Album Review: The Bed I Made by The Softies

Coming two decades after their last album, Holiday in Rhode Island, The Bed I Made exceeds the wildest dreams and loftiest expectations any Softies fan might have had when they heard that Rose Melberg and Jen Sbragia were getting the band back together. It's both a comforting bit of time travel and exactly the kind of deeply felt, precisely played, and warmly cocooned record that anyone tired of the overwhelming blare of plastic pop needs. Built around chiming guitars, sunshine-dappled melodies, and still-breathtaking harmonies, the album delves into strong stuff like the pull of the past, the glory and disaster of love, and the loss of important people in their lives.

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To the uninitiated, a band like the Softies can only conjure up images of tender quietude and intimate emotion. Famously, that’s only partially accurate: Rose Melberg and Jen Sbragia certainly dialed back the volume by cutting out bass and drums, but their wielding of two electric guitars while singing crisp harmonies often made them a bit too loud for living room acoustic sets and a bit too quiet for big indie rock showcases. It’s this unconventional approach, inspired by legendary oddballs like Daniel Johnston, and their excitement to embrace vulnerability that led the Softies to become standouts within a budding Pacific Northwest twee-pop scene..

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Photo by Amy McDicken The Softies' first run wasn't all that long ago, stretching from the early 1990s into the earliest days of the aughts, but it already seems impossibly antique. The band formed when Rose Melberg was looking for a quieter alternative to her punk band Tiger Trap and enlisted friend and sometime pen pal Jen Sbragia of Pretty Face to play in it. That's right, the two them forged a bond by writing each other letters, something people used to do until relatively recently and most definitely do not do any more.

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In the world of the Softies, to crush is to live. Their songs are pop miniatures where the spectrum of human feeling seems to ripple outward from the bittersweet ache of liking a person so much that your mind is pulled obsessively in one direction, however momentarily. Maybe it is Rose Melberg and Jen Sbragia’s 30-year friendship and indelible, world-of-its-own musical chemistry—two plainspoken voices, two sparkling guitars, and space—that helps communicate that intimacy so effectively.

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