8. The Phoebe Bridgers Comedown
8. The Phoebe Bridgers Comedown
My voice is hoarse
Last last August, the 2020 one, I caught myself in a bit of a web after writing an essay about Phoebe Bridgers’ album Punisher. The essay was about the music and how it made me feel, but it was also about a woman I’d briefly dated whose favorite artist was Phoebe Bridgers. I published the piece to my blog, whose readership included my family and dog, on a good day. Still, someone in my too-small pool of people who date each other read the essay while she was dating aforementioned Bridgers fan and I was dating the essay-reader’s ex. (That confused me to write probably as much as it confused you to read.)
It stirred the pot, and I took the essay down.
But the whole experience spurred me to listen to Punisher like it was my religion, and I started having conversations with die-hard Bridgers fans. I liked Bridgers well enough, but not with the fervor of these fans.
Some things they told me:
“When I saw her at folk fest 2018 it was so hot and my chronic pain was flared up incredibly and I forgot about all that and now see her every chance I get.”
“Seeing her in concert changed everything.”
“I genuinely don’t know what it is beyond her being staggeringly talented! Every other live act I love I can explain exactly why. Her idk”
Last last night, the Sunday one, I heard Phoebe Bridgers live for the first time. My friend and I sat in a back row, waiting for her to appear in front of a screen of SMPTE color bars when she danced out on stage, silvery and bone-bright in her skeleton costume.
Immediately, the Leader Bank Pavilion was her captive audience. We wanted to give her the moon. She could have chewed us all up and spit us out and we would have said, “Thank you, Phoebe! Give it to us again!”
For many in the audience, this was our pandemic album. It’s some serious sad girl shit. (The friend I went to the concert with reminded me, “Hot people get sad, too!”) So much of what Bridgers sings about—preoccupation with death, depression, living outside your body, existential dread—are things we tend to experience alone, inherently isolating emotions. Phoebe’s music reminds me of my most hopeless experiences with mental illness, the disconnection from my body, desires, and decisions. It is the loneliest feeling: not existing within yourself.
In concert, though, there’s a strong collectiveness in the audience. We understand the loneliest feeling. We’re all swaying our bodies and nodding our heads, “I know I know I know” and dancing to songs that sound upbeat but aren’t. The skeletons are dancing with us; some of us are the skeletons.
The concert culminated with the last song on her album, “This Is the End.” The song builds through its nearly six minutes. We’re immersed in Phoebe’s lethargic depression at the beginning, but then the song rides an apocalyptic wave, and this amazing prophetic chorus foretells “The End is Near” while the Sufjan-esque horns urge us toward some chaotic precipice. And then the screaming starts.
I knew it was coming—it’s in the song—but I wasn’t prepared for the cacophony of voices, tearing from vocal cords and then through masked mouths, ripping into the air. We were screaming for our lives. I gulped air and screamed again. As Bridgers said in an interview with Stereogum, “There’s something so victorious about singing fucked up lyrics with a bunch of people.” We were a primal roar.
Then the screaming ended, and what was left inside me was a sob. Without my permission, everything released, and I cried into my mask. I felt my legs quake after standing for hours, as if the outside world wouldn’t be able to support me once I walked out of the pavilion tent. I wobbled home, a little too high and too sad.
The comedown after that hit hard. The audience dispersed. A big group of us piled onto the silver line, and got off at South Station, then took an inbound red line train and I watched more people leave at each stop. When I got off at Central, my friend and I parted ways and I walked to get my bike and rode the rest of the way home in the dark, chugging two bottles of water when I got home before passing out in the middle of reading a Rolling Stone interview with Phoebe Bridgers.
The powerful thing, and the hard thing, about this concert is that I felt most connected to other people, most understood, at the apex of my intense, painful emotions. When the music ended and we all returned to our separate beds, I felt the backwash of all that feeling, without any of the community of the other feelers. It’s going from screaming with everyone to screaming alone.
I know this feeling is temporary. The comedown is just my response to the powerful drug of the concert, the addictiveness of Phoebe. But I also know that what I am reacting to is not temporary: emotions are elicited from a very real place. I felt and feel these things—depressed, elated, enraged, nostalgic, anxious, loved, heartbroken—because of what I’ve witnessed in the world and in my life.
My sister and I played a game the other night called, “Think of something good that’s happening in the world.” And then we stopped because it got pretty dark.
Ever since the IPCC report came out, I am consumed by new urgency, panic, and grief about the climate crisis. I know I should never fly again, should never travel overseas; I know I shouldn’t have children, but it’s hard for me to let go of those dreams completely. I know I can never have pets, buy a car, own a house. And all of those personal sacrifices seem so small when I think about the fact that no matter what I do, our world will not act fast enough, corporations will not compromise their profits to save human life, governments will not level with us about the magnitude of the sacrifices our generation will have to make. I feel so blue and sorry for myself all while, as Phoebe sings, “somebody’s kid is dead.” Tragedy marches on.
I’m not spiraling back into mental illness, but within that frame of futility and the pointlessness of it all, the pain in Bridgers’ music is enough to remind me of my worst days, and how much I don’t want to go back there. Her music is exquisite, but so much of it sounds like how depression feels. Phoebe sings, “No, I'm not afraid to disappear/The billboard said ‘The End Is Near’” For me right now, moving forward in any direction is better than ceasing to exist. Even when I know the end is near, I’m still afraid to disappear. I’m pretty sure that’s a good thing.
I got my booster shot last night which made me feel crappy enough that I stayed home from work today. My reaction to my other two doses was pretty minimal, so I wasn’t expecting to take a sick day, but it gave me the opportunity to nap (which I never do), avoid a bike ride in the rain, and write this newsletter from my bed. I got the booster shot for the express purpose of living through many tomorrows in the future. Seeing Phoebe again. Devoting myself more fully to the climate crisis and so many other things that are broken in our world and broken in myself.
While Phoebe sang “Chinese Satellite,” through an opening in the pavilion tent, I saw the moonrise, a waning gibbous, glowing orange leftovers from last week’s Harvest Moon. It was not whole, just a broken-off piece. But it was bone-bright and hopeful as it rose through that tent window and disappeared from view.
Some other things I’ve been writing:
Sanguine, a pretty personal story about my relationship to my body and my period. CW: eating disorders, blood
Building a personal canon of holy texts, just a small sample of the things I’ve read that have meant something to me
What Types of Light Produce the Best Cannabis? New Study Says It’s These 2 Wavelengths & Is Vaping Safer? New Study Explores The Relationship Between Your High And How You Consume Cannabis, my last two articles for Cannabis Health as they’re going under :(