Phoebe Bridgers
Lost Weekend
DEAD OCEANS
Phoebe Bridgers possesses the incredible ability to capture the path of a body in emotional freefall. We all know the feeling: You’re about to cry from joy or sadness, holding it back like a levee until the tip of your nose starts to sting from the pressure. Her third album Lost Weekend snapshots this sort of amorous love and crippling grief in a delicate dance. What’s changed for Bridgers as she returns to her solo career after six years is that she’s impacted by a new romantic relationship and is still reeling after the death of her father in 2022. In the interim, of course, we’ve seen her on stage with indie-rock supergroup boygenius, following her collaborative work with Conor Oberst as Better Oblivion Community Center. She also tried to start up Saddest Factory Records in this damn economy. You often accelerate when you’re falling.
On the eve of her 32nd birthday, Bridgers’ voice as a songwriter of pain and pleasure colliding has only grown deeper and more resonant. Her stellar solo work includes her 2017 debut Strangers in the Alps and a second LP, 2020’s Punisher—both of which were largely defined by her heavy-hearted vocals and emotionally penetrating lyrics. A bit of a misdirect, Lost Weekend begins with Bridgers’ voice disguised under vocoder as she sets the scene on “The Outside”: She’s touring with boygenius, watching herself crowd surf, detached from her own body. Her distorted voice emerges to sing the album’s devastating opening lines: “Crying in a suit and tie / But you should see the other guy / One more time, for old time’s sake / I’ll watch him get carried away.” Subsequently, lead single “Lost Boys” feels ripped from a pre-pandemic period. It’s a crowd pleaser for sure, but Lost Weekend has deeper things to dispatch.
Bridgers naturally drops most of the love songs earlier in the tracklisting, beginning with the lilting “Kill Me.” Eventually, the bottom drops out of the acoustic track and the full band locks in (including a cameo from Geese’s Cameron Winter, who later returns at the close of the late-album harmonica and slide guitar folk-rocker “I Can’t Wait.”)—a perfect sonic analogy for giving in to the rush of love and letting go of fear. Here, Bridgers is humbled by love just as her dad exits stage right: “He tastes like a flower with chemical petals / Bobby, you taught me that I know nothing / This is gonna kill me.” The lyrics to “Bobby,” a companion piece of sorts to “Lost Boys,” are funny in a way only Bridgers can be on a song about cohabitation: “We’ve got stars on the ceiling and clothes on the floor / And a thing in a box I don’t fuck anymore.” She ends the song with one of her sweetest lyrics: “Now I don’t know if I can make it tonight / But what are you doing the rest of my life, Bobby?”
Elsewhere, a dying mall in Danvers, Massachusetts gets a shoutout on “Liberty Tree” as Bridgers details a scene in a photo booth with a new romance where she’s sticking out her tongue and lifting her shirt. These moments of bliss are cut with tragedy, as she wishes her love won’t die before her—she can’t endure that pain again. Her macabre sense of humor is still present throughout the record, and her references range from Shelley Duvall in The Shining on “The Governor’s Waltz” to ICE killings on closer “Lost Weekend (Reprise).” While racked with grief, Bridgers fell in love with the calming effects of ambient music (see “Panorama”) and decided to step back a touch from public life. You hear electronic music’s influence on many of the outros to these tracks—“Still Standing,” in particular, is reminiscent of Sufjan Stevens’ choral outros on Carrie & Lowell and Javelin. Sometimes an instrumental speaks louder than clever wordplay.
There are also welcome curios, like a sample of Paul Lansky’s electroacoustic computer-music composition “Notjustmoreidlechatter,” which features linear predictive coding and granular synthesis built from thousands of chopped vocal samples. "Lost Weekend” and its reprise also contain elements from Damien Jurado’s solemn piano song, “The Last Great Washington State.” But “Still Standing” is the album’s true heart. The retrospective mid-album track is flush with banjo, electric guitar, vocoder, synths, mandolin, and strings as Bridgers’ lyrics are steeped in memories: “I’m still standing at the top of the stairs turning red / Pound for pound in a prom dress.” A scene of self-harm raises the stakes as the instrument swirls around Bridgers’ vocals.
For all its tough subject matter, Lost Weekend is a soothing balm of quickly paced folk-rock. These 16 tracks fly by and the last words sung to the songwriter’s new love at the very end of the album ring true: “When a dream comes true, a fantasy dies / But we’re gonna be alright / Me and you / You love me, and I won’t ever let you forget / Not yet.” Bridgers’ heart has expanded alongside her songcraft, and it feels like she’s just getting started.
