Event

Once, when boygenius was on a road trip in Northern California, Phoebe Bridgers asked Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus to listen to a very important song, and pushed play, and got on the freeway headed in the wrong direction. The song was “Trapeze Swinger” by Iron & Wine—about a dead person telling the living how he wants to be remembered. It was impossible to interrupt this ten-minute-long song. Because of how the exits were spaced, “Trapeze Swinger” added an hour to their travel time. Phoebe felt like an idiot. Lucy turned that drive into the song “Leonard Cohen.”

What happens when you see an hour-long detour, not as a detour, but as part of the trip—the part where you listened to “Trapeze Swinger” while driving the opposite direction from your destination. Does that become the most valuable hour on the trip? Does time transform into something other than alternating “valuable” and “not valuable” hours? What if the right song can dislodge, for its duration, this piece of capitalist furniture?

"the record" started in June 2020. A week after "Punisher" came out, Phoebe sent Lucy and Julien a demo of “Emily I’m Sorry” and asked if they could be a band again—for the first time since those five short months in 2018, when the boygenius EP was conceived, written, recorded, released, and toured. Nobody had wanted to be the first to ask—to make such a demand on everyone’s time. Now, Julien made a Google Drive folder called “dare I say it?”, and everyone flooded it with potential songs.

Now "the record" is on the sound system and you’re merging onto the freeway. Glen Campbell’s guitar is doing the Sad Beatles, as the wrong exit comes up on the left. Soon you’ll be at the ocean, which Julien still sort of thinks is a creek, and the Venn diagrams are overlapping, and the years are rushing by in descending order. This interchange has way more than four levels. 2018 rushes past, and the EP—there’s Phoebe, and her dog!—and the illegal fireworks, and your mother’s father’s mother. Then the track changes, and it’s time for the overdue U-turn that isn’t actually overdue, and “spiraling” is the mot juste and the crack in your plan is where the light comes in. Why is this song is so long? How can it take this much time? Can we afford it? And meanwhile the time keeps unfolding, until the only think you had to sacrifice was the idea of sacrifice: everything was the important thing. Six hours later, you’re ready to engage, and 2023 is here, and "the record" is now.

Highlights

• DATE: Sunday, July 30, 2023
• DOORS OPEN: 4:30 PM
• SHOW STARTS: 5:45 PM
• *Chair rentals available while supplies last
• ONLINE PRESALE:
• Thursday, March 30, 2023
• 10 AM – 10 PM
• If not already, sign up for concert alerts (upper right) to receive presale code.
• GENERAL ONSALE:
• Friday, March 31, 2023
• at NOON