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PHOEBE BRIDGERS
© ELEANOR JANE “I LIKE TO WRITE WITH MY FRIENDS. IT’S FUN
TO BE SURROUNDED BY PEOPLE WHO I CAN
JUST BE COMFORTABLE WITH”
But that’s not to say that experimentation wasn’t
the order of the day during Punisher’s long gestation,
more that it’s been a fundamental part of how she
Bridgers writes and records her music since she “It’s something that everyone who writes faces at
devised Stranger In The Alps. some point,” she says, with a shrug. “You’re basically
“I think of myself more as a producer than a writing for yourself – and then you have an audience.
musician,” says Bridgers. “My favourite thing to do I don’t think it’s changed me much but it’s changed
is write 15 versions of the same song and then fuck the record. I feel like the experiences catalogued on
them up in the studio, because if I try to make the the first record are those of a teenager or someone
song into something interesting just on guitar, I get in their early-twenties with no job. I don’t typically
so wrapped up in it that I give up. I’ll be like, ‘Oh, write about other people’s experiences. I only really
whatever – that just sounds like this other thing’. find it in myself to write about my own life. So it’s
“I’ll never let myself plagiarise or do something that changed in that way, because I’m now writing about
sounds exactly like something else, so I guess I just my new life.”
trust in that process. And for that reason, I take longer
than most people to make stuff, because I’ll write a TOUCHED BY GENIUS
song and then six months later, it’ll be super-different. It’s hard to imagine how Bridgers has found the
Kyoto was a fucking ballad! I just like writing stuff time to record and write any music over the past
and then fucking it up.” three years given her long-standing commitments to
Second-album syndrome may be a well-worn the likes of Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker, Conor Oberst,
trope but the ramped-up expectations that follow Matt Berninger, and The 1975 – a full dance card by
immeasurably successful debuts have proved too anyone’s standards. Collaboration is clearly something
much for many artists. It’s all too easy to fall prey that energises and inspires her and, perhaps more
to increased expectations. But such pressure didn’t importantly, exposes her to things that aren’t
phase Bridgers during the creation of Punisher. necessarily in her comfort zone.
GUITAR MAGAZINE 37
