Post-Millennial Classics: “I Know the End,” the Apocalyptic Closer to a Masterful Phoebe Bridgers Album

It’s not often that an album receives such immediate and universal praise like the kind Phoebe Bridgers’ 2020 album Punisher got. Like other classic albums, it benefits from a stunner of a closing track in “I Know the End.”

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What is the song about? How did it develop through many iterations? And how did “I Know the End” represent a kind of bucket list of things Bridgers wanted to accomplish in a single song? Let’s take a deep dive into this incredible shapeshifter of a track.

“End” Times

When Phoebe Bridgers released Punisher in 2020, it likely seemed to those following her career that it couldn’t have possibly been only her second album. That’s because she had been releasing a steady stream of music over the previous several years, including singles and EPs under her own name, as well as music with Better Oblivion Community Center (with Conor Oberst) and boygenius (with Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus).

It also meant Punisher arrived with a lot of attention and expectation attached to it. The writing for the record took place over several years, and just about all the big names with whom Bridgers collaborated on her other projects contributed to its recording.

“I Know the End,” which she chose as the cacophonous closing track on the record, took the longest period to complete. The writing was begun by Bridgers and Marshall Vore, the drummer in her band, and it focused originally on the pair’s breakup. But it expanded from there, with Bridgers expunging many of her concerns about the state of the world into the final product. She explained to Apple Music in a 2020 interview what she intended with the song:

“This is a bunch of things I had on my to-do list: I wanted to scream; I wanted to have a metal song; I wanted to write about driving up the coast to Northern California, which I’ve done a lot in my life. It’s like a super specific feeling. This is such a stoned thought, but it feels kind of like purgatory to me, doing that drive, just because I have done it at every stage of my life, so I get thrown into this time that doesn’t exist when I’m doing it, like I can’t differentiate any of the times in my memory. I guess I always pictured that during the apocalypse, I would escape to an endless drive up north.”

Oberst and Christian Lee Hutson shared writing credit for “I Know the End” with Bridgers and Vore. To get some thunderous rock heft at the end of the frenzied finish to the track, Bridgers’ enlisted Nick Zinner of Yeah Yeah Yeahs on guitar.

Behind the Meaning of “I Know the End”

“I Know the End” is essentially two songs crammed into one (or three, if you count the wild, screaming finish). In the first part, the narrator laments her travel-related separation from someone about whom she deeply cares. Like a wave that crashed and melted on the shore is how she assesses their relationship.

To presage the move into the second part of the song, Bridgers signals her character’s willingness to leave the past and any attachments behind: But I’m not gonna go down with my hometown in a tornado / I’m gonna chase it. As the melody and rhythm shifts, she’s out on the road, assessing the sights and her feelings as they fly by in tandem.

She masks her inner torment in sly humor: Went looking for a creation myth / Ended up with a pair of cracked lips. The imagery hurtling past her takes on a surreal feel, especially as lightning conjures fear or an alien invasion. Bridgers goes into the unknown free of fear or illusions: The billboard said, “The end is near” / I turned around, there was nothing there / I guess the end is here.

“I Know the End” features some high-wire songwriting from Bridgers and her collaborators, as all the disparate elements that went into it coalesce smoothly. And when she sums up her angst with some primal screams in the final moments, it sends a wonderful album on a note somewhere between feisty catharsis and resignation about the emotional apocalypse to come.

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Photo by Kyle Gustafson / For The Washington Post via Getty Images