EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED
PHOEBE BRIDGERS IS A MUSICIAN WHO REVELS IN THE DARKNESS, ALBEIT HAVING EARNED HER PLACE IN THE SPOTLIGHT
Musician Phoebe Bridgers is as unfiltered as they come.
phoebe Bridgers is the kind of person you want to be friends with on Co-star. She writes funny tweets (“I would like social distance from myself”), posts self-deprecating selfies, sings about missing her dog (“I wish I was on a spaceship, just me and my dog and an impossible view”) and makes funny Tiktoks. She is also effortlessly cool: enough to be tapped for a Rodarte campaign that also starred January Jones, Kirsten Dunst and the Haim sisters. And unruly enough to get away with smoking a bong in the video for “Garden Song”. Fader has described her as “one part
@Sosadtoday, one part Leonard Cohen” – listening to her introspective and bittersweet songs evokes an image of your emo teen self, but all grown up.
But foremost, Bridgers is insanely talented. When she released her debut album Stranger
In The Alps in 2017, she seemed a relative newcomer, but already had considerable industry clout and had been picked up to appear on two Apple commercials. She started learning guitar when she was 11 (Ben Harper’s mum taught her the banjo), and she went on to land a spot at competitive performing arts school Los Angeles County High School For The Arts after just a single verse of her three-part audition. Of cutting her teeth busking at the Pasadena Farmers Market, in her home town, she recalls: “I would sing for hours, and no-one would pay attention to me. I could practise songs over and over – if it had been two hours, I could start playing the same songs.”
“I ALMOST CRY every time I’M ON STAGE AND people are SINGING MY SONGS”
She says that anonymity gave her a thick skin when she played in tiny bars to crowds who barely knew who she was. “I can handle it. Or I have a higher tolerance for it. I was opening for someone in Idaho, and the entire audience was scream-talking at each other. They just didn’t give a single fuck. I was looking at my band and couldn’t stop laughing the whole show, it was so funny.”
She reflects: “Singing for a bunch of people who don’t give a fuck is very humbling. And it makes me twice as grateful when people care. I almost cry every time I’m on stage and people are singing my songs.”
With her second album, Punisher, due out in June, and slots on major festival line-ups such as Latitude and Pitchfork (right under Kim Gordon, no less) hopefully still going ahead in July, that’s her reality now. If she’s appearing as support, it’s for an act like The 1975 or The National.
“I think I knew that I was going to do it forever before I should have known, like, before I was good,” says Bridgers. “I was pretty committed before even knowing what it really meant to do it as a job… I felt confident before I should have. It wasn’t really on the table for me to do anything else. I have no other marketable skills.
“I’ve always felt this way: if you hate your job, all the shitty stuff is extra reason to hate it. But if you love your job... it’s like confirmation bias: if you love something, if you think your boyfriend is awesome, all the shitty stuff that he does you’re going to blame on other things. Which is half good and half bad. Sometimes it’s denial, and sometimes it’s just caring about something. I think I just blame becoming a musician on that. Every bad thing that happened to me was just like, ‘Oh whatever, that happens to everybody.’ Every good thing was because I made it happen, you know?”
Somewhere along the way, she met the Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Ryan Adams, who produced and released on his label her first EP, Killer, when Bridgers was 20 years old and Adams was twice that. In a now-infamous New York Times article (the same one that first alleged Adams had been sending explicit texts to an underage fan), Bridgers said their professional relationship turned briefly romantic, before he began barraging her with texts and emotionally abusive behaviour. When she ended things, she said he became evasive and retracted the offers he’d dangled in front of her. Instead of letting the saga derail her career — or define it — after the Times piece blew up, she issued a quiet note of thanks to “my friends, my bands, my mom. They all supported and validated me. They told me that what had happened was fucked up and wrong, and that I was right to feel weird about it.”
At least publicly, Bridgers went on with things, including a music career that was by that point well beyond needing to be propped up by Adams. The prospect of a follow-up to Stranger
In The Alps has had fans waiting with bated breath, in part because of the success of her two side projects: duo Better Oblivion Community Center, alongside Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst, and Boygenius, with Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus. “These two things took off in ways I didn’t expect and was very pleasantly surprised by,” she says. “[The album] was always like, ‘Okay, next month!’ That totally delusional thought of: ‘Well obviously I’ll finish an album and it’ll be out in spring!’ It’s like, ‘It’s been a year...’”
Bridgers describes the all-female Boygenius as a “therapy group”. “On tour, we could not make eye contact at all on stage otherwise we’d immediately start crying,” she says of performing in the trio. As for the difference between working on her solo stuff and being a part of something like Boygenius? “It’s like going on a road trip,” she says. “When you’re by yourself, it’s great in its own way – you’re finding stuff out about yourself and learning how to work in that way, you’re putting your name on something. But with Boygenius it’s like taking a road trip with your friends. It’s just better – better for the good and better for the bad. If someone forgot a giant tent pole, three people now have to deal with it. You share the burden of the good shit and share the burden of the bad shit.” She concedes: “I collaborate with so many people in my solo music, so it’s not a perfect analogy.”
Punisher is no different: Oberst, Baker and Dacus all appear on tracks, as does Warpaint’s Jenny Lee Lindberg and drummer Jim Keltner, known for his work with Bob Dylan and John Lennon. Even her tour manager — a “Dutch man named Jeroen [with] the voice of an angel” — makes a cameo on “Garden Song”.
Of her own process, she says: “I write all the time, but I’m not that prolific. I’ll spend three days trying to write one sentence, or like cleaning out a drawer instead of writing. So when I have 10 songs, it’s like: ‘These are them.’”
When we talk, her tour with The National has just been postponed due to the COVID-19 shutdown, and she’s been selfisolating at home in Los Angeles, “just like, reorganising and all the shit that everybody’s doing, but also a lot of depression naps”. She’s sure of herself, but at times talks (and sings) as though she’s thinking out loud, often elevating the minutiae of the every day into lyrical gold. “Little things that I say to people every day will just seep into the writing. No matter how many times I write a song, I always try to start from a very heady place. And then I always come back to: just tell the fucking truth.” Sometimes that truth is a painful one.
Punisher feels less burdensome than her first album. The dark parts of her psyche are still there, but her bleak, caustic tendencies are tempered by moments of whimsy and lightness. “I genuinely believe the subject matter of my songs, for the most part. That’s kind of hard because a lot of it is depressing. But it’s nice to be able to write stuff that feels really dark and have others resonate with it.” She ruminates: “I can’t decide if the depressing songs are curing me… In the best way, it feels like you’re moving on from it. And in the worst way it feels like you’re just choosing to live there. Every time I’ve been like, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t write a sad song,’ it makes it in somehow.”