Review | Phoebe Bridgers Made Me See Her Show (and My Life) Through My Own Eyes

In the fall of 2023, I met a girl who would become a friend in the coming year

I was coming home from a night out with some friends, a night where I spent a decent chunk of the evening running away from a guy with a fanny pack trying to dance with me (he wore it cross-body … for some reason). After, we went to a friend’s place, where several people were laying on top of each other, looking up at the ceiling on MDMA.

Someone asked if anyone wanted to play a song, and after a few moments of silence, I queued “Scott Street” by Phoebe Bridgers. After a night of rap songs, a guy groaned, “Who played this really slow song?” as I, presumably, ruined the mood. The girl then asked the same thing, but excitedly. 

We talked about how it was one of our favorite songs by her, and later that year she ended up finding us last-minute tickets to Phoebe’s shows in London. During “ICU,” she asked me if I was okay after the “I hate your mom, I hate it when she opens her mouth” lyric, because I was dating a guy at the time, and every one of my friends hated his mom. When she asked, I looked back at her confused, but I told her later I really appreciated the gesture. She was thinking about my life more than I was.

L.A.-born singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers’s music is often a blend of acoustic guitar and electronic production. Her lyrics tend to deal with blunt recounts of internal emotions, including love, loss, codependency, and trauma. Bridgers has been featured on tracks with Taylor Swift, SZA, and Kid Cudi, to name a few, and is a member of the musical groups boygenius (with Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus) and Better Oblivion Community Center (with Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes).

Fast forward to this week, where I saw Bridgers again, but this time on the other side of the world. I walked into Los Angeles’s Intuit Dome with my boyfriend, past droves of fans dressed up for “Phoebeween,” as a few signs outside read.

We went through the line to get our tickets scanned, then each got a Yondr pouch to put our phones into. (I was given tickets to her other two shows and ended up seeing the show from the pit as well, and as a short girl, I loved how nice it felt seeing a show through my eyes and not through people holding up phones.) 

The lights stayed dim, and a blue light shone hazily onto the audience as we waited for Bridgers to start. There was a giant white dome, and a curtain with a film-like grain being projected onto it.

Then, a ball shaped light (that looked a bit like a dark gray moon) came down from the ceiling, and music started to play. You could hear Bridgers’s voice sing “The Outside,” the opening track to Lost Weekend, as light billowed around it. As the song came to a close, the dome rose to show Bridgers and her band, dressed as characters from Peter Pan to play “Motion Sickness.” The dome looked like a UFO rising, with lights beaming all around the edges.

Underneath the dome, they played more songs from Lost Weekend, including “Kill Me,” “The Governor’s Waltz,” and, fittingly with their costumes, “Lost Boys.” 

The curtain showed a projection of the mountains on the cover of her sophomore record, Punisher, as a beam of red light shone. The band started playing the album intro “DVD Menu,” then went into “Garden Song,” and “Moon Song,” with a moon projected onto the bottom of the dome.

Bridgers then went to the B-Stage closer to the back of the stadium to play “Funeral,” “As Above,” and “Still Standing.” Before the latter, Bridgers dedicated the song to her father in an emotionally complicated speech. “My dad was abusive,” Bridgers shared, “and all my mom did was help me.” Her voice cracked in the first few notes, and under a blue spotlight, smoke covered her almost completely as she sang, “I found her bleeding over the sink, but when you said sorry, you were looking at me.”

Then it was back to the main stage to play the upbeat ode to her boyfriend “Bobby,” before surprising the audience with two special guest performances: “Silk Chiffon” with MUNA, and Savior Complex with Billie Eilish. The volume in the crowd was deafening for both acts, with both dressing on theme as pirates (MUNA) and Michael Darling (Eilish).

A highlight of the night was when Phoebe’s brother Jackson Bridgers joined her onstage to sing “I Can’t Wait.” “All my life, side by side. Hyde, Jekyll, Hyde, finally together,” they sang and Jackson proudly announced that his mask, in the shape of a ship, was made by him. 

Phoebe closed the show with “Kyoto” and “I Know the End,” where the audience yelled along with her during the outro. Then, for the encore, Bridgers played “Lost Weekend (Reprise)” and “Scott Street” on the B-stage.

The mix of the song and its associated memories with my friend hit me in a way I wasn’t expecting. My friend and I were close for years, but recently, after her grandma passed, she told me that the good things in my life made her feel so bad about her life that she couldn’t talk to me anymore. The story in the song, of two people who’ve missed such huge chunks of each other’s lives but were once so close, kicked in together with the outro of multiple lines of “Anyway, don’t be a stranger,” and tears fell. On the other side of the world, I was thinking about my own life this time.

I thought of this quote from an interview Bridgers did a while back: “Some people who misunderstand sad music are like … ‘why would you want to kind of soak in that feeling?’ And, honestly, it’s kind of like trauma representation … when I read a book that’s super dark or something, there’s like a weight lifted.” 

And, for the first time since my friend and I last talked, I felt it.