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When considering Phoebe Bridgers, Christmas music certainly isn’t the first thing that comes to mind, but the indie-alt singer-songwriter, known for her haunting vocals and lyrical prowess, also dabbles in the realm of holiday music, releasing five season-appropriate covers in the past four years. Starting off with “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” in 2017, Bridgers updates the well-known classic with a beautifully ethereal spin, evoking a sense of nostalgia more so than hope for the coming holiday. The next year she released a cover of McCarthy Trenching’s “Christmas Song,” which has an upbeat tempo that superbly parallels with heartbreaking lyrics that chronicle the unique sadness that oftentimes comes with the holiday season: “you don’t have to be alone to be lonesome / it’s easy to forget / the sadness comes crashing like a brick through the window / and it’s Christmas so no one can fix it.” Her 2019 release signaled a thematic shift in the holiday covers, as she released “7 O’Clock News / Silent Night” paying homage to Simon & Garfunkel’s track of the same name, which features vocals of “Silent Night” overlaid by a mock-version of the seven o’clock news, displaying, as journalist Bruce Eder claims, “a grim and ironic (and prophetic) comment on the state of the United States in 1966.” Bridgers’s version functions much in the same way, but instead of news reports on Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, and Nixon, the newscast references Trump, police brutality, and Roe V. Wade. 2019’s commentary on the state of our nation was followed by a cover of Merle Haggard’s 1973 track “If We Make it Through December,” which tells the story of a parent who is unable to provide a proper Christmas for their child due to being laid off. “If we make it through December we’ll be fine,” sings Bridgers in an eerily apropos line which alludes not only the financial hardships brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, but also the generalized unease and global despair, waiting month by month for life to look a little brighter by its end.
Bridgers released this year’s cover on Nov. 30th, her version of Tom Waits’s “The Day After Tomorrow” which tells the story of a soldier reflecting on their time at war and longing for their loved ones. Two lines of “Silent Night” and distant sounds of bells are the only references to the holiday season on the track, making this her least festive of the bunch but perhaps her most cathartic and timely. Upon first listen, it may be puzzling as to why Bridgers selected to release a song originally protesting the Iraq War during this destabilized world of a lingering pandemic. However, Bridgers’s unique talent has always been speaking to indefinable feelings and evoking emotions within her listener which at once seem intangible and specific in a way that is personal to each individual. While Bridgers isn’t the first musical artist to liken this pandemic to wartime (think Taylor Swift’s “epiphany”, for example), the underlying implication that we are soldiers living in a brutal, crumbling world resonates as surprising and gut-wrenchingly pertinent to our present state. Bridgers’s wistful and melancholic voice and tone sings of wartime and lack of connection but the listener resonates with attempts to retain hope in the world of an ever-evolving pandemic where the end always seems just out of reach.
“Day After Tomorrow” opens with the soldier getting a letter from their family, singing of how much they miss them and that they’re counting the days until they return home—they “still believe that there’s gold / at the end of the world” and are hopeful their homecoming will be possible. The framework of a soldier longing for family translates within the allegory to families disrupted due to Covid-19 out of fear of spreading the virus to loved ones, which becomes especially difficult and isolating during the holidays where gathering to celebrate is a hallmark of the season. “I still don’t know how I’m supposed to feel / about all the blood that’s been spilled / will God on his throne get me back home,” sings the soldier, asking “tell me how does God choose / whose prayers does he refuse?” In these lines, Bridgers captures the praying, the sorrow, the abandonment we feel within our world today and the struggle to grapple with the magnitude of lives lost during the pandemic. The soldier then chronicles the turn of the season, singing “and the summer, it too will fade / and with it brings the winter’s frost, dear / and I know we too are made / of all the things that we have lost here,” the sentiment paralleling our own hope that with the passing of the season the state of our lives will change, but understanding that there is no returning to what once was and is now missing from our lives.
Perhaps the most effective line in the piece is “I am fighting for my life / and another day in the world here”, which speaks to those during the pandemic who experienced the day to day fear of survival, but also to perhaps the most pertinent element of the allegory: the quiet everyday, unspoken suffering which many of us have experienced since the pandemic began. Once again, Bridgers has bottled a specific experience and feeling within this song in a magical and poignant way, elucidating the pervasive hopelessness present within our current culture and the difficulty of mere day to day life. The titular lyric displays these emotions the most clearly and achingly; the soldier sings of returning “on the day after tomorrow”, and the unspoken truth within these words rings painfully true to our modern listener. Our “plane it will touch down” but not tomorrow, rather the day after, as each night we go to sleep and know the next day will be the same but perhaps, just maybe, the day after tomorrow will finally be the day we return both to the home we knew and the internal home of who we were before this all began. There will be some peace just over the horizon line, almost in sight, as each day we fight for the next, hoping to be one of the “lucky ones” who “comes home on the day after tomorrow”.
It feels as though Bridgers alone would be capable of unlocking this unique feeling within the hearts of listeners, as the only clues we have to this extended allegory is our current lives and her strange, inimitable voice which somehow conveys it all. Whatever next year’s release may bring, this song will be unparalleled in the sheer emotion and catharsis it elicits as well as the beauty of understanding that we aren’t all suffering alone, which is a sentiment that perhaps serves as enough to get us through this pandemic until we are no longer waiting for the day after tomorrow.
