Inside Phoebe Bridgers’s Secret Show at Madison Square Garden
That same year, Bridgers released “The Record” with her band boygenius, which would go on to win three Grammys; attended the Met Gala for the second time; performed on “Saturday Night Live,” also for the second time; and was named one of Time’s Women of the Year. In a feat more or less unprecedented since the nineties, when the monoculture of cable TV still enabled rock stars to become household names, Bridgers had ascended from indie darling to international phenomenon.
Before superstardom, Bridgers was what some would call “very online.” For more than a decade, she took to Twitter to broadcast wry, all-lowercase missives, ranging from “the hardest part of taking nudes is cleaning your room” to “abolish the police.” She was brash, political, and clever, fluent in the ironic deadpan of the internet. She posted often, and heedlessly. When Bridgers—who had already colorfully spoken out against Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, and Greg Abbott—posted “fuck TERFs,” denigrating transphobia, another user commented, “I love you so much but you should question yourself and know more about what you post.” Bridgers replied, “shut the fuck up.”
Social media had been offering artists an alternative, and direct, means of promotion, endowing them with a new kind of control over their public perception. Even still, few had so convincingly cultivated a voice that felt actually real. Bridgers talked to her fans exactly as she did her friends. The air of intimacy was heightened by the timing of her rise, which coincided with the pandemic. In the desolation of lockdown, her hushed, brooding ballads became a balm, reflecting and thus relieving the intense loneliness of the moment. The circumstances also forced Bridgers to conduct press from home, offering fans incidental access to the most private chambers of her life. People came to know her rocketship bedsheets, the posters on her walls, the books on her bedside table. She spoke with James Corden from under the covers in a night-sky pajama set, and performed on “Jimmy Kimmel” from her bathtub. She routinely live-streamed on Instagram for an audience of millions.
She was, it turned out, too available for her own good, her openness engendering a dangerous sense of ownership. The year of her last solo show, her father, who had struggled with substance abuse, died suddenly. At the airport on her way to his funeral, Bridgers was assailed by mobs of fans and paparazzi. Some demanded autographs; others expressed their apparent discontent about abrupt changes in her love life. Her relationship to fame had never been altogether comfortable. Now it began to rot. “There’s a higher chance that you’ll meet a fan that you hate than a fan that you love,” she later said.
When she released “Punisher,” she decided to drop it a day early, and simply posted the news on Twitter. For the as-yet-unnamed record she has in wait, Bridgers has opted to remain totally offline. The buzz around the album has grown in part because of how little anyone knows about it: amid the constant churn and surfeit of the streaming era, Bridgers has engineered a rare sense of scarcity. Even the promotional rollout has been conducted almost exclusively in person. The crowd at the Garden on Thursday were the first to hear that she’ll be embarking on “The Lost Tour” in the fall.
In the course of the night, Bridgers played seven new songs, one of which she had never before performed in front of an audience. (“If I fuck it up, you guys won’t tell anyone, right?” she joked.) One was a lively, driving melody that she introduced as a country song, a fun and faithful genre experiment bolstered by Hutson’s twangy fingerpicking and rollicking harmonica. The rest were mid-tempo folky ballads of the type that first made her famous, similarly preoccupied with sex and death. These fresh meditations on grief, written in the wake of her father’s passing, seem less fancifully existential, more rendingly direct. She reminds herself throughout that, when someone is gone, they aren’t coming back.
