The Softies Make Their Own Rules

As afternoon fades to early evening on Saturday of Pitchfork Music Festival, I make my way to the shrouded Blue Stage to catch a set from Bratmobile with Lou, my best friend of six years and counting. When he and I first met in college, we bonded over a shared adolescent love of riot grrrl bands—me, a lifelong New Yorker and him, a Seattle kid who came up in the Bandcamp generation of the Northwest DIY scene, with the proverbial sons and daughters of the musicians that created Washington’s indie rock empire in the ‘90s. It was a lineage of music that Lou used to blast from a speaker in his college dorm room while we sat on the floor eating shitty pizza, sifting through his collection of zines and weird postcards, occasionally leaning out his open window to blow smoke or eavesdrop.

Lou and I have been living in different cities for a while now, but every time we reunite it feels like we’re back on our college campus, and it’s unfathomable that I’ve spent nearly a year being unable to just walk down the street and knock on his door whenever I feel like bugging him. On my first night in Chicago, at a corner booth in a dive bar that’s about to be sardine-packed with people, I polish off an Old Style and end some anecdote with “God, aren’t you so happy we aren’t 21 years old anymore?” It feels a little dumb to say this, as we’re both 25—how far removed from your early 20s can your mid-20s really be?—but I’m still young enough to mean it. When Lou and I first met, Bratmobile had been broken up for more than a decade, and seeing them live felt like something we’d need a time machine for. But here they were, sunlight reflecting off Allison Wolfe’s sequined dress, plastic multi-colored novelty shades perched on the nose of each band member, ready to spit grrrl germs right in our faces.

Joining them on the guitar is Rose Melberg of the Softies—a band I’m pretty sure I first heard in Lou’s dorm. Rose had informed me of her upcoming P4K Fest performance when I spoke with her and her bandmate Jen Sbragia over Zoom the previous Wednesday. Earlier in the summer, the Softies announced their signing to Father Daughter Records and began releasing singles from The Bed I Made, their first album in 24 years. During their hiatus, the two remained best friends, but they also stayed busy—with kids, jobs and playing in other bands. “I’d been saying for years, ‘I think the world needs another Softies record,’” Rose tells me. I went into this interview already agreeing that the world has, in fact, needed another Softies record for quite some time now. But I came out of it understanding that—maybe even more than anyone else—the Softies needed another Softies record, too.

Jen and Rose both lost their mothers in 2022, shortly before writing and recording The Bed I Made. “Grief is an amazing opener,” says Rose, “We were both extremely raw and we sought a lot of comfort from each other. I think the album really came from this revitalized emotional connection between me and Jen.” Not only were the feelings of mourning still fresh, but they dredged up old memories, forcing Rose and Jen to look at pieces of their pasts in a new light. Losses like theirs are totalizing, and they have a way of making the past seem as mercurial and unpredictable as the future. On the opening track of The Bed I Made, titled “Go Back In Time,” the shadow of grief darkens all that surrounds it, turning time into a shapeless sludge: “Weeks and then months became one awful year, watched the light disappear from everything.”

“We had different relationships with our moms, so our grief was different, but the same,” Rose affirms. “It was what pulled our hearts back together.” Grief and extended time apart changed the Softies’ songwriting process in ways that neither Jen nor Rose could have ever anticipated. Both band members agree that The Bed I Made is the most collaborative album they’ve put out; in some ways, it’s the first where there aren’t clearly distinguished “Jen songs” and “Rose songs”—ones whose lyrics, melody and guitar parts had been written by just one band member before the two met up in the studio to add harmonies together. Rose describes the process behind their latest album as “looser” than their previous material: “Jen would have a riff and I would expand on the riff, or Jen would write half the song lyrics and I’d write the rest. We’d never collaborated on lyrics before.”

Jen and Rose traveled back and forth between their respective homes of Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, British Columbia, sometimes meeting in the middle and booking studio time in Seattle—doing anything they could to keep up the momentum they’d been building. While they were apart, they recorded demos on GarageBand—Rose on her laptop, Jen on her iPad. “I’m planning to get a new laptop, for the next one,” Jen says. Their comeback record is still weeks away, but after re-opening the floodgates, the Softies are already thinking ahead. Their excited back-and-forth chatter sounds like a band remembering just how much they love making music together. Rose smiles. “Once we remembered we could do it, we wanted to keep doing it.”

The songs on The Bed I Made don’t sound all that different from the Softies’ earlier material—they sound like a band doing what they do best, returning more confident in their strengths than ever before. “Deep Softies,” as Rose calls it: “Deeper into our partnership and our friendship and our style of existing together, when we’re together. And it’s something special when we get together because we’ve been friends for so long.” Or as Jen puts it, they “marinated for longer. “We’re the soy and ginger sauce that’s been sitting in the fridge,” she says.

It feels like a tired gimmick to overemphasize the very real but often-shallowly invoked “power of friendship” in a band profile or, as is often the case with bands whose members are women, to let their friendship overshadow their musicianship in a reductive, infantilizing way. But a profile of a band like the Softies—a group so singular in their history, ethic and cultural niche—would be incomplete without discussing the lasting power and profundity of Jen and Rose’s friendship. The two connected after the dissolution of Rose’s previous band, Tiger Trap, and signed to famed Olympia label K Records for their debut album It’s Love, an essential in the twee-pop canon. At the time, Jen was in Portland and Rose was still living in Northern California, where both of them had grown up. When Rose joined Jen in Portland, the two met Elliott Smith—who they still consider a kindred spirit—and toured with him in 1996.

The Softies’ formula is simple and always has been: Two guitars, two voices. Their pillowy pop songs are short, melodic and usually about falling in or out of love. Though both Jen and Rose had played in punk bands and, in Portland in the ‘90s, shared scenes and stages with the pioneers of riot grrrl and grunge, the Softies were always a bit of an odd band out. They weren’t a controversial band by any means; it was their lack of abrasiveness that set them apart. While their peers made music that was brash, loud, angry and provocative—music that both Jen and Rose loved—the Softies embraced sensitivity and a gentler, sweeter sound. They describe themselves as “a pop band with punk ethics.” Inspired by artists like Linda Smith and Marine Girls, the Softies took pride in their outsider status and self-selecting audience, to the point that cuteness and kitsch felt like a sort of armor. “It always had to be a little bit too weird, a little bit too emotional, or a little bit too sensitive,” Jen explains.

The way Jen and Rose describe it, this disregard for fitting in or “making it” sounds so liberating. Part of why Rose had disbanded Tiger Trap was because she was uncomfortable with the amount of attention the band had gotten in a relatively short span of time. Collaborating as the Softies provided an opportunity to create, free from the scrutiny that comes with worrying about fame, marketability or reputation. They trusted that their music would find the audience that needed it, and it did—likely because they weren’t worrying about whether or not they were on-trend.