Inside Phoebe Bridgers’s Secret Show at Madison Square Garden
“If any of you figured out how to stick an Apple Watch up your ass or whatever to record, just please don’t put it on the internet,” Phoebe Bridgers told a crowd of some twenty thousand at Madison Square Garden on Thursday night. She was sitting on a drab sofa over which was slung a seventies-style chevron wool blanket. Beside her, the musician Christian Lee Hutson tuned his guitar. Their rapport was relaxed; Bridgers, who is thirty-one, wore a faded Black Sabbath T-shirt and periodically sipped a mug of tea. She hadn’t done a headline solo show in New York in almost half a decade. After her 2020 record, “Punisher,” shot her into the spotlight, it had been less and less clear whether she would continue to make music at all.
The M.S.G. concert—the grand finale of a run of hush-hush pop-ups she’d staged across the country to début a trove of new music—had been announced just three days earlier. In order to maintain the confidentiality of the unreleased material, everything was heavily restricted. Tickets were disseminated via lottery, with sliding-scale entries starting at one dollar; all proceeds went directly to the Community Justice Exchange’s Immigration Bond Freedom Fund. Attendees’ phones were locked in Yondr pouches upon entry. Smart watches, smart glasses, cameras, recording devices, and even writing implements were forbidden. (Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield was apparently briefly ejected for daring to scribble in a notebook.) Security guards in dark suits and ties patrolled the aisles for the duration; one paused to make sure a teen-age girl ahead of me was just tying her shoe and not, one imagines, activating an anklet recorder whose contents she would hawk on the internet.
Overhead monitors showed a live feed of Bridgers’s performance in a grainy, bluish resolution that recalled Nirvana’s “MTV Unplugged,” which was shot just ten blocks away, in 1994—not least because of Bridgers’s startling resemblance to Kurt Cobain. The gauzy, nostalgic V.H.S.-style footage suited the lo-fi vibe of the whole show; despite the enormous venue, it was quaint, shambolic, alive. There were only ever three musicians onstage: Bridgers and Hutson were joined on keys by the longtime Bright Eyes collaborator Nick White. (Hutson also brandished a harmonica, and Bridgers occasionally leaned on a coffee table to play Mellotron.) A few times, Bridgers started strumming the opening chords to a song before realizing Hutson still needed to tune. Christian was always tuning, Bridgers complained, affectionately. She added, “These songs shouldn’t be in tune!” They were just two friends, jamming in someone’s living room.
Bridgers’s low-key comeback tour began on May 7th, when mysterious flyers turned up around Roswell, New Mexico, advertising a concert. (Roswell was chosen for its mythic U.F.O. crash site; subsequent venues, like Lubbock, Texas, and Little Rock, Arkansas, were also selected for their extraterrestrial lore.) The following evening, she played a tiny honky-tonk bar called the Liberty for a couple hundred people. It was her first solo performance since 2023, when she opened three consecutive nights of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour at MetLife Stadium, to audiences of more than seventy thousand.
That same year, Bridgers released “The Record” with her band boygenius, which would go on to win three Grammys; attended the Met Gala for the second time; performed on “Saturday Night Live,” also for the second time; and was named one of Time’s Women of the Year. In a feat more or less unprecedented since the nineties, when the monoculture of cable TV still enabled rock stars to become household names, Bridgers had ascended from indie darling to international phenomenon.
Before superstardom, Bridgers was what some would call “very online.” For more than a decade, she took to Twitter to broadcast wry, all-lowercase missives, ranging from “the hardest part of taking nudes is cleaning your room” to “abolish the police.” She was brash, political, and clever, fluent in the ironic deadpan of the internet. She posted often, and heedlessly. When Bridgers—who had already colorfully spoken out against Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, and Greg Abbott—posted “fuck TERFs,” denigrating transphobia, another user commented, “I love you so much but you should question yourself and know more about what you post.” Bridgers replied, “shut the fuck up.”
Social media had been offering artists an alternative, and direct, means of promotion, endowing them with a new kind of control over their public perception. Even still, few had so convincingly cultivated a voice that felt actually real. Bridgers talked to her fans exactly as she did her friends. The air of intimacy was heightened by the timing of her rise, which coincided with the pandemic. In the desolation of lockdown, her hushed, brooding ballads became a balm, reflecting and thus relieving the intense loneliness of the moment. The circumstances also forced Bridgers to conduct press from home, offering fans incidental access to the most private chambers of her life. People came to know her rocketship bedsheets, the posters on her walls, the books on her bedside table. She spoke with James Corden from under the covers in a night-sky pajama set, and performed on “Jimmy Kimmel” from her bathtub. She routinely live-streamed on Instagram for an audience of millions.
She was, it turned out, too available for her own good, her openness engendering a dangerous sense of ownership. The year of her last solo show, her father, who had struggled with substance abuse, died suddenly. At the airport on her way to his funeral, Bridgers was assailed by mobs of fans and paparazzi. Some demanded autographs; others expressed their apparent discontent about abrupt changes in her love life. Her relationship to fame had never been altogether comfortable. Now it began to rot. “There’s a higher chance that you’ll meet a fan that you hate than a fan that you love,” she later said.
When she released “Punisher,” she decided to drop it a day early, and simply posted the news on Twitter. For the as-yet-unnamed record she has in wait, Bridgers has opted to remain totally offline. The buzz around the album has grown in part because of how little anyone knows about it: amid the constant churn and surfeit of the streaming era, Bridgers has engineered a rare sense of scarcity. Even the promotional rollout has been conducted almost exclusively in person. The crowd at the Garden on Thursday were the first to hear that she’ll be embarking on “The Lost Tour” in the fall.
In the course of the night, Bridgers played seven new songs, one of which she had never before performed in front of an audience. (“If I fuck it up, you guys won’t tell anyone, right?” she joked.) One was a lively, driving melody that she introduced as a country song, a fun and faithful genre experiment bolstered by Hutson’s twangy fingerpicking and rollicking harmonica. The rest were mid-tempo folky ballads of the type that first made her famous, similarly preoccupied with sex and death. These fresh meditations on grief, written in the wake of her father’s passing, seem less fancifully existential, more rendingly direct. She reminds herself throughout that, when someone is gone, they aren’t coming back.
The new work draws on the same lyrical conventions: mining the quotidian for clever turns of phrase, using plain language to point out overlooked sadnesses. As ever, there are hints of autobiography. One song about parting with an ex mentions Omaha, Nebraska, the home town of Conor Oberst, who’s also believed to have been the subject of several tracks on “Punisher” and “The Record.” Another clearly alludes to her father, with whom she had a troubled relationship. A third guiltily acknowledges a called-off wedding—a potential reference to her rumored broken engagement with the actor Paul Mescal.
Despite the sometimes heavy material, there was a lightness to Bridgers’s tone. She appears ready to forgive others and to look inward, examining her own complicated attraction to violence and danger. The levity comes not from mocking those who’ve wronged her, as she did on her breakout hit, “Motion Sickness,” but from allowing for their duality. At one point, she asked the crowd whether they had conservative parents. She explained that she didn’t: her father had done the hard work of “defecting” so she never had to. People are a lot of things, the new songs seem to be saying. What’s most important is grace. Second most, perhaps, is a sense of humor.
The qualities that made Bridgers so appealing—her accessibility, her lack of a filter—were in full evidence at the Garden. They were also precisely the things that had made her celebrity intolerable to her. When the boygenius tour finally ended, she went into a kind of hiding. She deleted all social media, including the archive of her beloved Twitter account. She cut her platinum-blond hair short and dyed it brown, abandoning her most identifiable feature. She and her boyfriend, the comedian Bo Burnham, stopped attending public functions where they might be photographed. After frequent past collaborations with the likes of Paul McCartney, SZA, and the Killers, she stopped appearing on other artists’ songs. For two years, nobody outside her personal circles heard anything. When she took the stage in New Mexico last month, no one even knew what she would look like. The answer: exactly how she did before she disappeared, though maybe a little older.
At the Garden, Bridgers interspersed the new material with some fan favorites. Even then, the reaction was rapt, respectful—a far cry from the chaos of most post-pandemic concertgoing experiences. During “Graceland Too,” a love song she wrote back in 2020, which is widely assumed to be about her boygenius bandmate Julien Baker, the room lit up with quivering specks of flame. Audience members, without iPhone flashlights available, had remembered lighters. Security guards looked around, frantic and confused, unsure whether they should intervene, but then they stopped and let it spread. Soon, hundreds of lighters dotted the crowd. “That was fucking cool,” Bridgers said when it ended.
The final song of the night was “I Know the End,” the anthemic doomsday closer of “Punisher,” which culminates in a pastiche metal scream. Bridgers invited audience participation, instructing everyone to let out their anger. As the song built, so did the chorus swelling around her. “Romanticize a quiet life,” the cavernous hall belted along with her, “there’s no place like my room.” At the climax, the collective scream shook the rafters. Bridgers took off her mike pack, pulling the wires from under her shirt. Then she, Hutson, and White moved to the front of the stage, clasped hands, and bowed. “I love you guys,” Bridgers told the crowd, beaming. It seemed like she really meant it. ♦