As the indie superstar makes her Glastonbury debut, she explains why she is much more than just the ‘patron saint of sadness’
Phoebe Bridgers is spinning me around her bedroom with her phone camera. Last year, the 27-year-old songwriter swapped her studio apartment for a bigger place, still in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake neighbourhood. “I’m still a poster-y person instead of a mounting-art person, so it kind of looks like a teenager’s house,” she says, pointing at a gothic floral print tacked to the wall. There’s Tom Waits; her beloved Elliott Smith. Her duvet is illustrated with cute rockets. It’s hard to find that sort of thing for double sheets, I say enviously. “It’s single,” she laughs, with a deadpan, dude-ish joy that’s nothing like her singing voice. “The bedroom situation definitely needs to be grownup, too.”
Just as Bridgers’ home teeters on the brink of adulthood, she is a cult star at the threshold of enormous fame, a reality she is only just encountering now that Covid restrictions have lifted and she is coming eye to eye with a fanbase that ballooned during the pandemic. In June 2020, Bridgers released her second album, Punisher, which minted her signature sound: a sort of lunar, spooky folk. Her lyrics mixed the humdrum (24-hour pharmacies) with the surreal (possible UFOs that turned out to be Elon Musk test flights), as she searched for salvation but mostly came back with wry takes on the void. Even a looming sense of apocalypse couldn’t quiet her comparatively insignificant problems. It couldn’t have chimed more thoroughly with Covid-era perspective.
