Is Phoebe Bridgers Making You Sadder?

The psychology behind sad music and what it does for our emotions. 

Phoebe Bridgers, the critically acclaimed pop artist, is culturally known for her melancholic sound. For Gen Z, she represents the soundtrack for coming-of-age stories and teenage breakups. Similar to Conan Gray or Lana Del Rey, she has built a discography perfectly suited for staring out a car window. But does tying our emotions to songs help us move on, or keep us trapped in a playlist of sadness? 

University of Chicago professor Larry Zbikowski calls music “the language of emotion.” He studies human cognitive processes and how it shapes the way we understand music, with or without lyrics. 

“Because the musical part of music doesn’t really have linguistic meaning, we’re a little bit freer to make certain associations with those sounds,” Zbikowski said. “We’re not driven in a particular way, and when we have that sort of situation, we start to move much more naturally toward emotion.”

The non-lyrical aspect of music is dubbed “patterned non-linguistic sound,” a feature that appears across every culture in a variety of different formats. However, the sounds that evoke certain emotions are subjective to individual cultures. Michael Lewanski, an associate professor at DePaul’s School of Music, said no single pitch can be understood as sad to everyone. 

“Other musics around the world actually have completely different ways of organizing pitches,” Lewanski said. “And so what they think is sad is not what we think is sad.” 

However, when it comes to modern music culture in the United States, artists like Bridgers utilize certain techniques like string instruments and minor triads to express certain emotions. 

Lewanski compares musicians to chefs, as they both have a set of techniques or spices to work with. 

“If you’re creative about deploying them and combining them, then you will evoke the emotion that you want to evoke in the same way that you can get spicy or savory,” he said. 

Outside of the choice behind pitches, the perspective of the listener also has an impact on how music is interpreted. 

“If you’re kind of feeling a little blue, you put some blue music on and that kind of almost amplifies it,” Zbikowski said, referring to the psychological process of amplification. For all the Bridgers fans out there, this would be listening to “Waiting Room” over and over. 

Music’s impact expands beyond emotion: It reaches into our memory, making it so we associate certain moments or people with songs. Even an objectively upbeat melody may spark tears because it was popular years ago and played the night you broke up with your ex.

On the other hand, there are many sad-music listeners out there who will tell you it does not make them sad. This can be attributed to personal disposition, the psychological term to describe the general state a person is in as they regularly go through life. It can be simplified to if they are generally a happy or unhappy person throughout various situations. In this case, different dispositions result in different reactions to the same songs. 

“Someone who is sort of invariably upbeat and happy, they’re still going to understand sad music. They can hear it and categorize it as ‘Oh, that’s a sad piece,’ but it may not [evoke] sadness in them,” Zbikowski said. For people with this disposition, sad music offers something to be appreciated instead of amplified. 

Harper Lahde, a sophomore at DePaul, listens to stereotypically sad music for the beauty of the  lyrics. Artists like Alex G and Elliot Smith are her favorites, both with dreamy sounds in the indie-folk genre. 

“If I am trying to listen to music that’s sad, it’s because I’m trying to find a song that puts words to my feelings, you know?” Lahde said. 

For many listeners, this is what Bridgers does best: providing poetic lyrics that somehow relate to each of our lives. Whether or not her songs are making you sadder, though, seems to depend on why you listen and what you listen for. 

“One thing that happens in Bridgers songs and Boygenius in general is they’re sort of not about one thing, there’s all of these layers that are typically in their songs,” Zbikowski said. “So people could be starting with music that might amplify their sad state, but then they might also be appreciating more dimensionality to their emotional state.” 

Header Image by Steph McClintic