Rose Melberg and Jen Sbragia double over laughing on separate Zoom screens when Sbragia lifts Frog Baby, the unofficial mascot of the Softies, to the camera. A doe-eyed Kewpie doll head fixed to the body of a green plastic frog, the hybrid creature resembles one of Sid’s monsters in Toy Story. While the Softies didn’t create Frog Baby—on tour, in 1994, someone from Washington indie-pop band Crayon playfully mashed together two figurines from the Softies’ dashboard—both singer-guitarists immediately loved it, so much so that Sbragia tattooed the creature on her bicep years later.
These days, Frog Baby is down one limb, and the plastic is starting to give way, so, naturally, the Softies want to immortalize it on merch before it’s too late. “My daughter likes to draw, so I asked her to draw Frog Baby driving a Geo Metro for our T-shirts,” laughs Sbragia. “Instead, she drew Frog Baby driving a Miata because she thinks those are dumb, weird, funny cars: ‘Oh, look at this cool thing from the past!’ And I’m like, ‘Wow, yeah, that’s so old. Sure, babe.’”
“From the past?” Melberg playfully scoffs. “It’s a ’97 Miata!”
For the Softies, even 1994—the year of Frog Baby’s inception—doesn’t feel as long ago as it should. That’s when Melberg put her band Tiger Trap on pause, embarked on a solo tour with Elliott Smith, and moved in with her friend-turned-soulmate Sbragia. Drawn together by a shared love of music and similar sensibilities, the two snapped together like magnets. They formed the Softies as a side-project in their downtime, a natural extension of their hangouts and the sense that their pal-to-pal confessions were likely felt just as strongly by others. Their debut full-length, It’s Love, came out the following year.
Fans found comfort in the drumless jangle-pop and gentle guitars of their ensuing two albums, 1997’s Winter Pageant and 2000’s Holiday in Rhode Island, and a smattering of seven-inch records. Critics, however, couldn’t fathom why the Softies kept prodding their bruised hearts. Those who tried to detract from the so-called simplicity of the Softies’ music missed the point: These are complicated matters of love boiled down to their plainest, most striking truths; autumnal vocal harmonies that chill and swaddle simultaneously; matte guitar melodies that turn iridescent the longer you look. “People always use reductive language because it’s melodic, it’s pop, we’re women, but it feels so good to be brave in the face of that potential criticism or misunderstanding, especially because we’re very sensitive. Where do we get the nerve?” says Melberg. “I still don’t know.”
The best of friends, Melberg and Sbragia stayed in each others’ lives long after the Softies went radio silent. Publicly, they reunited for a handful of Chickfactor shows, in 2012, and a benefit concert in Vancouver, in 2018. During a brief, unexpected Pacific Northwest tour with Bay Area native Tony Molina, in 2023, the Softies debuted a handful of songs from what would become The Bed I Made, their first new album in 24 years. Singing an early rendition of “23rd Birthday,” a haunting number from The Bed I Made about the death of a loved one, Melberg spilled tears onstage while choking out the words. These songs, penned by women in their fifties, were just as complex and emotionally honest as their ’90s counterparts by a pair of twentysomethings.
The key to the Softies is the depth of their friendship, as the assurance between Melberg and Sbragia lets them write about any topic, even ones deemed taboo for adults to divulge publicly: being hung up on a crush, missing parts of yourself that have inexplicably faded, struggling to “move on” in the mourning process. And, even as life steered them toward different cities (Vancouver, for Melberg; Portland, for Sbragia) and different jobs (Melberg runs Happy Cat Feline Essentials—“What other job would I have? I’m Rose Melberg. Of course I own a cat store”—and Sbragia is a work-from-home graphic designer), their connection remained stable.
That stability became a bittersweet salve for both Melberg and Sbragia when they lost their mothers in close proximity. Spurred by those sudden deaths, The Bed I Made wades gently through grief, heartbreak, and embarrassment. Though most of its subject matter is dark, the Softies move smoothly and quietly; as ever, the duo’s minimalist approach to indie-pop best fit for a long solo walk in the park. As they sing three-part harmonies (“I Said What I Said”) and build their most beautiful guitar lines yet (“Don’t Fall Apart”), they craft an album that distills yearning down to its essence.
The most radiant part of The Bed I Made is the enduring love the two Softies have for one another, their bravery, and their commitment to vulnerability with age. On Zoom, as they recount old memories from the band and reopen the dark recesses explored on this album, Melberg and Sbragia are model best friends: listening attentively, finishing sentences when the other hesitates to do so, unabashedly telling each other they’re loved. Melberg even wore a shirt custom made for her by Sbragia—emblazoned with “I’m not here for the craft show,” a reference to one of Sbragia’s solo songs. They’re more than each other’s biggest cheerleaders. They’re in big, deep platonic love, the type of companionship that’s impossible to describe unless you’re lucky enough to experience it with a friend in your own life.
Right on cue, with no need for prompting, Melberg’s eyes dip with affection and she chimes in, “I’m so proud of you, Jen. I don’t know if I tell you enough.” With a half-frown-half-smile, Sbragia replies with resolute sincerity: “Thank you for all that you did to help. I needed a lot of help, and you were my tugboat.” Both women speak, expectedly, like people who know the value and precariousness of time. It feels like a digital hug encircled our Zoom call.
Ahead of their fall North American tour, the Softies sat down to discuss their everlasting friendship, how staying vulnerable as an adult makes others uncomfortable, and how to uncover parts of yourself stolen by time.
Rose Melberg: I love that! Those were really fun because they were our first shows in quite a while and we were just dipping our toe back in still. The album was not even halfway written at that point. A lot came together at the last minute, so you really got to see us at a special time.
Jen Sbragia: I know it was my idea to do the whole album, but I think the tour tape was [Mike Schulman from Slumberland’s] idea. Tony is a way better shredding guitar player than me, though, and I thought everyone was going to laugh at me. I couldn’t sound like him.
Melberg: So I said, “We just make it like the Softies. Just interpret.” Recording that tape helped us get back into recording. It was a great way for Jen to get really back into her guitar playing again, too. We did that at the same time that we were writing the album, so it kept us loose and was this wonderful little side quest to keep Jen’s fingers moving.
Sbragia: Rose is my person. I hope to someday find a romantic partner that loves me as much as she does. It sounds weird, but before you joined the call and I was texting you, Rose, I said, “Yeah, we do this all the time. We talk every day, nonstop.”
Melberg: We met at such a tender time in our lives, so something locked in where we became each other’s safe person. We’re a funny pair. I think about our friendship sometimes, Jen, because we’re very different in some really fundamental ways, even though we both grew up in northern California in the ’70s and ’80s. We’re always lifting each other up about our insecurities, and we’ve been doing that for 30 years. To have this kind of friendship in middle age is a real gift. When we’re together, not just as the Softies, we’re still as silly and playful as we were when we were 22.
Sbragia: Also, there’s been periods where we weren’t that close, which maybe has to do with this time in our lives. I’m really leaning into my friend groups and realizing how important that is. I’ve lost three family members, with just one brother left from my core original family, so I’ve got to have my people close.
Melberg: We’re deep family: Jen and I are truly more like sisters. When I see early videos of us, we’ve always been tuned into each other. Even the times where we seem a little uncomfortable onstage, there’s a lot of looking at each other and checking, because we always knew what we were doing was a little weird. All we had to do was be like, “Are you cool?” “I'm cool. Are you cool?” And then, “OK, it’s cool.”
Melberg: My relationship with Jen started with music, so it’s really at the core: a similar sensibility, a way to encourage each other to create. We started playing music together practically the first time we hung out. So, when we’re together, it brings us back into this foundational part of our creative lives every time we start a song. The depth and the passion and the familiarity we saw in each other when we first met, that feeling is what fuels us. When we first started writing the songs for this album, we were positively giddy. It was like that feeling came back where I had nothing but a couple chords, and then the magic started to happen. We started laughing because it’s uncomfortable how good it feels.
Sbragia: I think it’s funny, too, that neither of us can read music. I took guitar lessons and theory, but that was so long ago. Instead, we just learned how to feel our way. “What’s that note? I don’t know. It sounds good.”
Melberg: Jen knows how I hear, and she’s so patient with me because she knows that it’s going to click eventually. We may not have the actual language for it, but we find a language for it. Sometimes that does take patience with each other, which we’ve always had—the confidence. We know we’re onto something. Anytime we’re writing a song, we’re like, “OK, I don’t know what it is or why it sounds good. Let’s just keep pushing into this idea with trust.”
Melberg: Part of Jen’s healing was her return to loving music. Once we were talking about music more, and she was getting excited about the idea of playing, I saw that spark of possibility. I’d been waiting for years for this. I’ve been consistently making albums for the last 20 years, but Jen wasn’t, and so I was just waiting for her to be ready. I saw her recognizing that she might have the time to fit it into her life again, or that she really needed it to be in her life again. Plus, I knew we were going to make another record someday. That seemed undeniable.
Sbragia: Me too. Rose was ready to make music when her kid was five, but I wasn’t ready until mine were 10. It was just so much. And the painful thing of losing our moms, a year after that, just sitting on those feelings and marinating and percolating and then boom. It just happened: I started wanting to write music again, because I’m fueled by those heavy emotions. That’s what I want to write songs about. I was having such an identity crisis a couple years ago and was so unhappy. I was sleepwalking through my life, and I needed to reconnect with who I am, who I used to be. Returning to the Softies changed my whole life again, but, at the same time, it felt like a really long break. The timeline of life is just a weird, squiggly noodle.
Melberg: Every album comes from something really terrible that happened. When you can take that and turn it into something maybe kind of beautiful, it's like alchemy. It’s this emotional transformation that happens. We’ve always written songs about the saddest things, and then it's just these beautiful little stories that we externalize and pull some of the grief out of our bodies and can look back at it and share it. That’s what we’ve always done and certainly came once we started on these songs, they kind of came fast and hard. There are a lot of feelings.
Melberg: We definitely approached this record a little differently. Jen hadn’t written songs in a long time, but she was full of ideas more than songs—chord progressions, a couple lyrics, all these beautiful bits and pieces—so this album became more collaborative. We also did that Softies thing where I play the same thing for 15 minutes straight, and Jen just noodles until we find the moment. She was trying new things, making it more sparse, using space to really punctuate emotions like it’s another voice. Jen’s guitar is not just filling space; Jen’s guitar is telling a story with those leads. That’s why it’s often two very different melodies happening that naturally play off each other. We labor over it because it’s the most interesting and important thing about the Softies: Jen’s guitar.
Sbragia: Some of those songs have notes within the chords, but it’s always very thoughtfully written. It was really hard to write anything for “23rd Birthday,” though, because I couldn’t stop crying when you sent it to me.
Melberg: A lot of the really sad songs came first because we were deep in grief and writing about it, and the rest couldn’t follow until we made space. “23rd Birthday” is just really sad. I mean, it’s beautiful, but it’s heavy and it’s hard to not feel every single feeling every time I sing it. But then what you ended up doing, Jen, was so thoughtful, so intentional! There wasn’t a meandering melody. Those notes you play in the chord, it’s like catching your breath in the middle of a meltdown. The vocals and lyrics are so emotional and sad, and sometimes your guitar note will pop right at the moment where you feel like you need a little bit of levity.
Melberg: Our mantra when we were making this record was: Be brave. Let’s just be brave. When we were younger, we wrote really vulnerable songs because there’s this inherent bravery to youth. We felt we had very little to lose, and we did, but that gets a little harder as we get older. So we had to remember that so many good things come from that kind of courage, the courage to be publicly vulnerable. We know we bring out vulnerability in other people, too, so we have to be prepared for that reciprocity of people coming to us with their vulnerabilities because we’ve given them permission. We had to ask ourselves: Are we ready to be vulnerable again? Be brave. People were generally fairly kind, if not just a little bit perplexed, about what we did back then. I’ve definitely read someone saying “This girl needs to go get some antidepressants” or whatever, just ignorant perceptions of sadness, depression, what comes and goes. There’s also this perception of the Softies that’s like “Oh, this is sweet,” when that was never our intention. We were being really brave and listening to the punk in us saying, “Let’s make something so full of truth that it’s kind of uncomfortable.” Revisiting that for this record, it took a little extra courage because you’re told not to make people uncomfortable. Don’t take up too much space. Don’t challenge the idea of what it means to be a woman, or an artist, or a mother. But it's so powerful to push into discomfort, and I think that’s at the heart of a lot of our songwriting.
Even though we talk about making people cry, we don’t want people to always sad-cry or be left hanging by the end of a song. There should always be an element of hope because that's humanity. What else do we have? Even if our song is about painful newfound wisdom, the reality is that you still have to wake up and do the dishes. Yes, we will feel these gigantic feelings and we’ll cry and we’ll make a bunch of tissues and we’ll throw them away, and then we’ll go work. It’s just the reality of sadness and living with depression or mental health issues. Let’s find out where it sits in our lives, find the beauty in it, and then figure out a way to live with it and move forward.
