‘Rose Melberg Invented Sad Girl’: The Triumphant Return of the Softies
It took over two decades, but the Softies are back. And their timing couldn’t be more perfect. The beloved indie-rock duo of Rose Melberg and Jen Sbragia have returned with their excellent new The Bed I Made, their first album in 24 years, on Father/Daughter Records. They’re also hitting the road for a fall tour. Like all the Softies records, it’s an emotional tour de force, full of intimate, hushed, exquisitely delicate heartbreak.
But the Softies have returned at a time when Rose Melberg has come into her own as an indie cult hero. “Rose Melberg invented Sad Girl,” I was recently informed at a gig by someone born in the Nineties. She was a pioneer — with Tiger Trap and the Softies, she built a bridge between riot-grrrl punk and the confessional indie singer-songwriter mega-emotional mode. That combination is now basically what indie rock is. Melberg is a name that most music fans still don’t recognize, but as the O.G. Sad Girl, she’s a massive influence on today’s generation of indie women with guitars, from Waxahatchee to Boygenius. In other words, the Softies reunion comes at a time when we live in a world full of Softies.
More from Rolling Stone
Dream Come True: Activist Malala Yousafzai's First Taylor Swift Show Was a Lifetime In the Making
Kacey Musgraves Delivers Tender 'Too Good to Be True' Performance on 'Austin City Limits'
Beyoncé, Zach Bryan Lead 2024 People's Choice Country Awards Nominations
Rose Melberg makes no apologies for a life spent making the world safer for miserable songs. “Now people talk about it and I’m like, be as sad as you fucking want,” she says now. “Just be interesting and sad at the same time. Or just be sad — fine. The world is a sad place sometimes.”
The Softies spent the Nineties recording for labels like K and Slumberland, touring with friends like Elliott Smith. But nobody else sounded like them — two women, two electric guitars, lovelorn tunes about boats and trains and rivers. They crafted a string of classic albums: It’s Love, Winter Pageant (their best), Holiday in Rhode Island. (All three are getting reissued on vinyl by K.)
When times changed, they moved on with their lives. Sbragia went to design school, took a long break from music, then started playing in All Girl Summer Fun Band. But Melberg kept thriving at her usual madly prolific pace. The Bed I Made is her nineteenth album. She’s had so many bands and projects: Gaze, Go Sailor (best known from the soundtrack of But I’m a Cheerleader), Imaginary Pants, Brave Irene, Knife Pleats, as well as solo gems like Homemade Ship. She’s the kind of artist who inspires tribute albums while she’s still going strong. She spent this past summer on tour playing guitar with riot-grrrl pioneers Bratmobile. And in the 2020s, there are entire genres based on what the Softies were doing in the Nineties.
But when they both lost their mothers, they turned their shared grief into music. “Jen and I, we lost our moms within a month and half of each other,” Melberg says. “It was really rough and disorienting, and life was just feeling really kind of heavy. We were reaching out to each other for support, and suddenly I just said, ‘Jen, I think it’s time for a new Softies album.’ It was just time.”
ROSE MELBERG FIRST turned heads in the early 1990s, with her Sacramento indie-pop band Tiger Trap. (“Supercrush” is still a timeless banger.) Then she formed the Softies as a guitar duo with her fanzine pal Jen Sbragia. “As soon as we started hanging out, I felt, ‘Oh my God, I think I found my person,’” Melberg says. “And thirty years later, here we are still best friends.” They’re used to connecting across the miles — Rose lives in Vancouver, Jen in Portland. “In our thirty-year friendship, we’ve only lived in the same place for one year. We had one year together in Portland, ’94 to ’95, and other than that, we’ve had this beautiful long-distance best-friendship.”
Right now they’re Zooming a thousand miles apart—Rose is home in her sewing room, surrounded by shelves of her beloved seven-inch singles. Jen is in Oakland on tour with her band, already dressed to kill for tonight’s gig. They lavish compliments on each other’s fits, with their matching glasses. Did they color-coordinate eyewear for this chat? “No,” Rose says. “We’re just middle-aged ladies who wear glasses all the time.”
The Softies had their own sound, with their twin-guitar electric twang and poetic sighs. “We always did feel like outsiders,” Melberg says. “We had our feet in a lot of different scenes, but we never fit in anywhere. We did feel like weirdos. We were always the awkward band on the bill that was too quiet, or not acoustic enough.”
But they hit a nerve with audiences, with their emotional candor. “We were never ashamed of our tenderness, but we were also punks, and when you’re in that scene, trying to be cool, it’s hard to also be super-sensitive. But we had each other, the two of us doing our weird thing, just being honest and super vulnerable and super tender.”
Seeing the Softies live back in the day was like a hushed explosion. They were usually on the bill with much louder bands, yet they didn’t need to raise their voices to cast a spell. A hush would fall on the crowd, spontaneously. “We got so used to people talking so loud, we could barely hear ourselves play,” Rose says. “But we had to stand our ground. ‘We are going to be quiet and tender and vulnerable and melodramatic and all these things for 30 minutes whether you like it or not.’” Yet they never came off nervous, never stared at the floor. “If you’re asked to get on a stage, you have to get on that stage and own that space without apology. My mother was a singer in cover bands, so I saw her act confident when she wasn’t—you need that. You don’t have to be good. You just have to really want to be there.”
The best Softies gig I saw was in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1997, down in the basement of our local sushi bar, playing all these great new tunes from Winter Pageant. They crashed with me and my wife, on our couch, sitting up late to talk music, gossip, rave about our love for 1970s soft-rockers like Bread. I did their tour laundry while my wife made a pizza; Rose grabbed her 1959 Les Paul and showed her how to play Bread songs like “The Guitar Man.” That’s how indie outsiders rolled back then—take the music from town to town, keep it real on the indie DIY level, spread the word. Of course it was tied into the cultural excitement of Nirvana, Bikini Kill, the riot-grrrl explosion — Kurt Cobain famously got a tattoo of the K Records logo, to remind him of the ideals that got him started.
In the early 2000s, when the internet killed off the non-corporate record biz, these ideals were presumed extinct. Bands like the Softies seemed to represent a bygone golden age for feminist punk. But nobody realized yet was how much the future would sound like the Softies. In the 2020s, we’re living through a boom for female and non-male guitar storytellers, in a world where an artist like Phoebe Bridgers can get an entire stadium to sing along. The sad girls have never been louder. And for countless mega-young music fans who don’t necessarily know Rose Melberg’s name, her influence is a crucial part of this wild future she helped create.
The Softies in 1994
THE FIRST TIME Melberg sang for other people was 1991, at the famed “International Pop Underground Convention” festival in Olympia, Washington. It was a star-making moment, playing solo in a lineup of indie legends like Fugazi, Beat Happening, Bratmobile, Built to Spill, and Heavens to Betsy. Festival slogan: “Love Rock Revolution Girl Style Now.” She was 19, a nervous wreck, singing “Any Day.” “Technically I guess that’s the first song I wrote, but I hadn’t really written it. I just played the only chords I knew. The lyrics are nonsensical — I wrote them on the Greyhound bus, on the way up to Olympia. I thought, if I play it loud enough and with distortion, no one can tell that it’s really stupid. I didn’t even know how to use my distortion pedal — I just handed it to the sound person and said, ‘Could you plug this in for me please?’ So she plugged it in. I didn’t even say my name. I just got up there, played a song, walked off, went to the bathroom and cried.”
She started Tiger Trap, a pioneering indie-pop outfit of four women. Fans called them “cuddlecore” or “cardigan punk”; non-fans called them “twee.” But it was a hugely influential aesthetic, as the rock kids started to use seemingly trivial bits of cultural flotsam — vintage dresses, barrettes, lunchboxes, Hello Kitty gear — as code to express new ideas about sexuality and gender. Tiger Trap made one excellent album, but their brush with fame was enough to turn off Melberg. “We got too popular too fast,” she says. “We played wild big shows—parties, rock & roll hijinks, drugs and alcohol and all that stuff. I just felt, ‘I don’t think this is for me. This doesn’t quite fit in with what feels like punk to me.’ I started to think, What can I do that won’t be popular?”
After the band crashed and burned, she figured she’d blown her shot, until she got a call from Sbragia, a pen pal who published a local zine. “Jen was a Tiger Trap fan, so she came to all the shows in the Bay Area. She lived in Santa Rosa and I lived in Sacramento, so I’d see her at the Northern California shows. One day, Jen just phoned me out of the blue. ‘I heard you guys broke up. I just wanted to check in and see if you were okay.’ And that was it. I just said, ‘Come visit me in Sacramento.’ And she came that weekend. That’s when we wrote our first song.”
“You showed me ‘Love Seat,’” Jen nods. “Then I wrote the guitar part. I don’t know if I let on to you how devastated I was about the band, but I did want to make sure you were okay. We drank red wine.”
“A LOT of red wine,” Rose says. “And we wrote a song. I needed Jen so badly in my life at that moment, and I didn’t even know it, but she just plopped into my life and filled this hole, from the ashes of the dramatic demise of my first band.” They soon came up with a name. “It was maybe the second or third time we hung out, in Santa Rosa. Jen had a Fifties ladies’ magazine with a quiz: ‘Are You A Softie?’”
Jen picked up guitar in her headbanger days. “I was very into mainstream heavy metal in the Eighties, as a teenager,” she says. “I was in a band with some guys in a garage, but we were just trying to learn Metallica songs together.” For her, punk was a different state of mind. “It was so refreshing because I came from a world of arpeggios and practice and sitting in your bedroom and trying to be so good at guitar. It was oppressive, especially being a girl, because somebody once told me, ‘You’re never going to be able to play guitar like a boy because their muscles and their arms are bigger.’ I was just like, ‘Weirdest thing I’ve ever heard, but okay, thanks, Power Guy.’
She started the group Pretty Face in Santa Rosa. “Rose told me, ‘Start a band, and then you can play with us to when we come to town,’ and we did. There’s a flyer that has Pretty Face and Tiger Trap on it together. It’s framed in my hallway at home.”
Melberg became a cult figure in the K Records lore, the kind of songwriter that everyone else aspired to be. “Everybody was just doing their own thing,” she says. “We didn’t sound like any of them and they didn’t sound like us, but the common thread was that we were all just trying to speak a truth. That’s what turned me on—people telling true stories.”
They were on the label alongside kindred spirits like Elliott Smith. “I met Elliott maybe three months after Jen and I started writing music, and so meeting him and playing shows with him and touring with him, that definitely showed me what it looked like to be really vulnerable and brave.”
They bonded over music they loved — the Kinks, the Everly Brothers. “We were both very tender people and I was very drawn to Elliot for that reason. We had a sweet friendship. We both came from hard family stuff and struggled as young adults, and I saw a lot of myself in him and his tenderness, and watching him put that to music was otherworldly. And we could not touch what he did. I mean, I watched him play guitar every night, but I never could understand what he was doing, with those spooky chords. If you closed your eyes, he sounded like he had three or four hands.”
Their legends are linked in many ways — but especially in terms of putting themselves out there as tunesmiths. “I felt, God, I could never write songs like Elliott, but I can take that sweetness and vulnerability that he brought to his songs, where he’s not afraid to be tender and say the hard stuff. The thing with saying hard stuff, the world doesn’t end. The song might make you cry, but it isn’t doing any damage. It’s not hurting anyone.”
MEANWHILE: REAL LIFE. Melberg and Sbragia grew up, as the band took a back seat in their hectic adult lives. “We live far away from each other,” Rose says. “For a lot of years we managed to fit in making music together, but then circumstantially, it got harder and harder.” Like many Gen Xers, they adjusted to a future that looked ridiculously different from the one they prepared for. After the Softies’ final album in Y2K, they moved on.
“Do you know what I do for a living?” Rose asks. “I own a cat supply store. I have a wildly successful business in Vancouver. It’s called Happy Cat Feline Essentials. It’s the cutest, best store in the world. We really created a community—Instagram-famous cats will visit, and the whole thing just keeps growing. It’s crazy. We’re just about to celebrate our five year anniversary.”
It’s fair to say that the diehard Melberg cult did not necessarily envision her as a catboss, but then, neither did she. “I did not have a normal job, for pretty much all my adult life. I was just doing music for all of my twenties and thirties and forties. So this is my first real job. I thought, okay, I need to get a job—I’m running out of money. But I can’t have a boss because I’m too sensitive. So I was like, ‘Guess I have to start my own business. What could I do?’” As a diehard feline lover, her choice was clear. “I’m super passionate about cats,” she explains. “I thought, ‘What if there were a place where we could help people to really be top-notch guardians for cats?’ So my whole life is cats.”
Obviously, this is one aggressively on-brand move for a Softie. “Occasionally fans will come in,” she reports. “A fan will come in and say, ‘I heard Rose Melberg owns this store.’ I love that. I have two very different lives, but it’s sweet when they come together. It’s a pretty cool mission to have in life—to help cats. It feels pure and noble.” Sbragia is a freelance graphic designer. “A little bit underemployed right now, just because I am doing so much music stuff. I like to work on music design when I can, but mostly I just do silly corporate stuff to pay the bills. But I can work from anywhere, which is cool since I’m on tour.”
The Bed I Made is full of adult reckonings. As Melberg says, “We had our kids—we don’t like to talk about our kids, but we did all the things we thought we were supposed to do, and we’re like, ‘Well, NOW what?’ Then we thought, ‘Oh yeah — THIS is the thing we love doing the most. Time to make another Softies record. Let’s go.’ It didn’t feel like a reunion. It didn’t feel like a novelty. It’s not a comeback. It’s just this linear, natural thing that that we finally had time to do. We fell back into the Softies, and it was so fucking fun.”
Yet they realized it was time because of another adult rite of passage: grief. When they both lost their moms, the songs began to flow. “It made the 24 years since our last album seem like nothing had passed. It was just, ‘Oh, better get writing. I’m really sad. Better write some Softies songs.’ It just felt very natural. And also, I think we were both seeking something comforting and familiar, since our lives had been chaotic for a long time. We used to see each other a couple times a year, and talked all the time, but this gave us this reason to travel and see each other once a month for a year. It felt like we were in our early twenties, yet with all the wisdom and crankiness of being older. But we became a lifeline for each other.”
They collaborated closer than ever in emotionally raw tunes like “Dial Tone.” “It’s obviously a song about grief and missing people who have died and wishing that you could call the afterlife,” Rose says. “Jen wrote the first half, I wrote the second half. We don’t usually write songs like that — it’s normally one person or the other who writes the lyrics.” But trading off lyrics was cathartic. “We gave each other these songwriting prompts,” Jen says. “Rose gave me a prompt of ‘birthday.’ And so I was thinking about how on my birthday, I can’t talk to my brother or my mom anymore.”
But even amid the grief, the album is also a tribute to the power of long-haul friendship. “I’d been kind of waiting for Jen to be ready,” Melberg confesses. “I’ve never stopped writing songs. Jen took ten, fifteen years off, but I’ve been in so many bands, done all these projects and solo albums, so I’m still just going. But I wasn’t writing Softies songs, and that’s different.”
She’s always got her ear tuned to young artists, from Palehound to Weyes Blood to Locate S,1. She raves about country queen Kacey Musgraves and Scottish folk singer Lavinia Blackwall to her longtime friend, Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield, who grew up on Tiger Trap. “I could talk for hours about Taylor Swift,” she says. “I’m fairly new to Taylor — Lover was the one that made me realize, shit, I think I like her, and then she drops Folklore and Evermore. So I have mad respect for her. I have the cardigan.”
In recent years, there’s been backlash against the sad-girl ethos. “People can be very dismissive,” Melberg says. “It’s like the character of Lili Taylor in Say Anything, with her ‘Joe lies’ songs. It’s the trope of the whiny, complaining, sad girl with the guitar—but I think it’s a beautiful trope. And brave, which is what it always comes back to as a female-presenting person. I’m like, no, it’s very brave to be vulnerable and to make art so beautiful. When you’re making something so fragile, it can be broken at any time. Someone can break the spell, someone can yell ‘you suck’ from the audience, and everyone hears it. It’s quiet music. It’s a vulnerable experience, putting that emotion out in the world.”
But making those vulnerable moments happen has been her artistic calling for over three decades now. “It is part of being a woman that people love to tell you to stop whining, and that just makes me want to whine more, obviously. But just giving people permission to feel hard feelings—that’s what you hope for when you write those songs.” Of course, the Softies aren’t the only ones who are feeling sad songs extra deep these days. “I don’t know — maybe the world needs it,” Melberg muses. “But I do know WE need it.”
Best of Rolling Stone
