In the years since rising to global stardom, Phoebe Bridgers has tended to guard her personal life with increasing privacy – but for a singer-songwriter, it’s never that simple.
A lot has happened in the six years since she last released a solo album, including the explosion in popularity of her supergroup Boygenius (comprising Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker), an engagement and breakup with Irish actor Paul Mescal, and a relationship with her current partner, comedian, musician and film director Bo Burnham. On her accomplished new album Lost Weekend, she finds herself ready to talk – or at least sing – things through.
The breakup with Mescal is seemingly alluded to in the title track in which Bridgers sings over a slow, drumless beat: “I’m supposed to be married, but I called it off/ I’ve been known to throw a tantrum/ When things are not the way I imagine them/ I am restoring the natural order/ Learning the same lesson over and over again.”
The subject of the song, however, is ambiguous, with Bridgers closing on the line, “You know me, and I’ll never forgive you for that,” before the song erupts into instrumental energy.
In a glowing five-star review in The Guardian, Alexis Petridis speculates that a line in “The Governor’s Waltz”, a lush, almost anecdotal song showcasing Bridgers’ knack for storytelling, “could be interpreted as a swipe at Mescal’s current partner”, the musician Gracie Abrams: “She can pretend to be me/ Since she took my place in my bed, on that stage.”
Bridgers and Mescal started dating during the pandemic, and were subsequently the subject of engagement rumours before separating in late 2022. Both have refrained from discussing their relationship, and breakup, in the press, with the Normal People star telling Harper’s Bazaar that his personal life is “nobody else’s business”.
References to Bridgers’ relationship with Burnham (whose full name is Robert Pickering Burnham) run through the album, most prominently on “Bobby”, a catchy and uptempo song about love, written with Bridgers’ characteristic black humour. “So you followed me home like you’d done it before/ And you had to bend over to get through the door/ And if you didn’t like either one of my friends/ I’d kill them, I’d kill them,” she sings.
It’s a song that makes love sound both euphoric and unhealthy: “Bobby, this could be the end of wanting/ I exist only if you’re watching.”
In another of the album’s standout tracks, “Liberty Tree”, an uplifting and defiant song, Bridgers seems to again address Burnham, who is credited as a co-writer on several of Lost Weekend’s songs, and also provides backing vocals. “Don’t die, Bobby/ Before I die/ It feels so good to have you in my life,” she sings.
Other credited collaborators on the album include prolific superproducer Jack Antonoff, and Bridgers regulars Marshall Vore, Christian Lee Hutson, and Boygenius bandmates Baker and Dacus. Stranger Things star Maya Hawke is also a credited co-writer on the songs “Haunted” and “Never Going Back!”. The track “I Can’t Wait” features a credit from an artist listed as “Son John-Johnson”, whom Rolling Stone speculates “sounds a lot like Geese [frontman] Cameron Winter”.
Bridgers’ songwriting has always tended towards the autobiographical, dating back to her early career; her 2017 breakthrough track “Motion Sickness” was written about her relationship with the older musician Ryan Adams, who produced Bridgers’ first EP and whom she later accused of emotional abuse.
Bridgers’ difficult relationship with father, Tony Bridgers, who died in December 2022, has also been a key inspiration on her music, and was notably the focus of the 2020 song “Kyoto”. The pain of grief, and her complicated feelings about him, are another pervasive theme on Lost Weekend. “I can’t imagine you dead/But you are every day,” she sings on the swelling and sorrowful “Still Standing”.
Though Lost Weekend is just Bridgers’ third studio album (not counting her work with Boygenius, or the album released as Better Oblivion Community Center, her now-defunct project with Connor Oberst), it looks set to ossify her standing as one of the foremost songwriters of her generation.
The distinctive, ethereal sound that first made her reputation with Stranger in the Alps in 2017 has been maintained but iterated on; likewise her capacity for wordplay and exacting control of lyrical tone.
Fans hoping for a “tell-all” album might be left frustrated by an album that opts more for messy emotional soul-baring than gossipy tidbits – though for those wondering just how exactly Bridgers has been doing these past few years, they finally have an answer. As she sings on the final track, the bittersweet “Lost Weekend (Reprise)”: “If I ever come out of hiding, you won’t have to know how to find me again.”
Lost Weekend is released on 14 August through the label Dead Oceans.
