🎵 Phoebe Bridgers Lost Weekend Album:
I came to Lost Weekend nervous for what six years of silence might have done to a voice I love. I have followed Phoebe Bridgers since her first album. In her most recent six year hiatus she had some pretty charged spotlight moments: went through a public lawsuit from a music producer who she spoke out about abusing herself and other women, broke off her engagement to Paul Mescal, moved almost immediately into a public relationship with Bo Burnham, and in the narrow space inbetween, her father suddenly died. What I did not expect was an album that treats grief and joy not as opposites but as the same act of attention, held under different angles.
The record is an elegy for her father, with whom fans will know she had a complicated relationship and about whom she wrote her earlier hit “Kyoto.” But this album is also, unashamedly, a love letter to Bo. And Bo is everywhere on it, not just in the song that bears his name. He surfaces in the asides and private jokes, until the whole album feels sung in his direction. He is the room the grief is processed inside, the named witness who lets her go as far into the dark as she does. “Bobby” is the closest she has come to writing love without irony, unashamed, and the lack of shame is its own argument: to name what you love plainly, after loss has taught you how quickly it vanishes is courage not naivety.
What runs beneath all of it is resurrection. Not a denial of death, but its stranger companion: what is buried does not stay only buried. When she nods to the failed engagement, she does not write it as wreckage. It returns transfigured, folded into the new love rather than erased by it, as if nothing truly felt is ever wholly lost, only changed in form. As above, so below (she says). The dead father and the living love mirror each other; the ending and the beginning turn out to be the same door seen from two sides. What she offers is not the body returned but its meaning kept alive, carried forward into a life that continues.
A few weeks ago I sat replaying old voicemails from my own father, now gone, so when a recording of her father’s voice arrives at the close of “Never Going Back!” I was a wreck. Loved it so much. Those voicemails are exactly this: a voice preserved and a person who cannot be. And yet the voice does return every time I press play, a small resurrection under “Never Going Back!”.
Honestly the whole album is great as a cohesive piece, but some notes and highlights
The Outside - if this isn’t how it feels to bury your father I dont know what is
All the love songs for Bo: Kill Me, Bobby, Haunted, I Can’t Wait, Liberty Tree .. and there is still more! But Bobby might be my favorite so far.
Other Plans - Sad sad sad