The Bus Song

Most songs about a rough patch ask you to sit still and feel it. “The Bus Song” does the opposite. It moves, it sways, it swells into a crowd of voices, and it carries a quiet argument along with it: that getting through a hard stretch is mostly a matter of keeping going, preferably with someone beside you. Jay Som’s second-album standout sounds like sunshine through a dirty window, and the longer you ride with it, the more the dirt on the glass starts to matter.

Melina Duterte, who records as Jay Som, has been cagey about spelling out what the song means. In the interviews gathered for this essay she never explains it directly, so everything below is interpretation built from the song’s surroundings: the record it opens up, the life she was living when she made it, and the way critics and listeners have heard it. That is a fair way to approach a song this open, and it is arguably what the song is built for.

A bedroom, an empty account, a second album

Duterte grew up in the California Bay Area, the child of Filipino immigrants, and began writing and recording music around the age of twelve.^[3] After studying music production at community college, she posted a batch of demos to Bandcamp in 2015. Those recordings were gathered and reissued the following year as Turn Into, and the attention that followed led to a deal with Polyvinyl.^[5]

Everybody Works arrived on March 10, 2017, through Polyvinyl in the United States and Double Denim in other territories.^[2] Duterte produced it and wrote every track, and she made it at home in Oakland, playing most of the instruments herself.^[1] It was a very DIY object, but it did not sound like a lo-fi sketch. Critics treated it as a leap, and it landed on several year-end lists, including first place at Paste and a high placement at Pitchfork.^[2]

The circumstances matter to how the song feels. Duterte has described being broke in the period around the album, with a bank balance that dipped below zero.^[1] She has also talked about the odd frustration of watching better-connected indie bands thrive while she worked in obscurity.^[1] The title of the album, and its title track, grew out of the food-service jobs and paycheck-to-paycheck living that supported her music.^[5] A song about a bus is, in that light, a song about the economics of a life: the vehicle you take when you cannot afford another, the commute that eats the day, the time you spend waiting to arrive somewhere better.

The ride as a way of thinking

The bus is a wonderful setting for a pop song because it is a place where nothing is supposed to happen. You are in transit, between a start and a destination, with nothing to do but look out the window and let your mind run. One reviewer heard the song as being about a relationship approaching its end, with the ride standing in for the time two people need to work out how they want that ending to go.^[7] That reading gives the song a gentle, almost tender sadness. The bus becomes a rolling waiting room, and the question is not whether the thing will end but how kindly.

A second reading, drawn from coverage in Under the Radar, hears a conversation between friends on a bumpy trip, with Duterte offering reassurance: that the listener can become whoever they want to be, and that there is no rush to figure it all out.^[6] That is a quieter and more generous song, and it fits the person Duterte presents in interviews, someone who overthinks her words and often lets the arrangements speak for her.^[1]

The two readings are not rivals. A relationship ending and a friend offering comfort can live in the same three and a half minutes, and in fact they probably do. Plenty of the best songs about a breakup are really about the people who help you survive it. The bus, with its strangers and its shared seats, is a fitting symbol for that mixture of intimacy and anonymity.

Settling, compromise, and the dignity of making do

Zooming out to the album, one critic argued that the record keeps returning to the idea of accepting what you have and making the best of something imperfect, and that Duterte treats compromise as a necessary part of life rather than a reason for gloom.^[5] This is the context in which “The Bus Song” makes the most sense. Its mood is not triumph, and it is not despair. It is the particular buoyancy of someone who has decided to enjoy the ride because the ride is what they have.

That attitude is easy to mistake for naivety, and it is the opposite. Duterte’s generation of musicians came of age in an economy where creative work rarely paid the rent, and where the old story of the artist who quits the day job and breaks through felt like a fairy tale. Choosing public transit, small pleasures, and an open mind is a form of realism. The song never pretends the commute is glamorous. It simply refuses to let the commute decide the mood.

There is also humility in how the song handles itself. The big group vocal that arrives as the track opens up has been compared to the communal singalongs of mid-2000s indie rock, and the writer who noticed it called the resemblance a happy accident.^[1] The effect is to turn one songwriter’s private bedroom recording into something that sounds like a carload of friends. Even though Duterte played every instrument herself,^[4] the arrangement imagines a crowd. It is a lonely person’s fantasy of company, made real through overdubbing.

How the music carries the meaning

Duterte has said she is more of an instrumental arrangement person than a lyricist, and that writing words has always been hard for her because she overthinks them.^[1] The arrangement of this song supports that self-description. The track builds from a loose, jangling groove into a lush wall of guitars and voices, then eases back again. Michelle Zauner, the Japanese Breakfast leader who later directed the video, said the song’s dynamic shifts were central to how she approached filming it.^[4]

Those shifts are the emotional argument. The quiet passages feel like looking out the window, alone with your thoughts. The loud ones feel like the bus filling up, the mood lifting, strangers becoming company. A listener does not need to parse a single phrase to feel the movement from solitude toward belonging, and that may be why the song works so well as an entry point to the album.

The video and the Bay Area

The video, released in October 2017, was directed by Zauner, who filmed around Oakland and San Francisco with Duterte, her bandmates, and a cast of friends and local musicians rather than actors.^[4] Zauner described it as a love letter to the Bay Area, aimed at showing off Duterte’s humor and charm,^[4] and she has spoken of Duterte as something like a little sister.^[9] Duterte herself called it a kind of time capsule of the album period, a goofy remembrance.^[4]

The images reported from the clip include a band breakfast, dancing on hilltops, and the handing out of pink melodicas.^[8] It is a very different picture from the money worries behind the album, and that gap is the point. The video shows what the song sounds like from the inside: a hard stretch lived with friends, in a place you love, with the volume turned up.

Why it resonates

Songs about work tend toward grievance, and songs about love tend toward drama. “The Bus Song” sits in a less crowded space, the emotional life of ordinary logistics. Anyone who has stared out of a transit window thinking about money, a relationship, or what comes next will recognize the headspace. The song does not solve those worries. It gives them a soundtrack that is warm enough to keep you company.

It also arrived at a moment when bedroom pop was becoming a recognized sound. Descriptions of Duterte’s music commonly place it in that world, alongside dream pop, and she has cited influences ranging from Yo La Tengo and Phil Elverum to Carly Rae Jepsen and Alanis Morissette.^[3] The mix of homemade intimacy and pop craft is part of the appeal. It suggests that a small room and a full heart can produce something with room for everybody.

Alternative readings

Because Duterte has not pinned the song down, listeners have plenty of room. Some hear it as straightforwardly romantic, the portrait of a couple managing a gentle breakup.^[7] Others hear a pep talk delivered to a friend, or to herself.^[6] A third possibility is that the bus is simply the bus: a place where she felt at ease, a symbol of a modest life she was learning to stop apologizing for. The title is plain, and the plainness is part of the statement.

There is also the possibility that the song is about perspective. When your finances are shaky and your peers seem to be passing you by, the world can feel like a series of cars speeding past a bus stop. Choosing to ride with everyone else, and to sing about it with gusto, can be read as a small act of defiance against the idea that success only looks one way.

Conclusion

“The Bus Song” is not a puzzle to be cracked. It is a mood to be entered: the stretch between where you were and where you are going, handled with humor, patience, and a crowd of overdubbed friends. Its meaning, as far as anyone outside Duterte’s head can tell, lives in that blend of difficulty and delight.

What makes it last is its generosity. It lets sorrow, money trouble, and uncertainty ride along without giving them the wheel. For a debut-era single from a musician who was, by her own account, down to her last dollars, that is a remarkable thing to have built in a bedroom. The seat next to you is free, the song seems to say, and the trip is going to be bumpy, and that is all right.