SOUNDTRACK: PHOEBE BRIDGERS WORLD TOUR (May 26-June 4, 2010).
Phoebe Bridgers is a fascinating person. She sings the most delicate songs. Her voice is soft and almost inaudible. Her music is simple but pretty. And her lyrics are (often) devastatingly powerful.
And yet she is really quite funny. Both in interviews and in her visual representation of herself.
Her logo when I saw her was a fascinating faux death metal style of her name. And now with this world tour, you can see in the poster all of the metal bands referenced in the logos. (There’s Slayer in the kitchen for instance).
And then there’s the basic joke of this world tour. No one can go anywhere, so she is travelling her world: kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom (second concert by popular demand??)
The first show last night raised money for Downtown Women’s Center.
After some introductory talking and even a magic show (!) from Ethan, her producer, she played five songs. Midway through she agrees that the set was a bit of a downer, especially opening with these two sad songs.
“Scott Street”
“Funeral”
Then it was time for two new songs (and an electric guitar).
“Moon Song”
“I See You”
Before coming to the end, she delayed, because she was having so much fun (and raising so much money). So she showed us around her kitchen and pitched the kind of guitar she was playing, the kind of capo (quite expensive!), and her Target-purchased kitchen ware.
She ended the set with a boygenius song, “Me and My Dog ” dedicated to her dog Max who died at the age of 17 last year.
The first night of her tour was a success. Tonight is night two, from the bathroom.
You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. You can watch it here.
[READ: May 27, 2020] “California Ghosts”
I don’t usually read profiles of artists I like. But every once in a while, one strikes me as interesting.
Phoebe Bridgers is a pretty fascinating character (see the above part for some details). So I though this might be an interesting profile. And it was.
Bridgers was brought up in Laurel Canyon and came of age listening to emo. I love that the writer has to define emo for the New Yorker crowd, “a sub-genre of punk focused on disclosure and catharsis.” That’s probably the most concise definition of emo I have read.
She writes that Conor Oberst (of Bright Eyes) is one of emo’s most beloved practitioners. Phoebe grew up listening to him and then met him in 2016. He says when he first heard her he felt like he was reuniting with an old friend. In 2018 they made Better Oblivion Community Center together.
At Carnegie Hall (where she wore a tea-length black dress and high to Doc Martens), she sang a song with Matt Berninger of The National.
They seem perfect for each other–great senses of humor with very dark music. And their voices would be so dramatically different, it must have sounded great. Berninger (who is 49) “sings worriedly of the past” while Bridgers (who is 25) “sings worriedly of the future.”
This profile is also fascinating because it happened during the quarantine. At the beginning of the essay, Petrusich and Bridgers met at the Grand Central Oyster Bar.
She talked about growing up and how her mother wanted her to take piano lessons–so she took guitar instead (at 13) because “reading music felt like math homework.”
At 15 Bridgers joined Sloppy Jane a punk rock band led by the artist Haley Dahl. Bridger splayed bass. You can see a few videos of them online and Phoebe looks just like Phoebe. [Dahl has relocated to New York and Sloppy Jane is now an 11 piece art project].
A talent scout saw her performing and she got some acting gigs from it: Taco Bell, HomeGoods, and an iPhone ad in which she sings the Pixies Gigantic, [She’s almost unrecognizable in the two seconds she’s on screen].
What’s fascinating about these commercials is that she found the “minorly soul-sucking” and yet she was “able to work five days in one year and give myself my own trust fund.” Wow.
She talks briefly about Ryan Adams (they dated when she was 20 and he was 20 years older than that). She spoke out against thin when attention was brought to his behavior. “Motion Sickness” (a favorite song of mine) is apparently about the relationship. She had a funny (not really) comment about thinking that Adams is hounding her on Twitter.
Petrusich talks about sifting through her social media to find useful information–“a process that felt both creepy and contemporary.” Bridgers is apparently entirely herself online: funny, blunt, smart.
Petrusich was supposed to fly out to LA in April. That didn’t happen.
Bridgers has been doing a lot of live streams. She did one for Pitchfork where she had trouble with the tech: “I’m such a boomer right now. I’m very impressed by this technology. She also did a performance for Jimmy Kimmel from her bathtub. There was a bottle of Head & Shoulders visible–she thought that it was funny.
Petrusich and Bridgers did finally video chat in April. Bridgers gave he a tour of her apartment (tiny) which you can see in the above home tour.
Then she went to her moms house in Pasadena. Her mom, Jamie, is very supportive and they are close. Jamie commented a lot during the World Tour Kitchen show which i thought was really cute.
Her parents divorced when Phoebe was 20. Her new (beautiful) song Kyoto is about her relationship wit her father.
Jamie invited her in, but Phoebe said she couldn’t–it’s not social distancing safe. So Jamie donned some gloves and took Petrusich on a virtual tour of Phoebe’s childhood home. You can see her shelf of Harry Potter books.
Jamie says she took Phoebe to shows when she was 13 and 14. Some of those punk shows were hard to sit through, “or actually to stand through, because you never get to sit down at a punk show.”
Bridgers has a wicked sense of humor and a punk vocabulary. It’s amazing how lovely her songs can be.
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