Photo by Lera Pentelute
To make a braid, you need three strands of hair. A stool needs three legs to stand. And when individually acclaimed singer-songwriters Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus join their formidable vocal, compositional and instrumental talents, the sum is even greater than its parts. The three artists ended their tour together at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles Friday night, each performing separate sets, then taking the stage together for the power trio they ironically call Boygenius — because girls don’t get called geniuses. But when they blended their voices in perfect three-part harmony on “Ketchum, ID” before a soldout crowd, it was genius, ungendered and true.
Looking and sounding like a young Melissa Etheridge, Baker is the powerhouse of the three, on both throat and ax — a supremacy her bandmates honored by taking to their knees and hailing her with deep bows when she partook in some serious shredding. But Dacus has a wonderful deep timbre, and Bridgers has an Emmylou Harris-meets-Hope Sandoval husk. It’s empowering to see the way they bring their voices together, never upstaging or hotdogging.
They talk in interviews about the strength they have found in numbers, how their support of each other has allowed them to express and articulate thoughts and feelings — and jokes — in ways they had never felt free to do before. All three, individually and collectively, make music drenched in melancholy. So when they find relief in each other, it’s all the more liberating. I mean it was cool when the National’s Matt Berninger and film composer Stephan Altman came out and performed with Baker during her solo set. But Boygenius felt like a statement, a pinnacle.
At the end of the evening, the end of the tour, Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus hugged and cried, and so did a lot of the audience. Rule of thirds: three is not a crowd, it’s a movement.
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