By Fiona Golden

I was first introduced to Phoebe Bridgers when a friend and I agreed to make each other playlists. I listened to “Motion Sickness”, which details Bridgers’s relationship with songwriter Ryan Adams. Her lyrics were sharp and purposeful, calling Adams out on his superficiality: “Hey, why do you sing with an English accent? / I guess it’s too late to change it now”. Motion Sickness was unlike any song I’d heard before and that’s when my obsession with her debut album, Stranger in the Alps began.

Curiously enough, Bridgers starts the album off with a slow, more somber song and later picks up speed. “Smoke Signals” is chilling and sets up the motif of death for the rest of the album. She mentions the deaths of artists as well as fears and anxieties that are only resolved once one has died: “That song will creep you out until you’re dead”. Death, while very present in Bridgers’s lyrics, is not quite portrayed as something scary, rather, a quiet release or a next state of being. “Funeral”, the third track, is about Bridgers singing at a funeral for a young adult and how the experience forces her to confront her own feelings about life and death. “Wishing I was someone else, feeling sorry for myself / When I remember someone else’s kid is dead”.

“Killer”, “Chelsea”, and “You Missed My Heart” take a darker turn, fixating on the minds of serial killers and murder. They all deal with navigating complicated relationships; Killer describes Bridgers’s fear of commitment and running out of time in the context of physical decay. Chelsea is about Nancy Spungen, who may have been murdered by Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols. You Missed My Heart, a cover of Mark Kozelek’s murder song, is about an ex-lover committing crimes of passion while reminiscing on childhood and relationships. It’s a heartbreaking finale to an already melancholic album but the repeated lines at the end are especially haunting, “Down river from the Moundsville Prison graveyard” continues until the track fades into an instrumental reprise of Smoke Signals.

Bridgers, though she has not released a solo project since Stranger in the Alps, has continued to perpetuate her unique brand. Her project with other female indie singers, boygenius, is tinged with heartache. “Me & My Dog” consists of Bridgers struggling with her open displays of emotion, “I cried at your show with the teenagers / Tell your friend I’ll be all right” and subsequently her desire to isolate herself and her feelings “I wanna hear one song without thinking of you / I wish I was on a spaceship / Just me and my dog and an impossible view”. Her latest project with folk icon Connor Oberst is the Better Oblivion Community Center, which grapples with helplessness in “Sleepwalkin’” and “Didn’t Know What I Was in For”. Bridgers observes that she’s “never really done anything for anyone” and when reconnecting with an old friend, wonders “Is this having fun? / It’s not like the way it was / I thought that you loved this stuff / Or did I make that up?”.

Whatever the song, Phoebe Bridgers’s lyrics are deeply introspective. She asks more questions than she answers and constructs a world of uncertainty and controlled chaos. Her line in Smoke Signals references Joe Strummer’s iconic phrase, “The future’s unwritten” but juxtaposes it with her pattern of dwelling on memories, “The past is a corridor / I’m at the exit looking back through the hall”. Both her voice and lyrics are haunting; her persona itself on the cover of Stranger in the Alps is a ghost, which is perfectly fitting. She’s a promising artist with a clear vision and I can hardly wait to see what she’ll do next.

Want to “surrender to the sound”? Here’s her music video of Motion Sickness:

https://youtu.be/9sfYpolGCu8

Images courtesy of the artist