phoebe bridgers and the music that helped me find myself

by helping us break through the constrictions of language, music gives us glimpses of our true selves

the first time i listened to “smoke signals,” forces shifted inside of me. everything about this song awakened me in a moment: phoebe’s voice, the soft and eerie instrumentals, the lyrics you can listen to over and over again and still be interpreting.

music connects with us in ways mere words never can. when we find music that truly resonates with us, the experience is like a meeting with our own soul: the real soul that is buried beneath everything we are taught to believe we are. that real soul is obscured by language, a fiction which we have invented and yet use to precisely categorize a deeply blurry reality. as alan watts says, “humans like to put things in boxes, but the real world is wiggly.”

music enables us to break through the made up words we are given to define and describe ourselves, words which mean one thing to us and another billion things to another billion other people: “man,” “woman,” “professional,” “lazy,” “productive,” “adult,” “child,” “writer,” “artist,” “son,” “daughter,” “husband,” “wife.” music is a magical medium for shattering the rigidity of this conceptual thinking and replacing it with the kind of thinking that will truly help us: emotional thinking.

feelings. real feelings that we may not have words for, real feelings that maybe we are not supposed to feel, real feelings that others caution us against expressing. when we give into the feelings that contradict our externally imposed and artificially fabricated reality, we can access the wiggly world and find our wiggly selves inside. the reason why musical culture is so threatening to extreme conservatives is simple: music stirs up all the longings, desires, and senses which the “objective” use of vocabulary, defined and propagated by fundamentally traditionalist institutions, keeps in bounds. music awakens feelings inside us which cannot be resisted and which compel us to violate the most sacred moral teachings, all in the name of personal happiness.

phoebe bridgers in Redmond, va (david lee, wikimedia commons)

music is more real than any of these words because music is emotional. music is an expression of emotion which goes far beyond the limitations of words; the lyrics of a song radiate at their maximum potential when set against the right musical production and when entering the mind of a person who feels them deeply.

one of the most powerful aspects of music (as with all art) is how no song can be contained within a single meaning, not even the meaning intended by the artist. the power of music is that a single song can manifest as a vast spectrum of emotion. a single song is like a star casting its enormous range of light in all directions, and all of us are like planets who take that light and turn it into new colors, new life, sunny days. even the saddest music can achieve this by helping us process our sadness in a world that tells us to keep that sadness inside or to only express it in a “mature” way.

the post i am about to share was written in december 2023 before i had fully come out. i read this post and i am struck by something: i was afraid to authentically explain why phoebe’s music meant so much to me. what i emphasized instead was the quantity.

the restraint in this older writing of mine is an example of why it is so important to come out. coming out is not just about how we dress and how we do our hair. coming out is about freeing ourselves up for genuine self-expression. coming out is about letting the true self emerge into the world. since i was not yet prepared to identify, embrace, and release this true self, my mind sought some other way of using my phoebe listening data to subtly imply the feminine nature of my soul. in some way i was trying to advertise that femininity, rather than coming right out and saying it.

to identify as an extreme fan of phoebe bridgers’s music was an easier and more socially acceptable way of being authentic without crossing the line. because the moment i actually explain why i love phoebe’s music is the moment i break the rules. the only problem is that i could never be authentic without embracing the why.

phoebe’s music gave me a feeling echoed by clairo in “juna”

“(you make me wanna) try on feminine”

phoebe’s music was a portal into the deepest parts of my soul. while listening to phoebe’s music, i caught ever more vivid glimpses of the true self buried deep down inside. phoebe’s music helped me discover and embrace the teenage girl inside me. the emotions which phoebe’s music stirred up in me, the feelings which phoebe forced me to acknowledge rather than repress, make her my favorite musical artist who has ever lived. for that i will always be grateful for the art she has created.

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december 2023

“I think there’s a lot of men who like Phoebe Bridgers because they feel like she’s the only one who understands how uniquely fucked up they are internally.”

I turned and looked at my friend. “Do you think I’m uniquely fucked up internally?” I asked hopefully.

She did not answer, but I was attached to the idea of being mentally ill, which I was.

“Look!” I told my friend, pointing to my 2023 Spotify Wrapped. “I’m in the top .005% of all Phoebe Bridgers listeners!”

“I think you might be the top Phoebe Bridgers listener.”

I laughed. Yeah right. But then I started thinking about it. Could it be possible? Last year, I listened to Phoebe Bridgers for 25,554 minutes. That’s nearly 426 hours of Phoebe. That’s probably about what a typical music fan consumes total in a year, right? Actually, all together, the average Spotify user listens to around a total of 3,600 minutes of music in a year. When I glanced at my friends’ Instagram stories, I saw numbers like 9,000 and 10,000 for total listening minutes. For my contacts, top artists seemed to max out around 5,000 minutes, maybe 7,000. For many, 2,000 or 3,000.

I guess that’s because people typically become bored after listening to the same stuff over and over. For years, this condition of disillusionment characterized my entire relationship with music. As a teenager, I didn’t watch much TV. I spent hours listening to music in my room. Now the same old shit I was obsessed with in high school kept streaming into my ears. I tried to evoke the almost spiritual sensations my favorite music and lyrics gave me at 17, but something was missing. Something was lost. Growing sick of music, I resorted to political podcasts. The pundits transformed me into a real adult, informed about economics and ready to argue about taxes at Thanksgiving, but these diatribes left me feeling worked up and angry about the world. I missed music.

“Ugh,” a friend said. “I don’t know who any of these new artists are. I feel so old.”

He said it with a certain resignation, as if musical alienation was the inevitable outcome of growing old.

I shuddered. Was I also too old to be a fanatical fan of a contemporary musical artist? Is that something only teenagers do? Was there something in my nature as an adult that condemned me to spend the rest of my life joking despondently about how ignorant I was about music these days?

By now you can guess what happened next. I discovered Phoebe Bridgers and became obsessed with her music. But after over 25,000 minutes in just one year, the cynical reader must sense that my boredom with Phoebe approaches. After all, Phoebe Bridgers is young: she has just two solo albums and a few collaborations. She just doesn’t have that many songs to divide up between over 400 hours. How many times can someone listen to the same songs and not get bored?

So far the answer is 800 and counting, which is the number of times I’ve listened to my favorite Phoebe song. Because this is actually the third year of my Phoebe Era. The 25,000 minutes of Phoebe I listened to this year came on top of everything I listened to before. Despite just a few dozen songs to choose from, I listened to over 24,000 minutes of Phoebe in 2022 and around 17,000 minutes of Phoebe in 2021. Since January 2021, I have listened to Phoebe Bridgers for over 1,100 hours.

There is a direct relationship between the number of times I’ve listened to a Phoebe song and how much the song obsesses me. Several Phoebe songs that I once found just okay are now among my favorite pieces of art of all time. So what do I care if I’ve heard a Phoebe song 500 times? On the 501st time, it’s going to sound better than ever.

Take my favorite song of all time: “Smoke Signals.” I streamed “Smoke Signals” 161 times in 2021, 330 times in 2022, and 310 times in 2023 (a decline explained only by the fact that several other Phoebe songs surged this year). I have literally listened to “Smoke Signals” over 800 times, and yet just the other day, four times in one hour, I fell in love with it all over again. The mere sound of the chorus sends me into a spiritual trance like nothing in any church ever did. It’s no wonder I once spent three hours walking around in circles on an island in Prague doing nothing but listening to Phoebe Bridgers and looking around.

This year in June, I went alone to see boygenius, a supergroup involving Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker. (My son, less than two weeks old, was still too small to fit into his Phoebe Bridgers skeleton onesie.)

I’d already seen Phoebe play live twice. But this performance with boygenius was something different. Never in my life, not even as an adolescent, have I had that kind of spiritual experience at a concert. Wearing my Phoebe Bridgers t-shirt and showing off my ghost tattoo (a reference to Stranger in the Alps), I was on the floor with the teens, hanging out in the back with the Elder Emos, and I was singing, dancing, screaming along to the lyrics. I sang, swayed, and smiled more at that show than at any show in my life. My phone stayed in my pocket on Do Not Disturb, and I only looked at the screen three or four times.

The performance absorbed me until I was falling in love with the same songs all over again. When Lucy Dacus was singing “True Blue,” my soul disintigrated into little heart emojis that bounced around in my chest. And when Phoebe Bridgers played “Revolution O” and “A Letter to an Old Poet,” I was floating.

The energy, the joy, the love in the crowd for this beautiful music swept me into raptures. The sound of thousands of people singing along to the same songs I’d mostly listened to alone for so many hours made me feel like we were all there to praise, worship, commune. The music, sometimes with Queer and Satanic undertones, was giving us the kind of meaning that no organized religion ever could. True, at 16 I was baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, but boygenius was the Holy Trinity that made me know what it really means to be born again.

Nothing had been lost in me when I passed from youth to adulthood. No, something had been gained. At that show, I adored music more than ever. I was connecting with art in a way I never had before; surges of happiness and love rushed through me relentlessly until I was screeching “I WANNA BE EMACIATED” with all the fans around me while the boys (that’s their group gender) performed “Me & My Dog.”

My little son cuddled in my arms the next morning while boygenius streamed from the speakers. Already I had dreams of bringing him one day to see Phoebe Bridgers and boygenius. My little baby has already listened to thousands of minutes of Phoebe and he’s barely six months old.

Maybe he won’t like Phoebe. I guess that’s okay? What I want to share with my son is the depth of the joy that comes with music fandom, something I myself never truly discovered until I was 32. Because while this post might make it seem like Phoebe is all I listen to, Phoebe was actually more like portal for me than a cage. Once I discovered how much I loved her music in 2021, I was determined to find more music to love: the 25,000 minutes of Phoebe I listened to in 2023 was just a fraction of the more than 110,000 minutes of music I listened to in total this year. All told, I listened to 1,258 artists and 4,787 songs in 2023, many of which I love very, very much. 

Sometimes, I go a whole week without listening to Phoebe while I explore other music. I think maybe I’ve finally gotten bored. Will the feeling be gone when I hear her again? But then I put on Punisher and my love for every song overwhelms me. I am so grateful that I get to experience such an intense and constant connection with art.

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photo my own