I Got Lost Listening to Lost Weekend
The first time I listened to Phoebe Bridgers’s recently-released album Lost Weekend, I got lost. The album is (very) easy to get lost in metaphorically; a new layer of complexity reveals with each listen. After at least 15 attempts, I still do not feel I have discovered the album’s core. The first-listen lostness I am referring to, however, was literal.
On the Friday of Lost Weekend’s release, I set out on a journey from my home state of Kentucky to Michigan, a journey I didn’t intend to be quite as circuitous as it soon proved to be. Bridgers and I share this in common. My journey, however, took only nine hours, while Bridgers took six years after releasing her sophomore album Punisher (2020). If a lot can happen in one nine-hour drive, then a lifetime can pass in six years: a global pandemic, an engagement and its collapse, a budding relationship, and a parent’s death.
In Lost Weekend, Bridgers refuses to hide her personal turmoil but doesn’t exactly shed light on it, either. Bridgers says it best: “There’s a difference between lying and knowing what not to say” (“Haunted”). She demands her listeners pay attention, particularly to what remains unspoken. However, even what is said is so quiet it was hard to hear over the crunching gravel of Indiana’s backroads. (Again, I was very lost.)
Lost Weekend blends Bridgers’s signature indie-folk sound with an uncharacteristically heavy dose of electronica elements. Phoebe can thank Lost Weekend’s long list of collaborators for the album’s fresh textural layers. Bridgers welcomed back Punisher’s producers and invited musical powerhouses Jack Antonoff, Alex G, Cameron Winter, and Conor Oberst, along with Boygenius bandmates Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, to participate in the project. The album had another critical influence: Phoebe’s new partner, Bo Burnham. “Bobby” served not only as a collaborator but also one of the album’s muses, alongside ex-fiancé Paul Mescal and her late father. With this team, Bridgers ensured Lost Weekend’s production had no shortage of brilliant minds nor discerning ears.
Admittedly, I prefer the album’s folksier tracks to its more electronic ones. The blending of the two, though, is magical, cloaking the album with an eerie yet ethereal quality. As Bridgers sonically and lyrically explores the death of her father, I, too, felt like I was dying. I did not, however, feel like I was going to heaven. At the end of “Still Standing,” for example, Bridgers wails like a siren amongst a wall of delicate synths. Bridgers and I were not ascending into the light but, rather, descending into the darkness.
Bridgers plays with this duality throughout Lost Weekend. While I caution against dismissing the album’s subtlety, Lost Weekend, when distilled, is a dance between love and grief. At times, the dance is a tango—sharp, dramatic, and swift—while, at others, it’s a waltz—flowing, graceful, and unhurried. Its changing rhythms reflect those of both love and grief, testifying to just how irrational the emotions are. And though the dances change, Bridgers’s partner does not. The album is a continuous, though non-linear, journey as Phoebe processes the loss of her father and the end of her engagement to Mescal, all while she falls in love with Bo.
Bridgers explores these seemingly contradictory emotions and her efforts at dissonance reduction by collapsing other binaries. The album’s journey begins by juxtaposing interiority with exteriority. Bridgers, dissociating at her father’s funeral, paints herself not only as on “The Outside” of the service but also on “The Outside” of her mind. In “As Above,” Phoebe realizes that, no matter the direction from which she gazes at the dumpster-fire of her life, her viewpoint cannot change her loss. Bridgers, at war with her mind, her perspective, and, ultimately, herself, identifies both as Jekyll and Hyde, as both good and evil (“I Can’t Wait”). Her heart is broken from grief, and either way, something must fill the cracks (“Haunted”). Bridgers, thankfully, allows it to be love.
Love wins, despite it all. And, with it, Bridgers wins, too. In this way, Lost Weekend is perhaps not an ode to the aforementioned men in Phoebe’s life but an ode to herself and to her past work. Nearing the album’s end, Bridgers weaves the melody of her song “Graceland Too” into several tracks (“Liberty Tree,” “Lost Parade”). Its accompanying lyrics echoed in my mind: “No longer a danger to herself or others.” A clear allusion to the risk and safety section of a dreaded therapy intake form—“Do you have thoughts of harming yourself or others?”—Bridgers makes her answer clear: no. At least, not anymore.
“I’m not good, but I’m better,” Bridgers confesses in “I Can’t Wait.” While it may be an exaggeration to claim Bridgers comes out triumphant, she does, at the very least, come out alive and “Still Standing.” In the album’s final track, Bridgers realizes that while her dad is not coming back, she certainly is (“Lost Weekend (Reprise)”). With Lost Weekend, Bridgers emerges from six years of “hiding,” returning to the spotlight only because she has, at last, returned to herself. She is no longer the outsider grieving at her father’s funeral. Instead, she is once again indie-folk rockstar Phoebe Bridgers, reigning over sad souls everywhere.
While Bridgers’s journey in Lost Weekend brings her back home, my journey as I listened to the album carried me far from mine. Bridgers, though, offered me solace: I can always return home. I can always return to myself. It doesn’t matter how long it takes.
Rating: INDY
Grace Guernsey is a Senior in the SFS studying Culture & Politics and minoring in Spanish. When she’s sad, she rewatches Phoebe Bridgers’s 2015 red-flannel performance of “Georgia” on loop. It does(n’t) help.
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