It’s been hard to ignore the prolific rise of Phoebe Bridgers, especially “Kyoto” the highly addictive lead single from her 2020 breakthrough album, Punisher.
It seems that Geographer has been just as addicted as the rest of us, as he has shared a lovely cover of the track ahead of his upcoming tour. It captures the heart and soul and the essence of the song, with a twist of his own as well.
Explaining the origin, he says:
This song started out as a Wedding gift for the wife of the editor of Atwood Magazine. Learning the song made me fall even more in love with it, particularly the lyrics of the verses. The line in the chorus is what originally made me do a double-take when listening to the song for the first time. I’ve never heard anyone sing anything like ‘I’m gonna kill you if you don’t beat me to it,’ and to start the line off on the 9th of the chord, with so much tension, it was a two-for-one deal on novel and moving.
In stripping the song down and singing the verses over and over I finally understood what the song was about, and saw how impressively crafted it is, it’s like a Keats poem. Ideas flow into each other, and the emotional weight of the ideas that bounce off of each other is somehow buoyant and immense, like a cargo ship laden with goods from some foreign market, impossibly righting itself every time it pitches on the massive waves. The cover truly took shape after the suggestion to flesh out the arrangement and not just have it be stripped down. I tried a lot of things—flute, strings, piano—until settling on what I described to the mastering engineer as a “digital hellscape” to play the role of the aforementioned waves. I don’t know if I’ve ever used dissonance to quite such an emotional effect, in such delicate conversation with simple beauty, walking the line we do in life, between the looming horrors around us and the small joys of our lives.
Enjoy a listen to his cover of “Kyoto” now below.
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