Phoebe Bridgers

US INDIE-FOLK WUNDERKIND TALKS TUNINGS, TONE, “PIANO F*CK-UPS” AND HOW LOCKDOWN HAS IGNITED A PASSION FOR HOME RECORDING

Like most of us, Phoebe Bridgers – the singer-songwriter and indie lynchpin – has found her time in lockdown has had its pros and its cons. “But I’ve been reading more, eating more, exercising more,” she told TG’S sister mag Guitarworld. “I feel like my quarantine body is Rhonda Rousey, you know? I’m just getting really yoked. And I’m eating loads of peanut butter.”

Bridgers is frequently described as a master of insightful, observational writing. In person and on record she is self-aware, but nonetheless brutally honest in a way that is equally amusing and affecting. Since her emergence in the late 2010s, her output has been prolific and multifaceted – from the expansive contemporary indie-folk and open-tuned experiments on her 2018 debut Stranger In The Alps and its new follow-up Punisher, to her work with Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst in Better Oblivion Community Centre and with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker in Boygenius. Bridgers also contributed vocals to four songs on The 1975’s recent number one album, Notes On A Conditional Form.

Now, amid the home-based preparation for Punisher’s release, she has had the opportunity to consume again. “I’ve been constantly listening to records and that has been really comforting to me,” she says. “So, [right now] I hope to do that for someone. I don’t want to remind people of what’s going on and I don’t want to distract people. I want to be there in the way that music always is.” We spoke to Bridgers about home recording, avoiding ‘lead carriers’ and how an unhappy accident led to an obsession with open-tunings.

“It’s made me become an engineer. I love gear, but I love gear that is handed to me on silver platter by friends who will say, ‘This is what you have to try...’ I recorded at Sound City, too, so it’s like everyone around me is a gear head. So I’m into it, but I don’t seek it out. I’ve never home-recorded before, but now I’m getting really good at it, so that’s been a silver lining. What freaks me out about the ‘live’ situation is that, [for instance] I had barely washed my hair, I was in my pyjamas and I started playing for Pitchfork Live and in like two minutes it was on 10,000 people and I immediately got crazy stage fright. I’ve never played to 10,000 people before! So it’s weird. It’s like living in an alternate reality, but I also feel really lucky to have a sense of purpose right now.”

“I’ve been recording through the Izotope Spire. It’s so sick. It’s this little at-home thing with one giant button in the middle. If you’re not a gear head and you want it to sound normal without trying very hard, it’s great. I do all my sessions on them. It’s like glorified voice memos and it means I’m not having to work on my laptop. It’s only eight tracks, which is great for me, because it stops me overdoing it. Then you can plug a mic into it – recently I’ve been using this AKG C414 B-ULS – and it’s a great preamp. Since I’ve been doing that, it sounds so much better and I feel like

I took my glasses off.”

“It just got easy all of a sudden. There’s kind of an end to it, whereas there’s an endless void with the piano. I was lucky, I would wind up going to an arts high school, but with the kids there, you could say you played the piano, but unless you are a virtuoso you’re not a f*cking piano player. There’s less freedom to be a f*ck-up. Whereas with guitar, it just got easier and I was just like, ‘I want to know all the chords’. Also, you could just pitch up on the street and play a song. I still wish I played piano. I know so many people who are technically piano f*ck-ups, but its great to have that tool onstage and go from one instrument to the other.”

“I think the first time was probably when I was trying to learn some song, like Joni Mitchell or Sun Kil Moon, that I loved. But I actually f*cked up my finger like a year and a half ago and it stopped me from playing E and F, which was in so many of my songs. I was cutting stems on flowers and the knife flipped and just hacked right on my knuckle. Since then it’s been really stiff and it hurts like sh*t. I hope that one day it heals but that’s been making me be more experimental with chords [and tunings].

“I play guitar in a weird way. When I met Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska, who produced both my records, I was basically a folk artist. It was sounding a little basic. Now I think of the writing process as going into the studio to f*ck up the thing that I just wrote. It’s like, ‘Show me a mode I can play in’ or ‘Show me an