headphone music
Mitch Therieau on Phoebe Bridgers’ new album in The New Yorker:
Her first two albums have distinct sonic identities, but the songs sometimes bleed into one another. She has a finely tuned ear for melody, but she is not a writer of earworms; her melodies tend to follow the lateral, associative chain of her lyrics. They take hold after repeat listens. Listening to her music again and again, in fact, is the key to seeing the larger shape of her ambition. Bridgers is not a serial self-reinventor like David Bowie or even Joni Mitchell—she is a polisher and a honer. She is the kind of artist who seems to have two or three basic musical templates for songs and is constantly creating new versions of them.
If you put Lost Weekend while you’re cooking or commuting or catching up on email you’ll miss all of the ambition in the new album, whose songs are very much Phoebe Bridgers songs, but whose production is “good headphones laying on the couch” worthy. Also, you’ll miss genius lyrics like this, the last line of Panorama: “If you’re drinking, then I’m drinking.”