Photo Credit bristolistereo.com
The New Yorker May 25, 2020 pp22-27 Profiles “California Ghosts” “Phoebe Bridger’s humor and dread” by Amada Petrusich
We rarely summarize artist profiles but Phoebe Bridger is an exception as we feel like long-term fans. Seems hard to say that regarding a 25 year old but having seen her opening for other acts in the last few years and seeing her as part of the Better Oblivion Community Center with Conor Oberst, (Stubbs April 10, 2019) we are compelled. Let's be honest, so often the opening act is not ready or just a bad fit for the crowd. Bridgers fits and has the gravitas rarely felt.
As for the fit, she grew up in Southern California (Pasadena) and she was raised by parents subliminally dousing her in the Laurel Canyon sensibility of Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Jackson Browne etc. and other notables Tom Waits, Fleetwood Mac and Nirvana. Her mother, Jaime pushed piano lessons but Phoebe Lucille hated having to learn to read music and so taking up guitar at age 13 was her rebellion. “I fucking hated being forced to do something”.
On her new and second release “Punisher”, “Garden Song” speaks of “California and lots of….ghosts”. “I grew up here till it all went up in flames”. Punisher refers to overly obessive fans, she admits to knowing too much about another influence Elliot Smith.
Bridger’s family was working class, her father worked building sets for motion pictures and TV and her mother raised Phoebe and her brother Jackson while working as an admin. “If we’d lived anywhere else, we’d have been very solidly middle class…but in Pasadena all my friends’ parents were directors or actors”.
By age 15, Bridgers “began attending the music program at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts” (LACHSA). She says “I was not an especially good student-I just didn’t get far enough in school to where it was interesting”. She is and we are grateful for the vocal training that came with having to sing every day at LACHSA. At about the same time she became part of a band "Sloppy Jane" and was discovered by a talent scout. This led to non-speaking or singing parts in TV commercials for “Taco Bell, HomeGoods, Apple and Intuit”. That's well compensated work. With that alone she had money and time to pursue music.
After high school she was accepted to Berklee College of Music but didn’t start having been put-off just by the orientation. So, she started trying to meet people by playing weekly and later, at the Bootleg Theatre every day. “I think I was delusional…I was a little more confident than merited at the time”. She made some connections and had some fruitful collaborations.
One with Ryan Adams when she was 20 and he was 40 included a relationship that didn’t end well. Of that she said “I’m, like, living my best adult life right now and then it went bad and it was just years and years of thinking about it”. At about the same time her parents divorced. Phoebe remarked about the experience, it was good that it happened but hard to watch “people who used to care about each other just fucking hate each other”.
She remains close to her mother but her relationship with her father is a day at a time. From Punisher, due to fully release in June, the song “Kyoto” is about her strained relationship with her father...he calls from a pay phone..."It cost a dollar minute/To tell me you’re getting sober, and you wrote me a letter/But I don’t have to read it”.
So much in the mold of another hero, Conor Oberst, her songs are "frank and anxious folk songs that are preoccupied with death and spiritual decay". The author Amanda Petrusich writes about Garden Song "it feels like a relic from an era in which large groups of people could still assemble to hear music, and in part because it is beautiful".
Comments