God damn, Phoebe.
Can I call you Phoebe? I feel like after that last album of yours, we might be on a first name basis. You poured your heart out on it and boy oh boy if I didn’t leave a metric fuck-ton of tears somewhere in the Columbia River listening to it. I feel like the combination of my tears, your words earned us something beyond Ms. Bridgers, but perhaps I’m being presumptuous.
I’m coming at you like you have any idea what I’m talking about and, as we all know, context really is everything. I don’t want to spend too much time on this, but some backstory is warranted. See, you released Lost Weekend on Friday, August 14, and I was working on my last day assigned to a fire in Washington. Thankfully I was in a hotel for this last day, so I had a moment to just listen.
I’m underselling saying I was on a fire assignment. I’m an information officer on a federal incident management team out of California. Normally I work for the Forest Service but summers in the west – you being from California know this – means wildfires. I typically spend the majority of the summer months going from fire assignment to fire assignment, California to Montana, Arizona to Washington. My team was supposed to take the Fox Fire there in Baker City, Oregon; instead we got emergency redirected to Spokane, Washington, August 1.
For two weeks my team was running and gunning managing the fire, getting information out to people, comforting those who’d lost everything – there wasn’t really a moment to think beyond the immediate. Especially in those first few days, we were running on coffee, nerves and not much else, camped out at the Spokane County Fairgrounds. See, that hotel room was a reprieve before heading home. And that night in the hotel, all I wanted to do was listen to music in the dark, put some pace between the last two weeks and going home. So I spent some time with your latest album along with Ren’s new album – damn good, heartbreaking company.
I gotta tell you – I’ve done a lot of road tripping over the years and I’ve come to both love and dread that time alone in my vehicle. This is where the hardest thinking gets done, where I’m alone with my inner monologue and whatever I decide to put on the stereo. It also means I’m going to be dealing with things I don’t maybe want to deal with, but when there’s nothing but road in front of you, things find a way to demand you pay them attention. That next morning, I had a long trip in front of me – Spokane back to my home in the Sierra Nevada Foothills. What I’m trying to say here – I had a lot of time on my hands.
See, the night before had sort of prepared me for this. I already knew this was a gut-punch of an album, but I didn’t listen to myself. It was kind of like that time I read a copy of Blackhawk Down while stationed at Camp War Eagle deep within Sadr City during the summer of 2004. Probably not my best decision, but here we are.
I’m a sucker for natural beauty, and no matter how many times I witness it, driving through the Columbia River Gorge as the mid-morning sun electrified an ocean of low hanging clouds – clouds that looked deceptively like smoke to my eye – moving from Spokane to Portland will never cease to take my breath away. I’m trying to figure out what the combination was that caused me to first tear up, then realize something within me had broken and I needed to pull over.
Phoebe, let me tell you – I ugly cried my eyes out for a good five minutes, draining weeks of grief, anxiety, sorrow and exhaustion into the Columbia River. I stood there with my eyes soaked as snot triggered by the water works flowed while “Still Standing” flowed from the truck’s speaker.
That’s a great song – hell, they’re all great songs – you’ve got a fucker of an album on your hands here – but that wasn’t the one. Like I said, I’ve been trying to think what the combination was, and I think I’ve come to it. It was the damn vocoder opening on “The Outside.” The way it allowed you to disassociate from your father’s memorial, an outsider numbly taking in a series of events as they unfold, all the while your true voice – fragile and vulnerable – sat underneath it all, just barely audible, made more human for doing so.
Yeah, that was the blow that started the chain reaction, and explosion after explosion in each subsequent song finished the job. The result? Me sitting next to one of the most beautiful scenes in our country, sobbing for everything that felt like it had just whirred by me, a lifetime of grief compacted into a two-week assignment.
My good friend Chris came out with us on this assignment. Chris works FDNY and gets out with my team whenever his organization will let him. Chris had brought a couple FDNY t-shirts out for me on this assignment. Do me a favor, Phoebe, don’t tell Chris, but one of those shirts became a well-used handkerchief in that moment as I tossed it back into the truck, wiped my eyes, took a series of cleansing breaths and got back on the road. You got me all the way to Portland and a pit stop to check out a TikTok creator who’s making a run in this new-to-him city with his pop-up of coffee and home-made pastries. I think you’d like him, he wears his heart on his sleeve like you … like me.
Once through Portland I called my brother Patrick in Grants Pass – this is where I was going to stop for the night. We’d already planned a trip over to Time Machine Records, something we do together whenever I come to town. I typically go over there with no real agenda, just taking it all in, seeing what might be good. Not this time, this time I had a mission – I was looking for your album. It wasn’t enough for me to stream it through my phone, I needed this release on vinyl. It needed to live in my home, something I could feel and place on my record player with the same sense of delicacy that weaves through every track. As luck would have it, they didn’t have it. I’m not going to get too down on them for not having any copies in stock, but ahem… Jesse, looking at you – what the fuck, man?
I walked out a little disappointed, but I thought to myself – all good, you’ve got to drive through Davis and Sacramento before getting home, surely someone will have a copy.
I left Grants Pass at zero-dark-thirty after a quick cup of coffee with Patrick as he prepared for the workday. I’ll let you in on a little secret, Phoebe – I’m a bit hyper-focused at times, and as I rolled down Interstate 5, I kept peering down at my watch, counting the moments until the first store, Esoteric Records, opened. Sold out! They might have some new copies coming in next Thursday, but I needed this now. And so it went! I called a total of six record stores between Davis and Sacramento and no luck! Like, what are the odds of this?! Then I thought about it – your first new solo album in six years, already gaining a fair amount of acclaim with the release of the single “Lost Boys.” No shit no one had it. But still … this absolutely would not stand.
There’s a rest stop on the southbound I-5 about 15 or so miles north of Sacramento. I pulled in, prayed for good cell reception. It was spotty at first, and I had to get out of the truck and find a spot that allowed my phone to connect to the world. From there, I ordered a copy of your record from Evergreen Vinyl. And then I listened to it a couple more times on the last leg of my journey from Sacramento to Sonora. This last bit of my journey is where the word lost kept jumping out at me.
I thought maybe at first I was imagining things, and then I looked at the track listing. Man, Phoebe, I can’t even imagine all that you’ve lost in the last few years. Obviously, there’s the autonomy and anonymity of being a bit less known than you currently are, but singing “Nothing New” onstage with Taylor Swift and being insanely talented will do that. But that’s not it, is it? I haven’t navigated losing a parent yet, but that day is just around the corner. I think I read somewhere the relationship with your father was complicated – boy howdy do I know that feeling. I’ve given some thought to what it might look like some day when I’m standing there, not quite inside myself, coming to grips with the man whose coffin I’m now standing beside. Whoa.
But that’s not it either, is it? You’ve hit that point in life at 32 where people start expecting things from you, right? Now you’re a grown-up, so they say, so that childhood, that innocence, that’s lost too, isn’t it? I hear that loss in the ache in your voice on every song, the vulnerability and tenderness, a primal scream in the background railing against the whole notion of it all. You’ve got this thing, Phoebe, this thing that makes a person want to sit down and hear all of your secrets and then tell you theirs.
It’s that last “lost” though, the reprise, that gives me, and I hope you, hope. There’s no easy answers left for any of us, Phoebe, but I take solace in your closing thought. “We’re gonna be all right / Me and you.”
Another gentle reminder from the Universe that I need to experience some songs from Phoebe Bridgers, to which my ridiculous brains always substitutes the actress/writer/producer Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
Beautiful. I resonate with this. Very beautifully written. And as an Oregonian, thank you and your crew for keeping us safe during fire season. I hope you enjoy your vinyl!