#98, “Me & My Dog,” boygenius (2018)

150 Favorite Songs, #98, “Me & My Dog,” boygenius (2018)

(content note: this entry discusses caring for a sick pet.)

2018 was a tough year for me. Kat was living in Los Angeles more or less full-time that year. It was exciting—she had finished grad school in 2017, and went out to L.A. to pursue her career in TV and screenwriting, subletting the second room in a friend’s West Hollywood apartment while I stayed at our house in Austin, continuing to work with Texas Monthly and work on the things I was doing here. It meant that we spent a lot of time away from each other, though, which was hard. To make it easier, I would find stretches where I didn’t need to be in Texas, load up the car and put Dio, our eleven-year-old husky, in the backseat, and drive out there as fast I was able, and stay with her and her roommate for a few weeks, maybe a month, at a time.

I was already a fan of the three artists who make up the indie supergroup that is boygenius at that point—Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, and Lucy Dacus—and, while the group was one of the breakout acts of 2023, their collaboration in 2018 was a bit more of a lark, effectively a collection of solo songs where each them backed the others on a handful of tracks. “Me & My Dog” is clearly a Phoebe Bridgers song, albeit one with Julien Baker’s guitar sound anchoring it. And it’s a song about loneliness, which I felt for a lot of the year, and also about traveling with your dog, which is exactly how I spent a lot of time.

“Me & My Dog” is also impossibly tender, which is an underrated quality in a song about loneliness and also dogs. Because our job, as people who live with dogs, is to take care of them, tenderness is really at the heart of that relationship, and the song’s title comes from a line toward the end of the song that feels incredibly heartfelt and earnest, and also exactly how I felt a lot of the time, when I was feeling sad and mostly only had Dio for company, grateful to him for being an anchor in the rearview mirror, curled up in the backseat of the car: “i wish i was on a spaceship / just me & my dog and an impossible view / i dream about it / and i wake up falling.” The way she delivers the end to that line—the word “falling” isn’t even really audible, just sort of mumbled, as she’s lost in the dream or the fantasy of being on the spaceship, flying away from everything, but not alone, because her dog is there, too.

I don’t know. The song came out at the end of the summer, and then a few months later, Dio got really sick—he had both a tennis ball-sized tumor in his intestine and an actual tennis ball, which he had eaten, and needed surgery to survive them both. The surgical site got infected, and it looked for a while like he wasn’t going to make it. He needed to stay at the emergency vet for a week or so, I don’t remember exactly how long now, it was all a bit of a blur, but I remember that I would drive to South Austin and sit on the floor of the exam room with him, stroking his fur and knowing that each time I left might be the last time I saw him, and that I was already feeling pretty alone and I wasn’t ready to lose the fantasy of the song, with my Hyundai Sonata swapped in for Phoebe Bridgers’s spaceship, as a touchstone during a hard time. I couldn’t really imagine making the drive to L.A. without him.

And then he had a few good days in a row, and the vet called and said that the antibiotics seemed to be working, and he could come home. He had an unpleasant few weeks of wearing a veterinary bodysuit that made him look like a lil’ sausage, so he couldn’t mess with the wound, and then about six weeks later, he was given a clean bill of health, with the various tennis ball-sized objects no longer inside of him.

We spent 2019 driving back and forth between Austin and Los Angeles, too, and every time we did—every time I put him in the car, every time I stopped along the way for a bathroom break, every time I walked him through a parking lot on the outskirts of Phoenix, every time a stranger at a gas station or a drive-thru told me what a beautiful dog I had (he really was), I understood in a new way just how lucky I was. And all of that got mixed up with the tenderness of “Me & My Dog,” and I was so grateful that I had a song that captured this incredibly specific feeling, of being so lucky to have a companion in this lonely time, one with whom my relationship could be so uncomplicated. I dream about it, too.

also, here’s a really nice live version.