The photo on the left was taken in 2018. The one on the right was taken two days ago.
I first saw Phoebe Bridgers live in San Francisco during the summer before I moved to LA for my MA. My rented U-Haul was parked at my apartment’s parking lot with my stuff packed in it. I didn’t have to leave until the early hours of the next day and I had some down time. I thought I should visit the city of my youth one last time. Looking for something to do, I realised that I could make it to a show. She happened to be playing that evening.
I remember being in line for the doors to open. I made small talk with a live music journalist and another solo concert goer while waiting. And when it was time to walk inside, I found myself nearly at the very front row. I remember being struck by the simplicity of the stage. Save from the fairy lights wrapped around her mic stand, there was just a printed backdrop of her first album’s cover.
The show was quiet not out of lack of interest or boredom but out of Phoebe’s ability to capture each individual in the crowd. I don’t remember the crowd around me at all that night because it felt like I was alone with her and her band in that room. I cried when she sang Funeral and felt goosebumps when she belted out Georgia. No one sang over her. There was no mosh pit or jumping. I could hear her voice clearly. She sang with such pristine quality live.
Now her crowds are massive, younger, with the crowd yelling the lyrics back to her for every song. Even though I arrived at the venue two hours prior to doors opening, the line was already about two blocks long and I was a good seven or so rows from the front. She still has the same fairy lights-adorned mic stand and rock metal font drum cover, but the growth of her fanbase is undeniable. When she appeared on stage (with Down With the Sickness as her entrance song no less) she glowed with confidence. She performed each song with a more finely tuned stage-presence, honed with experience.
The concert hall was electric. When she sang the Moon Song, we held up paper cutouts of a moon that was made and passed around by a fan. It touched Phoebe to the point of tears and we cried with her as she explained that the song was quite intense as it is and to have the crowd do something like that for her made her feel things. We boo-ed America when she advocated for accessible abortions, yelled “fuck the cops” during Smoke Signals, and we all screamed with her during the climax of I Know The End. Someone had a “fuck TERFs” sign and we all cheered when Phoebe pointed it out. It’s a far cry from the intimacy, the sanctity of her first tour. This one was a celebration. I was one with the crowd.
Friends were even made that night. There was Allie and Adele from the UK who thankfully saved my place before the start of the show so I could get stuff from the merch table. In front of me was Emma from Austria, who coincidentally looks like Emma Chamberlain and her friend Bori from Hungary who traveled all the way to Germany just to come to the show.
Two days after the aptly named Reunion Tour, I’m still thinking about the ways in which the two Phoebe Bridgers shows I’ve been to, four years apart, somehow chart my own personal growth.
When I think about the four years that has passed in between shows I can’t help but smile. I was on the brink of falling off a cliff and be swallowed by the vastness of the world in 2018. I felt small and worried about how far I could go, still anxious about proving myself to me. Now in Europe with a trip to rock bottom and the worst of my nightmares in the rear view mirror, it’s 2022 and hindsight offers relief. My joy no longer requires justification and I go where I want to go. I can give myself to whatever I decide to do and I don’t care to give excuses for the delusions or stubbornness of others. Pain is felt deeply with an understanding that it will pass. I don’t care to enshrine people who make my life difficult and stand in the way of what I want. I explore what I allow into my world without apologies for what needs to be spit out. I hold on to nothing because my life flows like water.
I wonder if in another four years I’ll find myself at another Phoebe Bridgers concert. I wonder where I would be in life and what new lessons I would be learning. I’m at an age now where the thought of what’s to come doesn’t weigh on me anymore. Come what may, I will survive it.
