There are vague echoes of all three in her music-Young’s dolor, Fleetwood Mac’s tunefulness, some of Nirvana’s boyish rawness. “Punisher” was recorded at Sound City, in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Van Nuys, where Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush,” Fleetwood Mac’s “Fleetwood Mac,” and Nirvana’s “ Nevermind” were produced. In conversation, Bridgers is quick to lampoon her own behavior with a withering quip, or to wisecrack about the gaffes of others, but her music can be almost unbearably tender. “The doctor put her hands over my liver / She told me my resentment’s getting smaller,” she sings on “Garden Song.” “I’ll listen back and be, like, ‘Oh, fuck, phonetically I have something else that sounds exactly the same.’ ” Her best writing is both dreamlike and mundane. “I tweak lyrics a million times,” she said. “Punisher” took Bridgers more than a year to record. But Bridgers is too interested in the pliability and the beauty of language to be satisfied with mere confession. Oberst and Bridgers both write frank and anxious folk songs that are preoccupied with death and spiritual decay. “I went directly into Bright Eyes as a teen-ager,” Bridgers said. Oberst is one of its most beloved practitioners. “Right when I heard her start to sing, I felt like I was reuniting with an old friend,” Oberst said, of their first encounter.īridgers was brought up with the music of Laurel Canyon-the nimble but vulnerable folk songs that proliferated on the West Coast in the nineteen-seventies, when writers like Joni Mitchell began exploring parallel ideas of domesticity and unease-but she came of age listening to emo, a subgenre of punk rock focussed on disclosure and catharsis. He and Bridgers met when she was added to a bill he was part of at the Bootleg Theatre, in Los Angeles, in 2016 two years later, they made an album together, as Better Oblivion Community Center.
That night, Bridgers was accompanied by her guitar and a string quartet, which added a tense elegance to a song that alludes, in an oblique way, to murdering a skinhead and burying him in the garden: “Someday I’m gonna live in your house up on the hill / And when your skinhead neighbor goes missing / I’ll plant a garden in the yard then.”Ĭonor Oberst, of Bright Eyes, was in the audience. On “Punisher,” “Garden Song” is buoyed by synthesizers it sounds lush and wet. “Just being kind of bored and on my phone.”Īnd last night I blacked out in my car And I woke up in my childhood bed Wishing I was someone else, feeling sorry for myself When I remembered someone’s kid is dead.Īt Carnegie Hall, Bridgers opened her set with “Garden Song,” the first single from “Punisher.” I made a bootleg recording of her performance, which I have replayed several dozen times, in part because it feels like a valuable relic from an era in which large groups of people could still assemble to hear music, and in part because it is beautiful. “My least favorite thing is not getting nervous,” she said. “She was talking about a gig she’d played, and she was, like, ‘Oh, what was I doing again? Oh, I was playing Obama’s Inauguration.’ She was flexing and it was amazing.” Bridgers, who will release her second album, “Punisher,” in June, gets a little jittery before she performs. “She’s so badass,” Bridgers told me later.
Backstage, she shared a dressing room with the seventy-four-year-old soul singer Bettye LaVette. A thin headband pushed her white-blond hair from her face. Already, it felt resonant.īridgers, who is twenty-five, wore a tea-length black dress and high-top Doc Martens. The text is intended to coax a consciousness through the foggy space between death and rebirth. Early in the evening, the artist and musician Laurie Anderson performed several pieces from her album “Songs from the Bardo,” in which she narrates sections of “ The Tibetan Book of the Dead” in a gentle, steady voice. New York was not yet fully in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic, but a diffuse anxiety was nonetheless in the air. In late February, the singer and songwriter Phoebe Bridgers appeared at Carnegie Hall as part of a benefit for Tibet House U.S., a nonprofit founded by the composer Philip Glass, the actor Richard Gere, and the Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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