Band:Phoebe Brdigers
Album: Lost Weekend
Best song: “Bobby” and “Lost Boys”
Worst song: “As Above,” maybe. It’s still very good.
Artists of all stripes disappoint us all the time, from the smallness of being disappointed with John Mulaney’s divorce/drug problems to the obscene bigotry of J.K. Rowling (and much of that foggy set of islands in the north Atlantic, apparently) to the fullness of various abusive musicians. Knowing about these things isn’t only a modern phenomenon, but the proliferation of media – both social and conventional – means we know more about the people whose work we enjoy.
I know I sound like the oldest man in the world, but we simply know too much about public figures. I don’t say this lightly; I’m a journalist by trade and education and I do not want to go back to the past of sweeping presidents’ drug abuse and illicit sex under the rug. Rather, I don’t need to know the fullness of what every artist thinks about everything. Unfortunately, this is the world we’ve made and I now need to be bombarded by speculation about whether a basketball player is a TERF or not because her teammate is a bigot.(Not that I’m letting Caitlin Clark off the hook. She did that Morgan Wallen thing and hasn’t really taken a strong stance on anything other than her love of playing basketball and making money. It’s very possible – likely, even – that she’s dumber than a rock. But, she should say something against her bigoted high-profile teammate.)
Of course, this is all a prelude to the fact that a bunch of the best songs on Phoebe Bridgers’ new album are love songs about Bo Burnham. To say that’s unsettling is an understatement; I already know too much about Burnham and Bridgers being a couple due to Bridgers covering his “That Funny Feeling” a few years ago. I don’t know or care about the timeline of them getting together; Bridgers also sings about her ex Paul Mescal – she did the same on her sublime verse on SZA’s “Ghost in the Machine” – on “The Governor’s Waltz” and, quite frankly, I’m not about to dig into the timelines of Bridgers’ relationships. I’m a grown man. I have better things to do, even if I’m currently unemployed.
I’m having trouble making up my mind about Lost Weekend being a masterpiece because of the record’s attention paid to Burnham. The record has multiple songs about Bridgers’ late father, who she introduced to us on previous songs like “Kyoto” and others. This relationship fits more within my – perhaps small – visions of Bridgers’ songwriting: she’s smart, she’s mad, she’s sad, she’s contemplative. Despite her being heir to Elliott Smith’s brilliant throne, I don’t think of her doing her versions of “Say Yes,” and yet here we are.
“Bobby” might be the best song on the brilliant album, a sonic mélange of “Graceland Too,” “Satanist” and the aforementioned Smith tracks. It comes in with a bang and plays with sonics like the best Pixies and Nirvana songs. The production features a full-throated production dotted with little banjos, background vocals and pounding guitar, with an outro that plucks and glides.
Bridgers forces us all to feel her meet-cute-via-lockdown-media when she opens the song singing “I saw you slow dancing alone in your room/I wanted to buy you a new pair of shoes,” evoking – as she slyly does with the album’s first track named “Outside” – Burnham’s multi award winning Bo Burnham: Inside special. But, the lyrics speak to Bridgers’ being Smith’s spiritual child in her ability to place simple phrases over tender arrangements, matching rhythms perfectly when she sings “Now I sleep in your shirts and you live in my house/You sing in the shower, I talk to myself,” with the chorus repeating a version of Burnham’s given name and “This could be the end of wanting.” Unlike Bridgers’ greatest previous works like “I Know the End,” “Bobby” is simply positive without the ambiguity that Bridgers has mastered.
The songs about her father are more within my – admittedly narrow – experience of Bridgers’ work. Listeners know Tony Bridgers – though probably not by name – from songs like “Kyoto” and “Garden Song,” which describe his distant/absent relationship with his kids. Bridgers reveals more about her dad, who died between Punisher and Lost Weekend, being potentially abusive in “Still Standing.” The track is gorgeous in its movements, featuring soft acoustic guitars and banjos as it builds during the first chorus and blossoming soon thereafter, with harmonica and a full band swirling around Bridgers’ delicate vocals.
“Never Going Back!” is a more direct and more opaque reflection on her father. The song features only two lines of sung lyrics (“Never going back again/The way it used to be is not the way that it is”) sung over a Muppet Show-esque party of instruments for a full minute before a banjo takes over and a voicemail from Tony Bridgers plays. Said voicemail positions Phoebe as the protagonist – I don’t say that as a bad thing. It’s her record! – and backs up her description of his distance in “Kyoto.” It’s a fun track with the bones of a hard conversation underneath asking us what our parents are to us, in life and in death.
The record is dedicated to her father. Like many people, Bridgers’ relationship with her dad was difficult and in need of repair, but her records outlined a young woman yearning for him to be there and be better. It’s a familiar feeling for many people; a turning point in our lives is when we realize our parents are nothing more than regular-ass people with flaws, love to give and lots of complicated actions that reflect those things. They’re just people, even if they hold a different place in our hearts.
(To the intro to this whole thing: Bridgers was minorly bombarded by press and fans when she went to her dad’s funeral, which she called out on social media. The funeral for a parent – even if you wrote songs that referenced them – is a private event and the atmosphere we’ve created of parasocialism strips public figures of their humanity. Needless to say, everyone needs to reevaluate how they treat entertainers.)
The album’s first single, “Lost Boys,” is the album’s other standout and shows the full powers of Bridgers’ songwriting. Singing about the perpetual man-child in negative, neutral and positive lights, the song has the hallmarks of her best work. She sings about specific situations like someone injuring himself while throwing a tantrum with a gun, threads beautiful anti-capitalist metaphors and melds melancholy minor key bits with trumpets blaring in triumph. Each verse describes a different lost boy, the first a young boy who makes her feel “weightless but not scared,” the second the aforementioned tantrum throwing gun lover who Bridgers still worries about and the third a man who makes her feel “born again,” even if he leaves the morning after (perhaps another nod to Smith?).
The track is less streamlined than the average Bridgers track; the pre-chorus almost feels abrupt but somehow works as well as any part of the song. But the song itself is an achingly perfect distillation of why Bridgers is so magnificent at weaving the emotions of empathy, sadness and hope together. There’s no one who does it like her and Lost Weekend is evidence of her genius (even if I don’t want to hear about Bo Burnham being a great partner).