In the time since the release of 2020’s Punisher, the influence of Phoebe Bridgers’ signature confessional songwriting on the wider industry cannot go unnoticed.
Of course, Bridgers hails from a long line of pioneers that came before her. Elliot Smith’s influence emerges in her open chord progressions and occasional existentialism, alongside John Prine’s and Gillian Welch’s knack for transforming the mundane into something profound. However, it’s her particular command over the craft that remains most striking as a modern subject. In writing about herself with such disarming honesty, she gifts listeners with deeply personal songs that simultaneously allows them to feel more universally seen than ever before.
And the rest of the world took note — along with four Grammy’s, she could be spotted with her own opening spot on the Era’s tour and making out with her fellow boygenius band members whilst a crowd of 25,000 fans looked on in awe. But with such notoriety comes other perils. Now thrust into the public eye, the intimate details of her life that were once given symbolic weight in her songs, became the subject of intense speculation. How, then, do you come to negotiate the tension between making deeply personal music and preserving your personal life, all whilst remaining an eternal subject to the surveillance of the internet?
Much of Lost Weekend seems to be in search of an answer to this question, with the album’s production and tone shifting in response. At times it departs entirely from the all-acoustic sound tied to Bridgers’ past projects and morphs into something far more abstract. Songs begin as one thing, and end as another — melodies collapse in on themselves, fracturing into a thousand different moving parts as Bridgers breaks down the identity that’s been imposed upon her from behind a screen.
This sentiment announces itself on the opener with her singular voice trapped inside a vocoder, like a ghost in a machine. It almost startles you at first — how uncanny and warped Bridgers’ voice sounds to the trained ear, but it’s fitting for a song about being unable to enter fight or flight. “Fist through the dry wall / I’m frozen in place”, she whirs robotically, as static hums through the background, “But not afraid”. At once the listener is a bystander to the scene, but stuck “On the outside / watching,” with Bridgers in control of when she wishes to pull away. Writing from a new, distant place, she masterfully constructs an image of herself that remains elusive — one half cast in shadow, the other pixelated beyond recognition.
Moreover, it’s not just Bridgers’ identity that’s eclipsed by the online world, as songs about love and loss are at odds with the heavily electronic production that brings them to life. Acoustic guitars strum to create synthetic textures, and live recordings blend with the machinery of virtual instrumentation. At a time when technology impedes every moment of our existence, there’s something fitting about producing a record that exists between the real world and the material, contesting what is true and what’s programmed to look like it is. One thing that remains irreplaceable, however, is Bridgers’ skill in telling stories in a way that still feels contemporary and real. AI could never muster something so simple and profound a lyric as; “The government isn’t trying to kill you / They just don’t care if they kill you.”
In all the places that Punisher (2020) was soft, rounded and ambient, Lost’s sound is constantly being dismantled and reassembled around Bridgers’ voice and the stories she chooses to tell. Narratives appear like vignettes, and the bad guys, who she mostly paints from a distance, remain anonymous. “There’s a difference between lying / And deciding what not to say”, she concludes on ‘Haunted’, resolving to keep the grizzly details of her romantic affairs buried under a purposeful sense of obscurity. And so Bridgers’ voice remains the only, and at times unreliable, narrator to her own version of events.
Instead of giving the internet any fuel for further speculation, most of her analyses on the album are turned inward. Nowhere is this more evident than on the titular track. When she’s at her worst, people are blowing her off for “using my friends / and losing the plot.” She throws tantrums and breaks off her engagement — if she’s calling out anyone on this album, it’s herself. And yet she will go on to learn “the same lesson / over and over again”, her raw voice suspended over a single mellotron track that forever repeats — a reminder of the things we wish to forget about our own past, but continue to colour every moment of the present. The songwriting here is Bridgers at her best, and the sudden twist in production pushes it to new extremes — as the song reaches its climax, its entire structure collapses. Drums crash into focus and jagged synths arpeggiate from corner to corner, all guided by her own shallow breaths that churn like a metronome, keeping a steady beat for the destruction raining all around her.
These distinct stylistic choices continue to decorate the surreal landscapes Bridgers conjures up on the record, making it feel as though the whole thing exists in an otherworldly, liminal space of its own. The mostly instrumental ‘Panorama’ paints a sparse image of a hotel room with a view, belongings spilled out over the floor and a menacing figure knocking at the door. Other songs are strung up with iconic images of a fading America. On ‘As Above’, she sees Air Force One flying over the fields of rural Nebraska, and dedicates a song to the desolate ‘Liberty Tree’ mall in Massachusetts. However, for Bridgers, these long-forgotten places would not be complete without the ghosts that haunt them.
The loss of her father permanently hangs in the air over many of these songs, not so much as a concrete exploration of grief but as an ongoing echo that rings through her everyday life. ‘Still Standing’ is a point of powerful emotional catharsis, as halfway through the arrangement cuts to near silence for her to revisit the moments of domestic violence that punctured her childhood. The words cut like a knife, made all the more painful when juxtaposed with a blemished image of her as a teenager: “At the top of the stairs, turning red / Pound-for-pound in a prom dress.” In seeking to understand the man who helped shape the person she is today, Bridgers casts herself in the very likeness of her father: “Your back to the ocean, burning red”, the two appearing like family portraits, one more faded than the other. Faced with the memory of him as an inherently flawed person, she cannot imagine him dead. “But you are, everyday”, she sings, parting ways with him forever, “Thank you for everything.”
Her father is not the only recurring figure to feature across the record. On ‘Bobby’, she introduces us to the other man in her life, a figure that could mean “the end of wanting” for Bridgers. He crashes into her life suddenly, like the rush of guitars and clattering percussion that appear as if from nowhere, and she gives him her heart on his sleeve. Like many of Bridgers’ love songs, it’s tempered by a healthy dose of irony, and marks the recurring association between her newfound devotion and, of all things, death. She offers to murder her friends for him, so long as they’re together and alive, declaring; “Don’t die, Bobby, before I die.” And on the stand-out ‘Kill Me’, she fears this great love might be the death of her altogether. What starts as a hazy, gothic acoustic affair about their first encounter (“He tastes like a flower with chemical petals”), warps into something far beyond Bridgers’ control. Distorted drums burst through the veil as she tells of a love that might obliterate her and everything she knows to be true; “You taught me / That I know nothing.”
However, these portents of death are not here to weigh down or diminish the joys in Bridgers’ life. If anything, Lost Weekend sees Bridgers learning that they have to live alongside everything else. And her former self, the one before strangers on the internet decided who she was, had to die in some small way for her to create a record like this at this stage in her career. “When a dream comes true, a fantasy dies,” she reprises on the album’s closer. The melody is an echo of ‘Lost Weekend’ but sung from a greater distance, with Bridgers’ voice emboldened from having gone through hell and back. “But we’re gonna be alright, me and you” she resolves, talking to everyone or no one at all. In the face of death’s startling devastation, Lost Weekend sees Bridgers live to tell the tale on what it means to survive it.
Lost Weekend is out now via Dead Oceans
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