Andrew Bird & Phoebe Bridgers Swap Emily Dickinson's Dashes for a Comma

The result? A completely different meditation on death and selfhood that speaks to the insularity and self-containment of our (post-) pandemic lives.

Photo: David Black

Emily Dickinson’s birthday is this week. Nearly 200 years after her birth, her work remains some of the most enduring and popular in American letters. Many of us, even those who aren’t avid readers, can at least identify phrases, images, and stylistic conventions of Dickinson’s with ease. “Because I could not stop for Death…” or a bird’s feathered hope or her enigmatic dash—Dickinson’s art echoes through our own language and lives, cresting to the top of popular culture time and again in works like Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Dangling Conversation,” the film A Quiet Passion, or the Apple TV+ show Dickinson. Her work is a deep part of our psyche, and continues to speak to new generations.

When singers, songwriters, and musicians pick up poems and use them as source material for their songs, a special kind of alchemy is created. As I’ve written about in previous posts, music and poetry share so much terrain: language, sound, repetition, and more. They are good friends grown from the same deep, human roots that desire a fusion of language with rhythm.

So when Andrew Bird’s latest single dropped this fall, I believe my exact words were