They’re not really cuddlecore, and they don’t feel like they’re twee.
Vancouver-based band the Softies are back with a new album, their first in 24 years, and while they’ve been described by some as twee or cuddlecore, Rose Melberg says the terms are not something she’s ever connected with.
“I literally had to look that word up in the dictionary when people first started using it,” she told CBC’s North by Northwest guest host Lisa Christensen from her cat supply shop in East Vancouver.
While the genre means different things to different people, Pitchfork Magazine has described twee as “whimsical, girly, innocent or precious.”
Melberg said the band was influenced by post-punk group Marine Girls and “weirder lo-fi weirdo music.”
“I’m certainly not going to take that away from people if that is meaningful to them, but to us, it’s not a word that we feel connected to or that ever had anything to do with what we were doing.”
Regardless of how you describe the Softies, fans will have been spinning their tunes for 30 years now, and have waited decades for their new record, The Bed I Made.
Origins
Jen Sbragia was in her early 20s when she made the nearly three-hour drive from Santa Rosa, Calif. to Sacramento to console her friend, Melberg, following the breakup of her band, Tiger Trap.
“Every band I’ve ever been in is just like being married to three to four or five people,” Melberg said. “I was distraught, utterly distraught.”
That weekend, the pair became the Softies.
“We started talking about playing music and started writing songs right away,” Melberg said.
“We drank wine also,” Sbragia added with a laugh. “Rose played me all these different, seven-inch singles that I should hear.
“It was just so much fun.”
Sbragia said writing and playing music together was easy.
“I had played guitar since my teens, but I liked a different genre of music then. I was a heavy metal girl,” she said.
“But playing with Rose, it felt like it was just a weird extension of this fast and easy friendship. That’s all I wanted to do. And still is the only thing I ever want to do.”
‘Therapeutic creativity’
The pair took a 20-year break from playing music together, but remained the best of friends.
They each had kids and other musical projects, and Melberg said the timing to get the band back together just wasn’t right.
But then suddenly, she said, it was.
“The world felt like it was absolutely falling apart and we needed some therapeutic creativity and we thought maybe the world needed a Softies record because there were a lot of people feeling a lot of feelings,” Melberg said.
“That’s kind of what we do is we feel feelings and we help other people feel feelings.”
The Bed I Made is out now, and the band is touring through September and October.