers in bloom. Lyrically, they’re as wistful as ever, using their gift for crafting snapshots of various states of sorrow and coupling it with many more years of life experience; making their songs feel as lived-in as your favorite cardigan from 15 years ago.
There are many songs that could just as easily be about grief or metatextual devotionals about being in the Softies as they could be about sweeping up the pieces of a broken heart or nursing a newborn crush (“23rd Birthday,” “Foot Path,” “Dial Tone,” opener “Go Back in Time”). Melberg and Sbragia also convey feelings of self-assuredness (“Tiny Flame”) and, on occasion, are even glib and sort of funny (“Sigh Sigh Sigh,” particularly the part about getting stoned). Two good signs that the passage of time comes for us all, and while Melberg and Sbragia are far removed from the twentysomethings who recorded much of their existing output, getting older comes with its own set of benefits.
The Bed I Made was recorded at The Unknown in Anacortes (certainly a familiar locale to regular readers of this column) and co-produced by Melberg and The Unknown’s Nicolas Wilbur. Sbragia says, “The Unknown is such a cool place. We slept at the studio, so it was almost like a weird camping trip where you don’t exactly have everything you need in the bathroom, but you make it work.”
Although tracking the vocals was difficult at times, the process of recording the album was easier overall because, unlike in the nineties, Melberg and Sbragia could send demos back and forth online and Sbragia took the opportunity on the five-hour drive from Portland to Anacortes to practice vocals. Even though the process was more labor-intensive (for instance, Melberg wrote three-part harmonies for pretty much all of the album’s songs), they were more prepared they had felt in the past and split the recording into four sessions instead of knuckling down, tracking and mixing an entire album in five days.
“There’s a reason this album feels a little different from the other ones,” says Melberg. “We took our time with it in a different way. It wasn’t just about, ‘Let’s do our best and put it out.’ ‘Close enough for jazz,’ as my stepdad used to say. This time [we were] like, ‘What if we were just good [instead of] just good enough?’”
After writing, releasing, and touring behind The Bed I Made—and, in Melberg’s case, playing guitar for the Bratmobile reunion shows as well as reuniting with Go Sailor—the Softies have more than earned a short break from music. (In their day-to-day, Sbragia works as a graphic designer and Melberg owns a pet goods store for cats.) But when it comes to extending the life of the Softies, Melberg says she’s got nearly a dozen songs starting to rumble around “in that funny little pocket in my brain,” and Sbragia simply says, “Yeah, I’m all in.”
There are a lot of things I adore about the Softies as a creative enterprise, but above all else, my favorite aspect of the artistic partnership of Rose Melberg and Jen Sbragia is that they are friends outside of it. The Bed I Made is an enormously worthy addition to their tandem body of work, but knowing the depth of love and admiration they have for each other, it would have been just fine if they had decided not to make another album. To know they have a close bond outside of the public eye, outside of the expectations of their fans—where it’s just the two of them and what they talk about, laugh about, and cry about is none of our fucking business—is just as satisfying as getting to talk to them for an hour about what has led them here.
In the first six years of their time together as a band, they gave the world three excellent albums that hold up as well as any music that has been released in the past 30 years. This most recent album and anything after that is a bonus.
“It was a moment where we basically agreed, ‘Let’s do it,’” Melberg says about her and Sbragia officially resuming the Softies. “I like the long game, but it was this beautiful testament to our friendship that had we not made this record, we would still be best friends.”
To give this comprehensive feature the respect it deserves, I’m invoking my right to forgo testing your endurance any further by giving you a small reprieve. Thank you for your support of Throwaway Style in 2024; you’ve read tens of thousands of words about Northwest music written by me this year and that is no small feat. Hope to see you all in this digital space in 2025!
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