THERE’S ‘FUN IN THE DARKNESS’
HOW PASADENA’S PHOEBE BRIDGERS WENT FROM ATTENDING COACHELLA WITH HER MOM TO PERFORMING ON ITS MAIN STAGE FRIDAY AMID A BACKDROP OF EMOTIONAL TURMOIL
THE FIRST TIME Phoebe Bridge rs went to Coach ella — and the second, and the third time too — she went with her mother. ¶ Bridgers, born and raised in Pasadena, was in high school then; a pale whisper of a punk girl who had yet to get her ears pierced. That was until one fateful Coachella in 2011, when on a whim she dyed her hair electric pink, then goaded her mom, Jamie, to take her to get pierced at a Claire’s at the mall in Palm Desert. She elbowed her way to the front during the Crystal Castles set, and thrashed next to singer Alice Glass in a mosh pit as her mom nodded along from the outskirts of the crowd. ¶ “My mom was cool with it,” says Bridgers, now 27. “I don’t know what I was trying to do. It was so 2011. I wore these bedazzled hot pants and combat boots. My hair was dyed pink, my hands were dyed pink. I’ve been on a lot of worst-dressed lists [since], but I think it’s something I’m proud of now.” ¶ Bridgers will return to debut on Coachella’s main stage on Friday, this time as a four-time Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter. An intimate, folk-macabre history of emotional turmoil, her sophomore album “Punisher” — which earned her nominations in 2021 for best new artist, alternative music album, as well as rock song and rock performance for the single
“Kyoto” — became a balm for many upon its June 2020 release, which coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as a national uprising following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.
“I’m not pushing the record until things go back to ‘normal,’ ” she tweeted that day, in solidarity with protesters.
Since then, Bridgers achieved her first No. 1 placement on Billboard’s emerging artists chart; in 2021, she sold out two nights at the Greek Theatre; Olivia Rodrigo and the 1975’s Matty Healy attended.
She counts a number of famous fans, such as Taylor Swift; Elton John, who said he would “hit someone” if Bridgers didn’t win a Grammy; and Paul Mescal, star of the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s “Normal People,” with whom Bridgers struck up a long-distance romance over Twitter in 2020. (“He’s the best” is all she’ll divulge.)
We meet in Highland Park. Bridgers is cradling Maxine, her black pug. During conversation, she keeps her sunglasses on, which accentuates her overall spectral presence, and wears a bespoke black Lifershop dress, printed with Frank Frazettaesque skeletons playing guitar.
“People are always like, ‘What’s up with the skeletons?’ ” says Bridgers. As if a handshake deal with her own mortality, Bridgers has developed a reputation for wearing skeletons on her clothing — whether it’s the matching pajamas she dons with her band onstage or the Thom Browne suit she wore to the 2021 Grammys red carpet, emblazoned with a skeleton intricately beaded to scale.
“When I finally went back on tour last year and saw like a sea of skeleton costumes, it made me want to cry,” she says. “I was like, ‘These kids get it.’ ”
She adds that it’s partly a byproduct of living in Los Angeles; she recalls the time she attended a Día de los Muertos celebration at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery and reveled in the music of local Latin rock legends Ozomatli. “I learned that there can be fun in the darkness,” she says.
Born in 1994, Bridgers grew up absorbing a broad range of music inherited from her parents and their friends, who introduced her to Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. Yet by the time she began attending the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts — as a student in the vocal jazz program — Bridgers began to immerse herself in emo acts like My Chemical Romance and Bright Eyes.
Haley Dahl, singer-songwriter of the indie rock band Sloppy Jane, took notice of Bridgers, and asked her to play bass in the band. “Phoebe was wearing dresses with bicycles on them and listening to ukulele stuff,” says Dahl.
A disciple of depressive indie rockers Elliott Smith and Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst, Bridgers grew to be similarly grotesque and unsparing in her lyrics, issuing closely-sung, earth-scorching farewells to ex-lovers and friends from whom she’s moved on — even when she can’t outright say it to them. (“I have an avoidant attachment style,” she explains of her relationships.)
Bridgers eschewed college at 18 to work as a full-time musician and learned quickly that to be financially resourceful was to be socially resourceful too. On the indie rock circuit, she rubbed elbows with influential people like Robb Nansel, founder of Saddle Creek Records, and eventually popular underground musician Ryan Adams, who compared her to Bob Dylan. Adams
released her 2014 EP, “Killer,” on his boutique label PAX AM.
Adams also began courting her romantically, when she was 20; or, exactly half his age. In a New York Times bombshell published in 2019, Bridgers came forward as part of a group of women, including singer Mandy Moore, in describing his behavior as “emotionally abusive.” (She says, looking back: “There was a collective responsibility we all had to each other ... I got messages from eight other women after that.”) Adams characterized reporting on the accusations as inaccurate; he later apologized to anyone he “ever hurt, however unintentionally.”
While she dated Adams, Bridgers’ home life was in turmoil. In a 2017 interview, she described her father’s behavior toward her mother as “textbook domestic violence.” “We went through a lot,” she tells me. The dysfunction hit a fever pitch, she says, after their house caught on fire. Her parents divorced shortly after, when she was 20.
Bridgers eventually alluded to the incident in a shuddering duet with Oberst titled “Would You Rather” — a single off “Stranger in the Alps,” her 2017 debut on indie label Dead Oceans, which she wrote for her brother Jackson. “You were still in the ambulance / When the cop suggested you’re the one who tried to burn it down,” she sang.
Bridgers and Oberst continued to write and release folk-rock music together as Better Oblivion Community Center.
“There are very few people you meet in life that change you,” Oberst told Pitchfork in 2020. “I remember my life before I met her and after.”
It was in 2020, after Bridgers helped broker an additional Bright Eyes deal with Dead Oceans, a subsidiary of Secretly Group, that she approached label founder Chris Swanson to start a label of her own. Upon getting the green light during the pandemic, she dubbed it — true to her Halloween-y sense of humor — Saddest Factory Records.“I wanted to share the same good experience I had as a new artist with Secretly,” says Bridgers. “The deals I was offered before I made my first album were heinous and should be illegal …”
Bridgers has signed friends Sloppy Jane and Charlie Hickey — plus nonbinary pop artist Claud and L.A. trio Muna, who joined after their contract with RCA was terminated. “She’s accumulated power and attention, but she gracefully shares the stage,” says Muna vocalist-bassist Katie Gavin. “She amplifies what inspires her in other people.”
Saddest Factory held their inaugural showcase last month at the SXSW festival in Austin. As a bisexual “since forever,” she says, Bridgers felt compelled to pass the mic not just to artists on her label, but to LGBTQ activists and organizers fighting transphobic legislation in Texas. “I lean into the girl boss,” Bridgers says sardonically of her chief executive status.
It was while befriending fellow young singer-songwriters like Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker — with whom she later founded the indie supergroup Boygenius — that Bridgers came to understand their survival as working artists, and as women, were intertwined. “I watched an older generation, especially of men, f— things up while the people around me, in my scene, were all rooting for each other,” she adds.
Yet Bridgers’ principles have come with a price: In October 2020, Bridgers expressed support online for her friend Emily Bannon, who wrote a series of Instagram posts accusing her ex-boyfriend, music producer Chris Nelson, of abuse. Bridgers shared that she “witnessed and can personally verify” the claims against Nelson.
Nelson filed defamation lawsuits against both Bannon and Bridgers — claiming that he shared a consensual relationship with the women, and that Bridgers “used her high-profile public platform to disseminate false and defamatory statements” and “damage [his] reputation.” He claims to have suffered damages of no less than $3,800,000.
“Mr. Nelson is seeking to chill Ms. Bridgers’ allegations of abusive conduct, which are protected by the First Amendment,” Bridgers’ attorneys wrote in a court filing. They added that Nelson’s complaint, which included private text exchanges with Bridgers, was a “transparent attempt to embarrass” her.
A Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled that Bridgers would have to appear at a deposition before April 29, to determine whether she acted with “malice.” Reticent to discuss the details of the suit with The Times, she says regarding its contents: “I think it’s disrespectful to report on.”
Lately, Bridgers has been revisiting Sally Rooney’s first novel, “Conversations With Friends.” As a vocal fan of Sally Rooney’s, Phoebe was invited to contribute to the forthcoming TV adaptation. She can’t quite say what it is yet, but the book has lent Bridgers a new perspective.
“I relate to the main character, as a queer woman [who] spent her 20s just looking for someone to follow,” says Bridgers. “I just had to start weeding the garden of bull—.”
Where Bridgers was once liable to tweet overshares like “hitting the open road with six strings and a UTI,” today’s version doesn’t volunteer as much. She’s even had to change her cellphone number multiple times — which is why when she received a mysterious text from Taylor Swift last fall, she almost didn’t believe it.
Swift offered Bridgers the opportunity to supply vocals to a folk ballad of hers, “Nothing New” — which remained in the vault until the 2021 “Taylor’s Version” re-record of her 2012 album “Red.” Swift recorded her vocals from the Belfast, Northern Ireland studio Kitty Committee, while Bridgers beamed in her tracks from L.A.’s Sound City; they have yet to meet in person.
“I think that the specificity of Phoebe’s lyrics, and the vulnerability she expresses in her voice when she delivers them is what makes her music so deeply impactful and moving for me as a fan,” Swift wrote to The Times via email. “You feel like she’s reliving a precise memory or delivering a secret message to someone and you get the privilege to read it or hear about it. Her phrasing is very conversational, which turns her storytelling into something tremendously intimate, fragile and real.”
“Nothing New” came to Swift when she was just 22; in a 2012 diary entry, she described the song as “being scared of aging and things changing and losing what you have.”
“[The lyrics] hit me more than I thought it would,” says Bridgers. Like Swift, she began her career as a teen, entering a music industry that is often quick to exploit young women. “I was a lot more worried about my youth and getting discarded when I was 21. At that age, everybody writes about you as like a prodigy.
“To have won [Swift]’s trust was special,” she continues. “I was stressed and I wanted to get it right, but she was a great guide ... and approached everything with such care.”
With Coachella one week away, followed by her much-delayed tour launch for “Punisher” in May, Bridgers hints that she’s got some tricks up her skeleton-print sleeve. But she’s most excited to check out sets by fellow indie eccentrics Arlo Parks, Caroline Polachek and 100 Gecs; she’s also happy to get her mom and her brother all-access passes.
“I play on Friday,” she notes. “Which means I don’t have to worry about getting sunburned until after my set!”