Phoebe Bridgers’ Lost Weekend Is a Lyrical Masterwork: Review

On Lost Weekend, Phoebe Bridgers is seeing double. Two men, one living and one dead. Two deaths, one imagined and one real. Two Phoebes, including a woman who takes her place. “Hyde Jekyll Hyde.” And as she spirals around, she finds herself “learning the same lesson over and over again.” Lost Weekend is an album of cycles. Bridgers introduces the theme on the very first song, “The Outside.” The song is sparse and slow. Through a vocoder operated by producer Ethan Gruska, we hear: “Crying in a suit and tie But you should see the other guy One more time for old time’s sake I’ll watch him get carried away” The vocoder gives her an unrecognizable voice, sonic evidence of her dissociating. She notices her “fist through the dry wall” without seeming to remember doing it. Find Phoebe Bridgers Tickets Here These few lyrics have many payoffs, beginning in the next verse. The second scene in “The Outside” parallels the first, and finds that same fist now held in the air as Bridgers crowdsurfs at a concert in Ohio. “You were there,” she sings to the dead man, her father, the one who just got “carried away.” But she still sings through the vocoder, which modulates the human voice through a key...