Listen Close #7 'Garden Song' by Phoebe Bridgers

Listening to newly released tracks is essential, you never know when a song will grab you emotionally, excite you musically or just leave you wondering ‘how did they make that sound!?’. 

​This week I’ve been spent a lot of my time taking in Phoebe Bridgers’ new album, ‘Punisher’, and I’d like to invite you to listen along with me to ‘Garden Song’, an understated but spellbinding production that has provided all three of those feelings for me. 

I’ll discuss the component parts of the track, how they fit together, why they work so well and how the creative team made the decisions that formed this uniquely melancholy song. ​

I’ve been splitting my listening between streaming while out and about, via Apple Music, and a 96kHz 24bit .wav version purchased from bandcamp​. You can find the song on all the major streaming services or hear it right now, featured in the player below. Be sure to follow the Listen Close playlist on Spotify for quick access to some production or mix inspiration, and follow Mix Perspective on Instagram for a reminder when a new blog is ready, plus insight into my listening process. 

​Before we deep dive into the listening, it’s important to remember that very few songs we hear are entirely the work of one person, the album ‘Punisher’ was produced by Tony Berg, Ethan Gruska and Phoebe herself, engineered by Will Maclellan and Joseph Lorge, mixed by Mike Mogis and mastered by Bob Ludwig. Phoebe wrote the song, with the albums liner notes listing Christian Lee Hutson and Marshall Vore as having provided “emotional and lyrical” support.
 
‘Punisher’ was released on the 18th of June on Dead Oceans, with ‘Garden Song’ being the lead single, getting a video and streaming release back in February. While instrumental mood setter ‘DVD Menu’ opens the album officially, ‘Garden Song’ is the first track that introduces Bridgers' finger picked guitar style and delicate vocal delivery that is so key to hooking you into her song writing as well as setting a tone for album going forward.

This is basic singer-songwriter production… isn’t it?

​‘Garden Song’ initially seems like a rudimentary production, comprised of a number of guitar parts, a constant kick drum with several layers of vocal bolstering the choruses. Despite this apparent simplicity (especially compared to something like this previous Listen Close subject track by occasional Bridgers collaborators The 1975) listening in more detail reveals that the production is constantly engaging the listener, using a sharp focus on the vocal performance and subtle shifts in the textures surrounding it to gently lead your ear from section to section. Many momentary background special effects keep a casual listener’s ear from getting bored and provide extra depth to lyrical phrases for those paying close attention. 
 
The first verse sets the scene, presenting an almost underwater sounding instrumental, with the central baritone electric guitar part and kick drum having been subjected to a steep low pass filter. These sounds define the overall emotional tone of the song, a muted melancholy feeling, but your ear is also caught by the stuttering and garbled sound that swirls around the stereo field giving the track a sense of width far greater than the mono guitar, vocal and kick drum could readily provide (see Get That Sound below for more detail).

Get That Sound

The verses of ‘Garden Song’ feature bizarre and spacey sounds that float around the stereo field, providing the track with a distinct vibe of its own right from the off. In the liner notes for the song, the only a reference to these sounds are as  ‘sound design’ provided by Ethan Gruska, but to my ear this sounds like a manipulation of that main baritone guitar part, it’s been distorted and warped almost beyond recognition, but it retains some sense of ‘guitarness’ to it. 
 
I would be willing to put money on the effect itself being generated by SoundToysEffectRack plugin. The high pitched granular trill, heard on the right side at 00:05 and then much more clearly as the track ends at 03:33, is a telltale sign of fun being had with the Crystallizer module. 
 
Unfortunately without access to the original guitar part feeding the processors and with so many possible combinations of modules in EffectRack, recreating the exact effect is a bit of a tall order. I would  highly recommend demoing the SoundToys plugins though, as some truly weird and wonderful noises can be made for your own projects, just by placing them on an existing rhythmic or melodic part and scrolling through some pre-sets. 

​Not wanting to be totally defeatist about it though, I set out to see how close I could get to recreating the effect, with the notion that at least something interesting might come out of it. 
Recruiting my friend Sam of Smotherly Love to have a go at copying Phoebes guitar part, I jumped into EffectRack to see what I could do. 

​First take a listen to the dry guitar signal

Dry Guitar

​From here it seemed to me that there are two different effects happening in the original track. There is a warped and stuttering sound that drops in and out slightly chaotically, as well as the dreamier granulated trills that float around.

Copying the audio of the dry guitar on to two new tracks, I loaded EffectRack on each and began tinkering. For the stuttering sound I decided that the Tremolator module would provide the drop outs, while a combination of the EchoBoys tape emulation, Decapitator and FilterFreak would do the warping. This didn't quite achieve the right level of weirdness, so I added Crystallizer to garble the sound a little further. You can hear the result below. 

Stutter Guitar Effect

​
​On the second track, I started with a similar combination of EchoBoy and FilterFreak, but then pushed Crystallizer to a very different place, upping the recycle amount and using a slower delay time to create the bubbling trills. I then added an instance of PanMan using its  step feature to give the sound discrete positions that move across the stereo field rhythmically, roughly recreating the movement felt in 'Garden Song'. Each of these modules is also adding saturation in varying degrees to push the sound tonally away from the original guitar part. Hear the finished effect below.

Crystal Guitar Effect

Now that you've heard the component parts, listen to them in combination with the original guitar part. I've added in a kick drum so we can compare the overall feel to the original 'Garden Song'.

Completed Garden Song Guitar Effects with Kick Drum

As you can hear, this isn't a perfect recreation. Like I said before, the sheer number of variables involved creating complex sounds like this means getting the same result twice can be almost impossible! But on a more positive note, I now have two interesting effects presets of my own ready to add some texture to future projects! 

If you'd like to try out these effects for yourself, you can download my presets below. Download the files and then drag them into an open instance of SoundToys EffectRack, even the trial version. 

Download Presets

At 00:19 seconds Phoebe’s voice enters, and opens up the frequency range of the track massively. As you can see from the FFT Spectrum graphics below, before she sings the track is restrained to 3kHz and lower, her voice then pushing the frequency content right up to the upper limits of our hearing at 20kHz.

'Garden Song' Spectrum at 00:18

and at 00:19 when the vocal arrives.

​It’s worth noting that the track does still contain some frequencies above that rough 3kHz cut off in the intro, it’s just that their level falls below the threshold of the analyser I’ve used here. This content is primarily just the noise floor of the recording, a white noise like hiss, but its inclusion is essential to keep the track feeling natural and ‘whole’. The presence of this noise softens the apparent severity of the filtered guitar and allows the vocal to pleasantly add to an existing sound rather than jarringly barging in as an entirely new-to-our-ear frequency. New frequencies can be exciting in a mix, but here the intention is to keep things more mellow and relaxed sounding. 
 
This first verse is used to introduce (or reintroduce if you’ve listened to Bridgers previous album)  the listener to the finger picked guitar and striking but gentle voice that make up the core components of the Phoebe Bridgers sound. On the mix side of things the track defines its boundaries in terms of frequency content, the kick drum controlling the low end, the guitar confined to the low mid while most of the upper mid and high frequency space is reserved for the vocal. After a full minute of this balance ‘Garden Song’ moves into its first chorus, and here is where things start to get a little more interesting. 

Going Against The Grain

​It is common, particularly within pop and alternative genres, for the chorus of a song to expand the sound out from the preceding verse. While there are many different ways to achieve this, the easiest and perhaps most common method to achieve this is a widening of the stereo field (check out my thoughts on Hayley Williams ‘Simmer’ for a look at another particularly effective method).  What caught my ear with ‘Garden Song’ though is that its chorus takes almost the exact opposite approach. 
 
The chorus arrives at the 01:00 mark, and almost immediately the sound design element that has been providing the sense of width in the verses fades out, pushing the track into a much more mono place. This potentially sharp transition is covered by the bold introduction of the much lower pitched vocal part, which I’ll come back to, while the additional guitar part that arrives at 01:01 is panned slightly to the right, ensuring that some sense of stereo is maintained. The effect is subtle, but reducing the stereo width gives the track a more focused feeling, your ear can hone in on Phoebe’s lyrics. 
 
While ‘Garden Song’ eschews one of the most common methods of making a chorus feel bigger, it does still utilise some classic tricks in this regard. During the choruses a double track of Phoebe’s voice is quietly introduced, thickening the sound in a way that is almost always pleasing to hear, without distracting from the main melody in the way a higher harmony part might have. 
 
The most obvious addition though is the aforementioned low-pitched vocal, which adds an interesting and slightly peculiar texture to the chorus. This voice has an entirely different timbre to Phoebe’s, which I initially thought had been achieved by manipulating another double track of her vocal with a pitch and formant shifter. But, having scoured Punisher’s credits I found there is reference to a Jeroen Vrijhoef as having performed on track 2, ‘Garden Song’, but not to what he played. Wikipedia has jumped to the conclusion that he’s featured as a vocalist and I am inclined to agree, but I’m also not sure we’re hearing exactly Jeroen’s natural singing voice...

Everything You Wanted

​Those of you that follow this blog, or perhaps just keep a keen ear out for interesting things happening in pop music might notice that there’s something familiar about the rolled off sound to ‘Garden Song’. To my ear the song is using very similar tricks to ‘everything i wanted’ by Billie Eilish, which I wrote about in detail just a few weeks ago. 
 
It’s worth making clear at this point, that with the amount of time and effort that goes into producing music as polished as either of these tracks, it is fairly unlikely that the release of ‘everything i wanted’ back in November 2019 would have had an impact on a single that debuted to the public in February 2020. However it does make for an interesting chance to directly compare the same ideas approached by different producers for different artists. 

Both ‘Garden Song’ and ‘everything i wanted’ utilise instrumentals that steeply filter out their high end to leave plenty of frequency range space for delicate female vocals. It’s possible that the idea for this high end reduction stems from the lyrics in both cases. Phrases like “see your reflection in the water”, “the screen turns into a tidal wave” from ‘Garden Song’ and “but my head was underwater” from ‘everything i wanted’ lend themselves to a sound that evokes the feeling of being submerged. ​

Billie Eilish's 'everything i wanted'

In leaving a large space in the audible frequency range for the vocals to fill, both sets of producers seem have come across the same problem and solved it in similar, but by no means identical ways. Rolling off the high end drastically removes most of the definition of a sound; it’s much harder to distinguish what and how something is being played without that 3khz and upwards content. To combat this, both songs take the instrument providing the chords in the verses and double down on that feeling of unintelligibility and mangle them even further. In ‘Garden Song’ the addition of the sound design element gives your ear an unusual texture to grab on to, rather than missing the detail, you’re hooked by the novelty of a unique sound. In ‘everything I wanted’ the same result is achieved by implementing heavy sidechain compression and distortion to the main piano part. 
 
These overlaps are fascinating to me, if these two equally interesting productions can arrive at the same conclusions and still come out sounding unique, it gives us a new perspective on how we might create something interesting for our own mixes. Starting out with an already successfully implemented idea can still lead to a production that is entirely our own.   ​

​The texture of Jeroen's low harmony part feels slightly unnatural, there’s a slightly buzzy quality to the midrange that suggests it has had its formant and possibly pitch shifted down. The result of this is that the vocal gains a kind of anonymous and mysterious feeling that ensures it remains a supporting part, enhancing rather than distracting from the lead vocal and ensuring the song doesn’t start to feel like Phoebe Bridgers feat. Jeroen Vrijhoef.

little alterboy from SoundToys is one of my favourite plug-ins for unusual vocal textures.

These mix shifts in the chorus are individually subtle, but the overall impact informs your ear that this is where the song wants your attention most, pulling your focus to the centre and exciting your ear with new sounds. 
 
For the second verse the mix shifts back to the width and vocal production of the first, letting the stereo information feel new again but easing the intensity of the track back slightly to give definition to the section. As the second verse has more lyrics than the first, a change up in Phoebe’s vocal performance for the final part keeps it feeling fresh. The second chorus uses the same tricks from the first to get maximum satisfaction from the two different approaches. ​

Big Picture Approach

​‘Garden Song’ is a great example of a track that takes what could have potentially been an uninspiring arrangement, and with a few broad brush stroke moves turns it into a production that is intriguing from the outset. When working on our own productions and mixes it can be tempting to get carried away with mix tricks and ear candy moments, but here focusing on the bigger picture of the emotional tone and where the listener is focused does most of the heavy lifting in terms of keeping the song consistently interesting. It certainly doesn’t hurt that those bigger decisions give ‘Garden Song’ a striking tonal quality and use the ‘sound design’ element to add something truly unique. 

---

Stray Obversations

This week I’ve really tried to look at the mix from a fairly zoomed out perspective, but like a lot of tracks that I love, listening even closer reveals lots of little details and moments sprinkled over its run time, here are some interesting things I noticed:

• The verses contain a second layer to the sound design element that’s present at the start of every four bars, a low midrangey buzz is central in the mix, which is likely also derived from the main guitar part. 
• A rich stereo Plate Reverb is present around Phoebes vocal and it retains its stereo spread throughout the song, as such it’s more clearly heard in the choruses. 
• A second reverb creeps up and blooms out on the words ‘door frame’ at 00:57, further blending the end of the first verse and the start of the first chorus.
• That reverb then returns at 02:00 to wash out the words “to a tidal wave,” it’s slightly denser here, briefly creating a burst of noise at 02:03 that recalls the sound of ocean waves.
• A deep synth bass sound is subtly adding emphasis to certain phrases in the choruses, it blends nicely with the formant shifted vocals into one texture. It’s most clearly heard at 01:20 under the words "and then I knew."
• The vocal double tracks are more pronounced in the second chorus, helping it feel more intense than the first. 
• A little bit of light googling reveals that Jeroen Vrijhoef is a tour manager, looks like he worked on Phoebe Bridgers European shows in 2019. Hope he’s doing ok while live music is taking such a hard hit from the pandemic! 

 
#LetTheMusicPlay

---

Further Listening

‘Garden Song’ is immediately followed on the album ‘Kyoto’ which I thoroughly recommend to hear another side to Phoebe’s songwriting, as well as some triumphant sounding brass, something I’ve particularly responded to after Last Week’s blog.
 
While researching this blog I discovered that ‘Punisher’ co-producer Ethan Gruska is an artist in his own right, check out his track ‘Blood in Rain’ featuring previous Listen Close subject Moses Sumney.

---

​Thanks so much for taking the time to explore another song with me. I would love to hear your thoughts on this track; you can find Mix Perspective on Instagram, leave a comment on this blog post or email me by following the Contact tab below. What’s your favourite track from ‘Punisher’? Do you know of another song that gets narrower in the choruses? Or one that separates its instrumental in such an extreme way? I’d love to hear what you think!