Tone Glow 154: The Softies
An interview with the singular indie-pop duo about their history of writing letters, of feeling the same as their 20-something selves, and their first new album in 24 years, 'The Bed I Made'
The Softies
The Softies are a legendary indie-pop duo comprised of Rose Melberg and Jen Sbragia. The two initially met at a Tiger Trap show and proceeded to write letters to one another to keep in touch. After Melberg decided to break up Tiger Trap, she and Sbragia started to make music together in 1994. Ultimately, Melberg wanted to spend time with her “new favorite person,” and the music they made as the Softies was an outgrowth of their deep friendship. Built on vulnerability and trust, their distinct sound—guitars, vocals, and little else—would push both artists to go deeper in both their lyricism and songwriting.
The Softies would release three studio albums on K Records during their initial run: It’s Love (1995), Winter Pageant (1996), and Holiday in Rhode Island (2000). Last year, they went on a short tour with Tony Molina and released a cassette. Now, the Softies are set to release their first studio album in 24 years, The Bed I Made. Out on August 23rd via Father/Daughter Records, the album finds the two back as they always were, reflecting on love and loss but with a new “evolved wisdom.” They’ll be on tour throughout the next few months, and their tour dates can be found at the Father/Daughter website.
Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with the Softies on June 24th, 2024 via Zoom to discuss their 30-year friendship, their songwriting process, and platonic love. Plus: Rose Melberg shares her favorite love songs.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: I was listening to The Bed I Made and I really love the song “Headphones.” It really captures this sentiment of making someone a mixtape, of how it can be such a gift. I was just talking with someone about the go-to songs I include on mixtapes for my crushes, and there are certain Softies songs that always make the cut, like “Me and the Bees” and “You and Only You.” Do you have songs like that?
Jen Sbragia: It depends on the era, but “You & Me” by Tiger Trap.
Rose Melberg: I love melodrama, but I love heavy songs. When you’re trying to get someone to like you, I’m just trying to elicit an emotional response. So I would do the Tracey Thorn song “Too Happy.” It’s this song about the reality of love. There’s this beautiful moment in the song where she sings, “Then a wrong word and you dropped my hand.” It’s so evocative of passion and how volatile it is—I find it very intoxicating. I’d love to put that on a mixtape because it’s a test of how deeply one can be moved by romantic truth (laughs).
Jen Sbragia: There was always Rocketship, like the song “I Love You Like The Way That I Used To Do.” There’s so many good songs on A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness (1996)—
Rose Melberg: Songs about longing! Ugh!
Jen Sbragia: Yeah, that’s the ticket (laughter).
I know that you both met at a Tiger Trap show and that you exchanged letters with each other afterwards. Do you mind sharing about that? Was this something you engaged with prior to or afterwards at that level?
Rose Melberg: We were coming into our musical taste and finding our community during the late ’80s and early ’90s, and there was a lot of letter writing then. It was toward the end of high school, in ’88 or ’89, when I started writing fan mail, and I wrote fan mail to any band that I loved if there was an address on the record. The beginning of my life in music was because of letter writing—this is how I ended up on K. I would write to them because I would order things from the K Records catalogue. They would send out the newsletter and it was their own releases, but they also distributed a lot of stuff. This was ’90, ’91.
You write letters and then you have a rapport with whoever’s doing the mail order. I was getting letters from Candice [Pedersen] because I was always ordering records. And the whole genesis of how I ended up on K has to do with my pen pal relationship with Allison Wolfe of Bratmobile. We became pen pals because I wrote a fan letter to Aaron Stauffer of Spook & the Zombies. They were on a really early K Records cassette, Birdcrash, and he was a teenager from Steilacoom, Washington. He made this really stripped-down, teenager love music during this movement in the Pacific Northwest. I asked if he had t-shirts and he said, “My girlfriend makes t-shirts,” and so he hooked me up with Allison Wolfe—this was before Bratmobile was a band. I started writing to Allison and she was like, “Oh, do you play music? My friend and I are starting this fanzine [Girl Germs].”
It was through my pen pal relationship with Allison that I ended up playing a song at the International Pop Underground Convention, which was the first time I played on stage ever. Allison said, “You should come up and play a song.” I had written to her that I had this band called Tiger Trap, but Angela [Loy] and I hadn’t written songs yet, and she couldn’t come so I went by myself. Really, I went to the IPU as a fan. We originally thought Tiger Trap was going to play, but it didn’t exist yet; it was just a name. The first night was Girl Night, and I went up. I didn’t even say my name, I just played a song and got off stage. That was the scariest thing I’d ever done. And that’s how I met [K Records owner] Calvin [Johnson]. When they made the compilation record of the recordings, he asked to put the song on it and I was like, “Oh my god!” I was 19 years old.
I would write letters to anyone that I loved because there was no internet. I needed to feel connected to a community. I lived in Sacramento and I had friends, but they were mostly men. They played music but I felt too shy to ask to play with them, so I had to start my own thing. It was through these letters that I wrote, especially to women, that I had encouragement to actually start playing music. I remember writing this letter to Barbara Manning when Tiger Trap first started. I knew she lived in San Francisco. I was like, “Hi, my name is Rose, I live in Sacramento. Here’s my demo tape.” She sent me back this really sweet letter as well as a tape with this karaoke booth recording she had done of “Crazy” by Patsy Cline. She became a mentor to me just because I wrote her this fan letter. We ended up playing shows together and we’re still friends to this day—we’re playing a show with her on our tour in October.
I feel like every single thing that my music career has become is because of these early postal relationships. That’s why we talk a lot about letters in our early songs. That was our life! You booked tours through letters in the mail. That was truly at the heart of creating a wider community beyond my hometown. It was also at the heart of my relationship with Jen. She had a fanzine and she sent me that, and then I wrote back. She was going through her old ephemera recently and read back one of the letters I had written to her. It was so wildly embarrassing (laughter). It was so sweet! Just the vulnerability. “Do you like this? I like this! Sometimes I kind of like girls!” It was beautiful. I would’ve been 21 when I was writing her, and that’s how we knew how to get in touch after Tiger Trap broke up. It all comes back to these letters.
That makes so much sense!
Jen Sbragia: Rose put her phone number in there.
Rose Melberg: And Jen called me. She lived in Santa Rosa. And you would always include stuff. A sticker, a tape, a news clipping of something funny. I had really funny pen pal relationships. K Records distributed a bunch of tapes from “Weird Paul” Petroskey, and he was just this high school kid from Pittsburgh making goofy music. I loved anything weird, like him and Daniel Johnston. And a lot of that was just through K. We would send each other so much dumb shit. Playing cards, whatever. That was our language.
Jen Sbragia: Emma Peel trading cards (laughter).
Rose Melberg: Any shit you could fit in an envelope. It was just to give this tiny part of yourself. And that’s how everything started! I was in Sacramento and I was dying for community! I wanted to be a part of this thing I saw happening through the records I was buying.
Jen Sbragia: I ordered once from a label in Santa Rosa, and the person who ran the label just brought it over to my house. We became friends and then we dated for a while (laughter). I got a boyfriend from letter writing!
Rose Melberg: Mail-order boyfriend! (laughter).
Jen Sbragia: I had a typewriter for when my hand got tired. I had pen pals that I knew from making zines. I would send them 9-to-12 page letters and it’d be like, okay, now it’s your turn! It was just massive letters with tapes. It was a lifeline.
Rose Melberg: I don’t think I had my own email address until like 1997. I had just moved to Portland, and I remember someone was trying to explain email to me and I was like, “I don’t understand this!” And I was like, “Can I just use your email address?” They were like, “I guess so? It doesn’t really work that way.” (laughter). I just wanted to write letters! But it’s okay, we’re modern women, we figured it out (laughter).
Did you two still write letters to people after this change in technology?
Jen Sbragia: A little. Times change.
Rose Melberg: We would get fan mail, and we have boxes of fan mail. People would send stuff to K and they would pass it to us. If it was a compelling letter we would write back, but that was kind of the end of it. It was the etiquette. Someone sent you a fan letter, you sent a thank you letter, and then they’d treasure that forever. But sometimes they’d send something again. At our show in Seattle last year, I met someone who I was pen pals with during the Tiger Trap days. I remembered her name because we had a few letters. She was like, “It’s me!” And I was like, “What theeeee fuckkkkk!!!” That was like 30 years ago!
Jen, is there anything you wanted to add about letter writing?
Jen Sbragia: Mostly just how I met that one boyfriend (laughter). It was the same thing with me; I would get an issue of Goldmine at the record store and then would look in the classifieds in the back to order a rare record. And then I’d wait by the mailbox. Even as a child, I would save up my gum wrappers and send away for a Hubba Bubba t-shirt or whatever (laughter). That’s how we did everything.
Rose Melberg: We also had ambiguous pen pal relationships with boys. For them it may have seemed like it was romantic, but for us it was just, like, sick mixtapes (laughter). The song “Headphones” is really about my husband John. He knows my music taste so well and we hear music in a lot of the same ways. He’s a constant source of new music for me, which is so important. You can’t get crusty and nostalgic about music—there’s so much new music all the time. And he is this beautiful pathway for me.
Having a musical connection for people like us is essential. You have to understand music in the same way even if you don’t like the same stuff. Sometimes you just hear music in the same way, and to have a partner who is like that is a blessing to me, especially because music is my life. I have so many thoughts about music and what I want to hear, and to have somebody who understands that… it’s like they have a direct line into my guts. They can be like, “I think you’d love this song” and you’ll be like, (in an endearing tone) “Oh my god, I love this!”
I know you both played guitar in your teenage years. Do you mind talking about the environment you grew up in?
Jen Sbragia: My family is not musical. My dad had a hi-fi and a record player and would go to the record store every week. I tried to learn guitar and clarinet in 4th grade, and I had a plastic toy record player in my room. I would mine my parents’ record collection. I always loved music. I was really into radio—I loved Top 40 radio.
Rose Melberg: We were talking yesterday about how much we loved Solid Gold and Dance Fever. We were obsessed.
Jen Sbragia: MTV came out when I was 11. We didn’t have it but my dad eventually got it at his house—my parents got divorced—and it was just my whole life. “Shut up, I’m watching MTV.” I started playing guitar when I was almost 15. There were no girls doing it! So I ended up with a bunch of guy friends. I was into metal in my teenage years.
Were there artists on MTV who specifically inspired you to make music?
Jen Sbragia: That was hard because they played just regular stuff and you had to wait until 2 in the morning for the good stuff. And even Headbangers Ball, it would only be like the last hour. I was into all of the mainstream pop metal stuff—nothing obscure. I loved Lita Ford because she was a girl playing lead guitar, writing her own songs, and was a frontperson. It meant a lot to me at the time.
What was it like playing with the boys? Do you feel like those were formative experiences?
Jen Sbragia: Yeah, because when I got old enough and good enough to have a garage band with a group of guy friends, I remember telling the other guitar player, “You just started playing guitar, so I’m gonna be the lead guitar player.” And they just wanted to have fun and play music in the garage, so I would put my foot down! It was great. “I’m playing lead!” And then everyone was blown away because I was taking lessons and it was all I cared about. I would sit in my room all the time and play guitar, trying to get better. A lot of scales (laughter). That was very short-lived though, sadly.
Rose Melberg: Did it have a name?
Jen Sbragia: No! I’m not saying it! (laughter). Our first name was Cerberus, you know, the dog. Probably the funniest thing that ever happened was that kids rolled up on their bikes and they were like, “Are you guys a band?” And then the guy who played bass was like, “Yeah, we’re Metallica.” And the kids were like “Oh, okay!” (laughter). That was a fun time.
Rose, how about you?
Jen Sbragia: Very different (laughter).
Rose Melberg: A very different upbringing. I was raised in a pretty non-traditional way. My mom was a working musician—she played bars and did four-hour sets three nights a week. They did weddings and parties. And that was how we paid the bills. I grew up going to my mom’s band practice because she couldn’t afford a babysitter—we were dirt-poor hippies! So it was very normalized for me to see someone play music. Even bar stuff. We would just come for four hours and watch them play.
We would go to band practice and they would always learn covers, so I have five million songs in my brain and no room for anything else. I grew up with a mom who played—well, different songs over time—but radio pop, country, old country, swing, jazz, Cuban music, whatever. When they were doing the wedding band stuff, it was also contemporary pop songs. But it was also their taste. My step dad loved Steely Dan, my mom loved the Pretenders. They did a lot of studio work, too. My mom was a great singer—she was a vocal teacher. My dad was one of the best pedal steel players on the West Coast.
They were both very good, and my step dad—I couldn’t learn guitar from him because he kept wanting to teach me theory. And I was like, “I’m a punk, I don’t care! I just want to play a song, I don’t give a shit!” I rejected their professionalism; that’s how I rebelled. I had to find my own way, I had to teach myself guitar. I took like three lessons, but I was too shy to play in front of my teacher, and all my friends who were boys who started bands in high school… I was just too shy. I wasn’t necessarily being invited to join, and I definitely didn’t have the guts to ask.
It wasn’t until after high school, when I learned how to play some chords, that I felt more comfortable to play with other girls. And I started it. If nobody was going to ask me to join their band, then I guess I had to start my own. I had to find other women to play with, and that’s how it all came to be. Like, I wasn’t a songwriter, but somebody had to write the songs, so I wrote them (laughter).
I love the initiative here—it’s not too different from your letter writing. You had to find a way.
Rose Melberg: When I look back, I’m like, “Oh honey, you were so brave.” I was so shy and so insecure and I just wanted to be cool. And if I couldn’t be cool, at least I could know cool people. All I ever wanted was to have peers and to have some validation, to be a part of this, but it took a long time to accept that I was part of it. I always felt like more of a fan than an artist; starting a band was like my secret way to hang out with cool people.
When did things change for you? Like, when did you start to consider yourself a cool person.
Rose Melberg: Tiger Trap got so popular so fast, so it was easy to feel cool, but I was too young to understand what it meant. I don’t think I ever totally accepted… I mean, I don’t think it was ever about me. The band itself was very thrilling, exciting, and kind of insane. It dramatically imploded and exploded. When Tiger Trap broke up, I thought that was it. I broke up the band—it was overwhelming and too much drama—and I thought that was my one chance. And that’s kind of why we started the Softies. I wanted to do something more obscure and weird to avoid that insanity of, “Do people really like me, or do people want to be part of this orbit of cool?”
I started the Softies and Go Sailor at the same time after Tiger Trap broke up as this way to do what I actually wanted to do—to be this cool, obscure musician like Daniel Johnston. I wanted to bring this back into fan letter territory, for it to be more community-based. I never felt cool enough for Tiger Trap. I think it was when the Softies got a lot of love that I realized that people cared about what I was doing.
I always thought that everyone would forget about me, and I thought I could be obscure and do this other shit, but after people started liking what the Softies were doing, it was like, “Wow, I don’t have to be in a bratty, loud, crazy band for people to get what I do.” And it was the same people who really loved Tiger Trap even though the two sounded completely different. It was like, “Oh, maybe this has something to do with me.” And that was the first time I felt seen and cool—because people could accept the Softies for how weird and different it was.
Jen, did this notion of coolness impact the decisions you made in life?
Jen Sbragia: Oh yeah. That’s how it started, that was the goal. It started with seeing movies like Over the Edge (1979) on TV. I just wanted to be a cool bad kid. I wanted to be a degenerate.
Rose Melberg: A delinquent. Oh yeah.
Jen Sbragia: That was so cool to me.
Rose Melberg: I think that’s what drew us together. We could’ve grown up and been totally normal, been married and have this small-town life, but we had this draw to rock and roll, this draw to punk.
Jen Sbragia: I was trying to stand out in middle school and high school by being the rocker girl. There were a lot of preps, a lot of popped collars (laughter). Being in a band is the coolest thing you can do, and to have this feedback—to have people write you a letter—is like a drug.
Rose Melberg: As a woman at the time, you didn’t have a ton of role models. We saw the future that was available to us and we thought it was gross.
Jen Sbragia: Especially the heavy metal genre—it was just closed doors.
Rose Melberg: I was a music fan, but I didn’t want to be just a fan. I didn’t want to go to college, I didn’t want to get a job, I just wanted to live a cool rock-and-roll life. I think for me it was watching Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (1979) growing up. Like, “I want to blow up my high school!” (laughter).
With the first Softies 7-inch, Loveseat, was there a specific sound that you were aiming for? Rose, you mentioned how you wanted this to be a more obscure project. What conversations did you have early on as a band?
Rose Melberg: I just wanted to write songs, kind of like I did in Tiger Trap, but without drums and bass. I was like, “I don’t want to be slow, I don’t want to be acoustic, and I want lots of reverb… but no drums.” I thought it’d make people mad in a cool way (laughter). You want it to be quiet and chill but that first 7-inch is insane! It’s so fast and there’s so much treble; it’s almost hard to listen to. And that’s what we wanted.
I was still in that punk way of thinking where it was like, “Let’s make people mad. People are gonna want to hear Tiger Trap but it’s not going to sound like them.” But that was the only way I knew how to write songs. I was still in my infancy as a songwriter; these were songs that could’ve been Tiger Trap songs. I mainly just didn’t want to be in a band with four people. I just wanted to hang out with Jen because she was my new favorite person—I didn’t want anyone else involved in this, I didn’t want to fuck this up! (laughter). I told her, let’s just have a band that’s the two of us.
I heard the Marine Girls earlier that year and I realized that you could be weird without having a drum kit. It didn’t have to be these categories where you’re either a solo artist or a band—there could be something in between, and we explored that. It was an extension of our friendship. Like, let’s do this together. We had no idea what it could sound like, but it didn’t matter because the stakes were so low. It didn’t matter!
Jen Sbragia: And I just used the guitar and the amp that I had—it was the path of least resistance. Like, “Okay, this sounds pretty good, what do you think?” It was the sort of Beat Happening, well-that’s-good-enough sort of thing.
Rose Melberg: There was not a ton of intention. We just wanted to hang out and it was fun to play music together. We’d be like, “How about this? How about that? And this?” In Tiger Trap it was very much that there was a lead guitar and a rhythm guitar. I was so young. It was like, well, one plays rhythm and the other plays notes, but Jen had this experience as a lead guitar player so we wanted to take it even further where the guitar melodies would have a life of their own that would be different from the vocal melodies. We’d often write the guitar melody before Jen heard the vocal melody. It was these two separate melodies happening all the time. Jen had this ability to find this melody in a scale and I was like, “Yeah, let’s run with this.” I was so excited by how good a guitar player she was. I think I knew like eight chords at the time.
Jen Sbragia: Well, you had Beatles chords, you had jazzy chords.
Rose Melberg: I had my mom’s Beatles songbook, so that’s where I got a lot of my chords from. It all happened organically, and I just wanted to keep playing, and we just wanted to play together. Jen would come to Sacramento or I’d come to Santa Rosa. As soon as we had four songs we made the 7-inch. There was no other band that we were aiming to sound like.
Jen Sbragia: We were just… doing our thing (laughter).
Rose Melberg: We were glad when there was just something, because then we’d go on to the next song.
When I put on the first song from the new album, “Go Back in Time,” it was just this rush of emotion. Hearing you both harmonize felt like I was immediately back in the Softies world. Do you two remember when you first sang together? What’s the process like for figuring out those vocal harmonies?
Jen Sbragia: Rose is the brains behind the operation (laughter). Seriously! I’m just the noodly guitar player. She hears what she wants in her head and then teaches it to me.
Rose Melberg: I was just so stoked that you were so teachable. I’d be like, “Try this as a harmony,” and then you’d do it. And Jen hadn’t done a ton of singing.
Jen Sbragia: Just to the radio.
Rose Melberg: But she had a good ear. She could jump in without much confusion. It was so fun to write harmonies because when I realized you could actually sing…
Jen Sbragia: I can sing really high.
Rose Melberg: Exactly! I was like, oh you can sing higher than me! A lot of her harmonies are out of my range. Even now, when I do demos and am writing the harmony parts, my voice is cracking because I know that Jen can hit the high notes.
With The Bed I Made, a lot of the songs can read as romantic love songs, but I kept thinking about the notion of platonic love and how much of the Softies reflects who you two are. There’s no hiding when there’s only the two of you playing. How do you feel like you two have grown individually as a result of being a part of this band? Like, what would be different if you weren’t in this group?
Rose Melberg: That’s a very interesting question because so much of this band is rooted in our 30-year friendship. I think it’s no secret that some of my songs are about Jen. And again, it’s about platonic love but it’s really deep, filled with a lot of the same stuff you’d hear in a romantic love song. When I moved to Canada and we had to be a long-distance band, Jen was meeting people and starting to make music with others. I was so worried that I would fall to the bottom of Jen’s list. I’d write songs that would sound romantic but it was just me fearing that Jen would move on without me. That was more important to me than writing about romantic stuff.
And you’re right—there was no hiding, both sonically and lyrically. We had to try to make it interesting. There had to be an interesting guitar chord or a really good lyric because there was nothing else that was gonna hold it up. That’s when I started “collecting” chords. I would ask people, “What’s your favorite weird chord?” I couldn’t keep writing Softies songs behind the same four chords because there was no drum fill to make you realize, “Well, it’s E to G again.” I had to try to make it interesting. It was the same with the lyrics. Like, I better tell a good fucking story. I wanted to tear people apart, I wanted to move people. But I couldn’t have done that with any other band. I couldn’t have done that without the vulnerability we felt with each other.
It took a lot of courage for us to be vulnerable, especially when we couldn’t find the right bill for us. But we always had each other. We would open for Superchunk to 2000 people and nobody was going to listen to us, but we would focus on each other and the four people up front who were listening. I wouldn’t have been able to do this without Jen. It felt so safe. Like, I had to do my job and you had to do your job; it made us very brave. The vulnerability came from that—the safety. As long as we were having fun and doing what we wanted, it was okay. That’s what allowed us to keep getting more vulnerable. I didn’t care what anybody else thought; we were doing this with each other, we were doing this for each other. I’ve since written vulnerable songs with other bands, but this is where it began. It was an emotionally safe place, and I felt safe performing with you because I had such confidence in your abilities.
Jen Sbragia: And that’s what makes it okay that it’s really challenging for me. You can’t play the same notes that you’re singing; it has to be more interesting than that. And I don’t even know how many times where I’ve been like, “Well, we’ll write this guitar part, then we’ll sing something, and then I’ll figure out how to do both at the same time.” I need to go off to my room and practice over and over again until my hands know what they’re doing, and then I can sing. Not that I’ve been in a ton of other bands, but the other ones are not like us. It’s difficult, but it’s worth it.
When making this new album, did you have the same feelings you did back in the ’90s when making those older songs?
Jen Sbragia: There are some songs where Rose would send me the demo and I’d be like, “How could I add anything to this? It’s already perfect!”
What songs were like that?
Rose Melberg: “I Said What I Said” was pretty completely thought-out. And most songs on the record I demoed completely and then sent them to Jen and was like, “Do your magic.” “I Said What I Said” had three-part harmonies and beautiful major 7th chords and all that shit, but then Jen elevated it. Those fucking guitar parts!
And then the last song on the album [“Don’t Fall Apart”] is the last one we wrote. That has one of the more complicated arrangements. It has four parts and the chord structure was done, but we didn’t have the lyrics or the guitar lead. Just at the last minute, I found the vocal melody, wrote the lyrics, and I said, “Jen, you’ve gotta do your thing.” And you would send me a couple different ideas and I’d be like, “That’s not quite it.” And when you sent me those last ones, it popped. It was like, “You just made the song!” The first part of the song was a progression that Jen wrote, and then I wrote the rhythm part, and then Jen wrote those little guitar bits that turned it into a song I loved. (Jen smirks and gives a little chuckle).
Sometimes you have those songs that are the last ones on the record and it’s like, “Fuck! It’s just not coming to me!” Like, the parts are there but the song isn’t. And it’s Jen’s guitar part that turns it into a song. It’s the most fun part of the process. I can write a whole song with harmonies and demo everything, but until Jen is in it, it’s not a Softies song. Even with me singing harmonies to myself on the demo and then recording Jen doing it… it becomes a whole different song. Her voice is such an important part of what we sound like. That’s the magic of the Softies: one of us may write the whole song, but what the other person brings to it—whether it’s a big or small contribution—is essential. It elevates it to this other place where it’s no longer just mine. The sound of Jen’s voice, the tone of her guitar, her style when she writes the lead… it’s 100% her (Jen smirks and chuckles again).
Jen Sbragia: It’s so fun! And it’s hard too, but I’m always really proud of myself.
Rose Melberg: At the core of it, I still don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.
Jen Sbragia: Me too! (laughter).
Rose Melberg: I don’t understand what I’m doing, and I often don’t know the names of the chords I’m playing.
Jen Sbragia: Squeezy G!
Rose Melberg: We have a chord called Squeezy G! (laughter). I don’t know what the real chord is, we just make up the names. We’re still like that 30 years into the band. We have our own musical language. I’ll tell Jen, “I need this kind of vibe” and she’ll understand. Sometimes it’s unspoken, sometimes it’s our weird language. And that’s why so many people who have heard the new record are like, “It sounds the same!” It’s because this is what we know how to do.
Everything you’re saying is really beautiful to me. Not knowing what you’re doing and it eventually coming together, of being surprised and happy about it all—I mean, that’s just what love is.
(Jen and Rose cheerfully laugh, look at each other, and hug).
Rose Melberg: Every song is a wild leap of faith! There’s a lyric about that on the record on the song “To You From Me.” That one is about songwriting. It’s about inspiration. A song is this moment, this feeling that comes to you. It’s like love—you can’t put your finger on it, but if it’s meant to be, it happens.
I really like “To You From Me” because it’s so short. And this is true of so many Softies songs: you don’t feel the need to stretch a song out to three or four minutes. It’s very much in this spirit of taking in the moment and letting it just be that. And even on the song “Don’t Fall Apart,” which is the most complex song on the album, it has the one line that says, “I’ve allowed a thousand loves to come and go.” There’s always this match between lyrics and music. I wanted to ask, what’s the most recent thing you both have learned about love?
Jen Sbragia: Wew!
Rose Melberg: We don't totally love to talk about being middle-aged but god damn, everything changes. The wisdom comes hard and fast. These ideas of romantic love we had… like, when we hear these early songs that have so much aching and longing, we have such tenderness for these former versions of ourselves. I could still write those same songs today, but they would mean something different; we’d be longing for something deeper or wider.
There were times when we were very specific, when we would be telling a story of something that happened. And now it’s more us writing about feelings… it’s bigger and wider and more open-ended. I consciously try to leave open space for people’s feelings. It can be about a very specific thing for me, but it can be about whatever you want it to be. We’ve realized that romantic love can be many things. There is not just one romantic ideal, and that’s something we’ve learned the hard way. And we’re still learning—I’m on my second marriage. We more deeply understand the openness and nuance of being a sensitive, tender person and allowing love and grief and loss into your heart.
It feels very comforting because any of these songs could be heard just as a romantic love song, and yet that’s not what they’re about. Or they’re about many things. And a lot of the songs I was writing on this record saw me mining a part of my life from a while ago that paralleled things that Jen is going through now. On a few songs, I got into a space where I’m telling both of our stories. I was trying to help Jen articulate feelings about her life based on things I did, and I turned it into a song. It became this beautiful shared experience that was about both of us in different phases of our life. That felt really meaningful and deep to me. This was about the reality of letting love in your life and questioning feelings and being honest with yourself. And then asking, “Can I make this into a pop song with nuance?”
What songs reflect this shared experience?
Rose Melberg: “I Said What I Said” and “Go Back in Time,” which started out as a song about grief. It was about losing my mom, and Jen had also lost her mom, but then we had this conversation about missing former versions of ourselves, about missing times in our lives, about wishing you could go back in time and redo what you did.
We were both going through a hard time, grieving the loss of our mothers. I remember I had the first couple of lines in my head and I was walking down the stairs and I said, “Jen! I just wrote a couple more lines and I think this song is turning into a song about missing former versions of ourselves.” And she was like, “Sick.” (laughter). I remember the moment that it shifted, where it went from missing a person to also missing a version of yourself; we were feeling that so deeply at the time. “I Said What I Said” was about relationship stuff that we experienced at different times.
Jen, I wanted to give you the chance to answer the question if you still wanted to. What is something you’ve learned about love recently?
Jen Sbragia: I wrote a couple of songs on this album with Rose’s help and I realized that I’m still exactly the same (laughter). I still love a song about unrequited love—it’s just my favorite thing. I just had very strong, complex feelings and I thought I was going to die. I had to transform those emotions into a song, and I was like, “I can do this. I am still the exact person as when I was 25 years old.” There’s comfort in that when you’re like, “I have to change!” but then realize, “Baby girl, that’s just how it is.”
Rose Melberg: It’s just like the line in “Don’t Fall Apart”: “I don’t require repair / I just need care.” We’re not broken, there’s nothing wrong with us, but sometimes we still have the same exact problems we did when we were in our 20s. The same anguish. It’s still very real, and we’re still very much who we are. And it can be comforting.
Jen Sbragia: I’ve been through so much therapy and I’m still writing the same songs. I mean, kind of (laughter). It’s my favorite topic! It’s where I feel the most emotion in my life.
Rose Melberg: It’s pop song juice!
Which song is this?
Jen Sbragia: I’m thinking of “Tiny Flame” and “Sigh Sigh Sigh.”
Rose Melberg: We wrote “Tiny Flame” together and the chorus actually came about because we were talking about using the word “baby” in the song as a challenge. Can we pull off a Softies song with the word “baby”? (laughter).
I loved what you two mentioned about longing for past versions of yourselves, but also that Softies songs have a different sort of meaning to you today. In playing live last year and with the tour coming up, can you expand on specific Softies songs that feel different now?
Rose Melberg: There are a couple songs now where we’re like, that’s inappropriate, we’re not going to sing them anymore (laughter). And I’m not gonna tell you which ones those are. But I don’t think I feel disconnected from any of the songs we’ve written.
I’m not necessarily talking about feeling disconnected to them, but that the feelings you have while singing them now register differently.
Rose Melberg: What I mostly feel about the old songs is a deep tenderness for my old self. Like, “Oh honey… the drama, the seriousness, the sadness.” I sing them now and I think, “Oh sweetheart, I wish you had more love and support.” I have such a tenderness for those songs. There isn’t any song where I’m like, “Eugh.” It was all real. It’s like a journal of my 20s and 30s. What a gift to have this wisdom from my younger self that resonates today. I will never be disconnected from that part of myself, that young, vulnerable, scared, insecure person. When we do the old songs, I feel empathy for that person, even if the songs are about people that I now hate (laughter). Like, “Look at you go! Look at you articulating your feelings at 22 years old.” (laughter). There isn’t a single song that I regret.
Jen Sbragia: Yeah, me neither.
Rose Melberg: There isn’t a single song that I can’t summon the same feelings again.
Jen Sbragia: When I sing old songs, I usually think of what I was thinking about when I wrote them.
Rose Melberg: It’s like a movie. I remember why I wrote every single line and I have this image in my mind. I’m deeply connected to every song I’ve ever written. Everything was so real. I think about that as our girlhood. We were in our early 20s when we started playing together. My son is 22! And I think about starting the Softies when I was 22 and think, wow, you were just figuring shit out. What a beautiful thing to have documented.
Yeah, I love looking through my old diary from when I was in high school or college and it’s like, oh shit, the same stuff I was worrying about then is what I’m worrying about today. Some things just don’t change even though I’ve matured in so many ways. Like wow, this is still me.
Rose Melberg: We bring a different kind of wisdom now, but it was all ultimately my truth. It was my truth then and it is my truth now.
I love the sort of whiplash I feel on the album when listening to a track like “When I Started Loving You” and then “Just Someone.” The former has the line, “I'm sleeping better than I ever have / I don’t even need to do the math / To know it started when I started loving you.” And then “Just Someone” has the line “’Cause anything can become forgotten / And anyone can become just someone.”
Rose Melberg: I have a story about “When I Started Loving You.” I was driving to Seattle once and I was thinking about the fact that I have a lot of songs about insomnia in both Tiger Trap and Softies. I write a lot about how I have trouble sleeping. We have that Softies song [“Sleep Away Your Troubles”] where I ask the person sleeping next to me to kill me because I want to sleep. And I was like, wouldn’t it be great to do a country music response song? And so the first line is, “I’m sleeping better than I ever have.” I think I made a comment, like, “Everyone’s gonna expect another insomnia song from me. What if I did the opposite and told everyone that I was doing a lot better?” (laughter). My mental health is a lot better, and I’m sleeping better than I ever have.
The thing about “When I Started Loving You” is that it’s actually a song about self-love. It’s about how my life started when I started loving myself. I don’t hate myself anymore. The line, “It all began the night they towed the van” had to do with me leaving Tiger Trap. There was a whole van fiasco, and it’s a reference to how breaking up that band was the first time I did something really scary as an act of self-love. This band was gonna kill me, but giving it up was really hard. It was a dream, it was everything I ever wanted—I was in a cool, popular band! But it was making me go crazy, and it wasn’t where I needed to be. So that is a song about coming into my ability to take care of myself. I’m glad it reads as a romantic song, but it’s about loving yourself. It’s kind of cheesy.
Well, love is cheesy.
Rose Melberg: Yeah, exactly. And the line, “I used to have a beehive in my mind” is a reference to my mental health. Life used to be a lot harder, but now I’m doing better—that’s at the heart of that song. But yeah, the whiplash to go into “Just Someone”... though that’s also a reassuring song to me. It’s a song about hope. This thing that feels like it’s killing you right now, this thing that is the saddest thing that has happened to you, someday it will be nothing. Someday you will see a picture of that person and just say, “Oh yeah, it’s them.” With time, everything gets better. I really tried to put a lot of hope on this record.
Is there anything that we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to talk about?
Jen Sbragia: I can’t think of anything.
Rose Melberg: Writing this record was so fun because we had this evolved wisdom and we turned it into a Softies record. That’s The Bed I Made. And we’re on my bed right now—this is literally the bed referenced in the song (laughter).
There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
Jen Sbragia: (laughs). I love that I make myself laugh all the time. I just think of things and I laugh. It’s seriously a great thing to be able to do, if one can. I’ll be talking to myself, or I’ll remember something funny I did, and I’ll just laugh. I’ll see something that’s funny and just think, I’m so glad that I think it’s funny (laughter). I just wanna laugh!
Rose Melberg: That’s so good. I love how much I love music. I love that I’ve honored that part of myself for my whole life. I love that I’ve been brave and have sacrificed so many things in my life to keep this love alive. I love my musical dedication. I feel really proud of myself for continuing to grow as an artist. I love my capacity to love music. I just want music to be a part of my life.
The Softies’ music can be heard at Bandcamp. Their new album, The Bed I Made, is out August 23rd via Father/Daughter Records. The Softies will be on tour throughout the next few months and tour dates can be found at the Father/Daughter website.
Rose Melberg’s Mixtape For a Crush
I asked if the band could share a list of their favorite songs. Rose Melberg sent me the following and labeled it “A Mixtape For a Crush (A Few of my Favorite Love Songs).”
Judee Sill - “The Kiss”
LAKE - “Takin’ My Time”
Arthur Russell - “That’s Us/Wild Combination”
Mighty Clouds - “Fierce Love”
Nick Drake - “Northern Sky”
Barbara Manning - “Talk All Night”
The Delfonics - “La-La (Means I Love You)”
Colin Blunstone - “Let Me Come Closer to You”
Tender Leaf - “You Are My Love”
Rufus Wainwright - “Peaceful Afternoon”
serpentwithfeet - “Old & Fine”
Thank you for reading the 154th issue of Tone Glow. Don’t let yourself live a music-filled life alone.
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So beautiful. I love their vibe together so much. Thanks for capturing it so well.