FEATURE:
Bright Lights and Dead Oceans
PHOTO CREDIT: Jessica Lehrman for Rolling Stone
The Amazing and Inspiring Phoebe Bridgers
___________
THIS is not tied to an album or anniversary…
PHOTO CREDIT: Olivia Malone for The Times
but I really love Phoebe Bridgers! I have been thinking about her music and how she evolved between her debut album, Stranger in the Alps (2017) and last year’s Punisher. The California artist is such an incredible artist and someone who always delivers incredible live performances. Not only is she a brilliant solo artist. Bridgers is part of boygenius (with Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus) and Better Oblivion Community Center (with Conor Oberst). I will bring in a review for Punisher, as it was among my absolute favourites of last year. It is hard to distil or represent Phoebe Bridgers fairly in a single feature! She is such a cool person who has incredible musical taste. It seems like she is destined to appear in films, present her own podcasts/radio shows and collaborate with a load of other artists. I guess she is working on her third album. I know she is keen to get back on the road and give Punisher a proper airing. Part of the reason for me focusing on Phoebe Bridgers is a recent interview The Times conducted with her. There are some many amazing and hugely promising solo artists out there right now. I think Bridgers is among the absolute best. Not only do her songs take you somewhere wonderful – thanks, in no small part, because of such a sensational and rich voice -; one also learns so much from interviews. Bridgers has that natural cool - though she is also very deep and intelligent. I guess this is me having a chance to write about an artist I really love. I reckon Bridgers is going to be a genuine sensation and an artist who carries on making albums for decades to come!
Released on the Dead Oceans label (like her debut), Punisher is a simply wonderful work that demands full attention and investigation. I really love Stranger in the Alps, though Punisher seems like a broader and more layered album where Bridgers’ words and performances are sharper and deeper. In their review, this is what The A.V. Club observed:
“And whether she intended to do so or not, Phoebe Bridgers has created a musical monument to our dissociative age with Punisher. It’s an album about sleepless nights and sinking feelings in the pit of your stomach, wrapped in a musical package that’s both feather-light and lush enough to run your fingers through. We open with the glitchy instrumental “DVD Menu” before transitioning into the deceptively grounded “Garden Song,” a tune of healing and of rest. “The doctor put her hands over my liver/ She told me my resentment’s getting smaller,” she sings, wondering if she’s actually getting taller from all this wholesome homebound living. But the feeling doesn’t last.
Opening with the reedy sounds of a cheap synthesizer and horns from Bright Eyes’ Nathaniel Walcott, “Kyoto” has a twee quality reminiscent of Belle & Sebastian—and much as it often is for the Scottish cardigan-popsters, the foundation of this upbeat tune is cracking under Bridgers’ feet. “That song is about being in Japan for the first time, somewhere I’ve always wanted to go, playing my music for people who really want to hear it, and feeling...bad,” Bridgers says in a press release, a restlessness that bleeds through in lyrics like, “I wanted to see the world/ Then I flew over the ocean/ And I changed my mind.”
As if to underline how short-lived happiness can be, the rest of Punisher stays on a more hushed, dreamier keel. Bridgers’ high, breathy voice cuts through layers of ethereal atmosphere on tentative love songs like “Punisher” and “Savior Complex,” backed by delicate guitar and poignant violin. Presented with freedom after being deemed “no longer a danger to herself or others,” the similarly halting heroine of the lyrical folk ballad “Graceland Too” isn’t quite sure where to go. Dreams, sleep, ghosts, and vampires haunt the smartly turned lyrics, as do the sirens on their way to the hospital near Bridgers’ home. “I used to joke that if they woke you up, somebody better be dying,” she says of these piercing wails in the opening verse of “Halloween.” Then she started to feel their spirits seeping through the walls.
Perhaps inevitably, hints of Bridgers’ other projects, Boygenius and Better Oblivion Community Center, can be heard on Punisher. And the band is ultimately what pulls Bridgers out of her funk, as five-and-a-half-minute closer “I Know The End” flows from a lonesome slice of touring life to a stirring primal scream driven by pounding drums, swelling orchestration, and a ragged chorus of voices shouting, “The end is here!” Yes, it’s an indie-rock cliché straight out of a mid-’00s Arcade Fire record. And Bridgers thinks it’s pretty funny, chuckling and hissing out a scratchy growl in those last few seconds before Punisher goes quiet. “When I can’t sleep, it’s just a matter of time before I’m hearing things,” Bridgers sings on the hazy “Chinese Satellite.” Lucky for us, what she hears is absolutely gorgeous”.
Just before rounding up, I do want to source a little from that interview The Times published in April. It is an interesting and revealing conversation that shows the many sides of Phoebe Bridgers. I don’t think that it is an undertreatment to call Bridgers the voice of her generation:
“Bridgers was already a “thing” before she released Punisher last June, but when she did, it hit a chord with an even wider public, isolated and angsty at home. “It’s a depressing record, in a very depressing year,” she agrees. Yet it would be too easy to dismiss her as just dourly emo. The reason many herald her as the next Dylan or the voice of a generation that loves to lol and sob, often at the same time, is that the sadness is undercut by searing intelligence and a loopy wit. Nowhere is this clearer than on Twitter, where she mouths off with varying levels of sophistication, or indeed on TikTok, where she has become a heroine to a certain “sad girl” niche, who do daft montages to her songs. And she has style too. If the signature look for her first album was a black suit, the one for Punisher has been skeletons: she wore a Thom Browne crystal-embellished skeleton number to the Grammys, and a Gucci take on it for a performance on Saturday Night Live. She still wears suits to every meeting she has with her record label. “I want a business persona that’s, like, really bitchy and entitled,” she says mischievously.
We can laugh now to think that Bridgers’s record label told her, early on, that her Twitter should be “darker”: they didn’t think her incessant gags sat well with her mournful tunes. In fact, they made her all the more relatable, thoroughly on the pulse of Gen Z. Is it all fun to do or anxiety-inducing and insane? “It’s both — it’s like life.” She has got so many positives from it, she promises: “Honestly, there are a couple of mental-health tweets that stay in my brain longer than a paragraph from my therapist. But it can also be such a soul suck.” She says she is often exasperated to find herself with her guitar in one hand but scrolling on Twitter — but then it has also been a great way to connect with fans. “It would cut off this very sweet window.”
Bridgers is bisexual and says that coming out in high school “was kind of the opposite of an issue”. I tell her I loved reading somewhere that her sexuality sat somewhere between fancying Beck and Megan Fox. She laughs delightedly. “Yeah! I feel like I love little innocent indie boys, and then my most seminal female crushes were always the bombshells in Transformer movies, or Jessica Rabbit, or whatever.” Nowadays, though, she’s a lot less binary; she’s more into someone like the iconic lesbian singer kd lang. “I don’t know — I actually don’t believe that anyone is, like, entirely straight.” She giggles. “I just don’t believe in straight people! It’s like, how? It’s 2021!”
PHOTO CREDIT: Olivia Malone for The Times
So where does Mescal fit in to all this? There were rumours last year that the two of them were dating. “Oh, he’s the sweetest — he’s the best.” Yes, sure, but do you think he’s hot? She grins. “No comment.” I ask her how the Savior Complex video came about — how did she meet Waller-Bridge? “Well, we had been emailing back and forth just because we share a name,” Bridgers says, as though this were just about normal. “And we were like, let’s get drinks! And then lockdown happened and our emails became like, you should watch this, you should read this, you should do this.” It was Waller-Bridge who said to her, “You have to watch Normal People right now. It destroyed me,” says Bridgers, and she was reluctant to, because she thought it would kill her too. She did, though, and loved it (even if she relates more to Conversation with Friends, also by the writer Sally Rooney). “Part of what destroyed me [in Normal People] was the brother dynamic in that toxic home. I recognised a lot of my own upbringing in it”.
Even though the twenty-six-year-old is still at the start of her career, we have seen so much promising from Bridgers. From her amazing songwriting through to her wisdom and how she impacts and affects people, she is a complete artist. Whether she will be an icon in years to come remains to be seen. She is certainly a treasure who is such an important artist. Given the way she progressed between Stranger in the Alps and Punisher, it is hugely exciting to see…
WHAT comes next.