Switched on Pop - Phoebe Bridgers opens her Moleskine

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

Many of us keep a journal, but few of us are able to turn our unvarnished thoughts into cultural moments touching on love, death, and guitars quite like Phoebe Bridgers. Her new album Lost Weekend isn’t just throwing the pages of her personal life into song, it’s much more than that: A beguiling, hyper-compositional meditation on the last six years of her life. The genres range from bluegrass to electronic, and collaborators pepper the record – from her boygenius bandmates Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, to Americana outfit Nickel Creek, to a mysterious presence who may or may not be Geese singer Cameron Winter. The end result is one of the most immersive and heartbreaking albums of the year thus far, transforming the specificity of one person’s story and observations into a universal reflection on life’s fragility. CREDITS  Reanna Cruz: Producer  Iris Gottlieb: Illustrator  Charlie Harding: Host, Executive Producer  Dion Lee: Art Director  Brandon McFarland: Audio Engineer  Nick Ripps: Video Editor  Nate Sloan: Host  Lissa Soep: Editor  Zach Tenorio & Jocie Adams: Theme Composers  Switched On Pop is a co-production of Vox Media Podcast Network, Vulture, and Rock Ridge Productions. Links: ⁠⁠Newsletter⁠⁠  Songs discussed: Phoebe Bridgers – The Outside Phoebe Bridgers – Lost Boys Phoebe Bridgers – Kill Me Phoebe Bridgers – The Governor’s Waltz Phoebe Bridgers – Lost Weekend Phoebe Bridgers – Haunted Phoebe Bridgers – Still Standing Phoebe Bridgers – Never Going Back! Phoebe Bridgers – I Can’t Wait Phoebe Bridgers – Lost Weekend (Reprise) Paul Lansky and Hannah MacKay – Notjustmoreidlechatter Phoebe Bridgers – I Know The End Phoebe Bridgers – Motion Sickness Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odu for free at Odu.com. That's ODOO.com. Charlie, do you or have you ever kept a journal? I kept a journal a lot when I was a kid. And frankly, probably once I got my phone, the journaling has not been as good. The phone is the enemy of the journal.

Yeah. And I have a similar situation. where I used to journal. I don't anymore, but I did dig through some of my archives and found my old moleskin from 2016. How embarrassing. And this is relevant because the artist that we're going to talk about today is also known for religiously using a black moleskin journal just like this one. Oh. Oh. And I think their music reflects that kind of intimate diaristic quality. I'm talking about Phoebe Bridgers, and we're going to dig into her new album, Lost Weekend, today. Welcome to Switch on Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. Charlie, can I read you a little bit of my journal from 2016? Oh, I am at the edge of my seat. This is when I went to New Zealand during my sophomore year of, college and worked on an organic farm in exchange for room and board. In this particular adventure,

I am trying to go visit a colony of Gannet seabirds. Okay, here we go. Now it was around 10.30. The tides receded at 11 and came back around five. Situation was grim and I was reluctantly stealing myself for another day in Napier, as I had already reluctantly paid and asked them outside if they were heading out. Maybe if the weather's good, they said. The sky was ominous and it started raining as we drove, but when we got there, it looked okay. I'm going to skip ahead a little bit.

The birds were spectacular. It was exhausted. I went over and got a ride with two New Zealand women back to me. I'm here in the hostel writing this. Nervous to go to the farm tomorrow, but mostly okay. Good night. Riveting stuff, right? I would say exhaustive and also maybe the style of writing

where you think maybe one day, someone will read this. Is this something that would say make a great song? I would hazard that diary entry would not, but I think it's a nice illustration of you can't just take your journals and turn them into music. There's actually a lot of artistry. I agree. And I will not be reading you my journals.

Well, Phoebe Bridgers, and that's totally true about her Moleskin obsession, by the way. There's an article from The Strategist, which is the New York Magazine, like, shopping guide, where celebrities talk about their 10 essential things, and she names this Moleskin journal as one of her essential items. And she's a singer-songwriter who's never been afraid to make her life the subject of her music. Her first album, Stranger in the Alps, was anchored by songs like motion sickness, which took aim at an older musician who had groomed her at a young age.

Her next do you sing with an English accent. I guess it's too late. Her next record 2020's Punisher included tracks like Kyoto, which detailed the strained relationship between her and her father. Now she's released Lost Weekend, and it's a meditation on a crazy six years in her life, starting the supergroup boy genius with Lucy Dacus and Julian Baker, dating and breaking up with high-profile actors. achieving a new level of fame and notoriety and losing the same estranged father that she'd sung about on Punisher. Made it a day in a shirt. He's not coming back as a bird. He's not coming back.

A lost weekend reprise. Like we were talking about, great artists take their personal life, their joys, their traumas. and they don't just put it right into the music. They transform it. They translate it. And Phoebe has actually commented on this. She did a hour-long radio show made for college radio stations called Lost Signal. And one of the things she said during that broadcast was...

I certainly don't like when my lyrics are kind of poured over as really literal. I think my songwriting is getting... less literal as time goes on. That's funny because I really do feel like her songs give the impression that they're emerging from a moleskin. They're so idiosyncratic. The language is often of a place, a texture.

The details of her music are definitely what makes it so compelling. But I want to resist the urge to read too deeply into those details. Like take the track, the governor's waltz. It begins with like a very real moment in her life playing the governor's ball in 2021. And then immediately in the next line we get an image borrowed from the shining and you start to wonder, okay, how much of this is real or kind of her processing the memory of this event? Shelly DeVole.

That is a creepy lyric. Shelly DeVall is the actor who plays Jack Nicholson's wife. Jack Nicholson is running around being like, I just want to, you know, no work, no play. Creepy. And she's hiding in the bathroom. Wow. That's a stunning pairing. There's a lot of powerful, sometimes herbific, sometimes funny imagery like that on this album.

They're part of a larger. narrative of the highs and lows of life itself. So let's listen to some of the tracks on Lost Weekend and hear how the personal becomes universal. I'm really glad that you're going to walk me through this. When the album dropped, I was both overwhelmingly excited because not why do I love Phoebe, but I also love a lot of the collaborators that she's working with. And yet, it's summertime. And I just haven't really had the emotional capacity to sit with this work and feel it in the level of, you know, weight that it deserves. Right. You're still, like, hitting the dance floor with Madonna, as we were discussing last

week on the pod. Yep. It's going to get a little heavy at points, but fear not. This is a dark album at moments, but I think it's a really rewarding listen. And it begins with kind of a slight of hand, almost like a faint. You hit play and you're like, wait, where am I? This is not what I was expecting. Crying in a suit and tall, but you should say the other guy. That's the opening track, the outside, and we're in the world of like imaging heap

and vote coders. Yeah. Not a sound we've necessarily heard from Phoebe Bridgers before. No, I expect Phoebe Bridgers to be soft rubber bridge guitars with. delicate synthesizer supporting her, and here she's become fully synthetic. The pairing of this opening lyric is also, I feel like captures what you were saying earlier, where at first it feels like it's right from her moleskin. She's in a suit and tie.

Right. Phoebe Bridges is known for performing in a suit and tie. Especially with Boy Genius. Yeah, yeah. But you should see the other guy is such a funny lyric. It's like sets up like there's some kind of battle. But then as it moves from the verse into the chorus, it's like the real voice of Phoebe Bridgers kind of emerges in this cool way.

When you hear her, like, quote unquote, real voice come out of the fog of that vocoder, and you can really almost see that image of her sort of watching herself. It's really powerful. And that almost becomes a theme through the album, this idea of like standing back and watching your life from a distance and trying to make sense of it. in some way. I mean, it makes sense that she's doing.

So at this point, obviously her last set of albums were hugely successful. But when she put out her work with Boy Genius, her celebrity took off in a whole new way that I think was quite unexpected. Used to see Phoebe Bridgers walking around Los Angeles. Now she lives a life where, you know, if I just look at my students, so many of my students want to be Phoebe.

They want to write music. Phoebe. She is such an aspirational figure at this point. And there's that thing when someone becomes very famous, their work has to change to meet that new found identity. And here we can see her looking at the character of Phoebe. And I think we're throughout what I've heard of this album, constantly sort of navigating. What's the real Phoebe versus what is the image of this idea of Phoebe Bridgers? That tension bleeds into the second track on the end. album Lost Boys, which actually begins with the tail end of that vocoder song before moving into a more acoustic world.

The lost male characters in her life? I don't know. Well, perhaps, but I think it's a specific reference to the lost boys of Peter Pan, the lost boys of Neverland, you know, who literally never grow up. And we meet them in the chorus. Okay. So now things are making more sense to me. I did try to do a viewing of Peter Pan with my children a while back, only to realize that that film has not aged well.

And I had to turn it off. Yes. And so when I first heard Lost Boys, I was like, does Phoebe attract a lot of immature men in her life? Like, is that what's going on? This makes a lot more sense where she is looking back on youth, a time before fame and wealth and money. were a part of her life and feeling nostalgic for that moment. Yeah, I mean, I think you can read it both ways, though.

I feel like the production of this song, in contrast, what we heard before, has a very sort of upbeat, almost sort of celebratory nature to it. And when she performed this song on Jimmy Fallon, the performance starts with a close-up shot of just her face and then slowly zooms out to reveal that her entire backing band

for the live performance is children. There's a really cool harmonic moment in this song as well. We get a really surprising chord at the end of the second chorus. Here we go. This moment where we modulate to a B-flat major chord in the key of D-major, that's a very distant foreign chord with this big swelling of all the brass instruments. instruments. To me, it's almost like that's like the vision of Neverland that you get for a moment.

And then it like fades away to this very pedestrian image of like lying in a twin bed. She really pays attention to making sure that the harmony matches the emotional sentiment of the music. And oftentimes we'll use a chord change that only happens once to communicate something very specific. The song, Kill Me, walks this line between fantasy and reality in a really nimble way. This is going to kill me. Wait. This is going to kill me. This chorus is another moment where it feels very organic, the way she's just almost talking like, this is going to kill me, wait.

It sounds like something you would overhear. someone saying in a conversation. But then at the same time, every time she sings, wait, it's so calculated. Everything drops out for a minute, and it's just the sound of her voice alone. It's like very vulnerable.

And then all the instruments come back in. It's this balance of feeling very casual and off the cuff and also like perfectly orchestrated. Two other significant moments from the song I want call out. One is the appearance of a character who will play a very central role in this album.

He has a whole song actually coming up later and it's Bo Burnham, her current Bo. Oh. And actually one of the co-writers on a number of the tracks on Lost Weekend. Bo Barnum, former YouTube star turned comedian, filmmaker, made the great COVID comedy doc inside, which featured the song, That Funny Feeling. That Funny Feeling. Yeah. Which was later covered by Phoebe Bridgers, one of the great covers of all time, if you ask me. So in addition to the first appearance of Bobby, as I guess we'll call him, we also get

one of the classic Phoebe Bridger's moves. It's something you can hear in some of her most popular songs like, I Know the End. Counterintuitively, you save the biggest moment of the song for the very end, and you ride it out into the sunset. A similar version of this cathartic coda appears on Kill Me. I think what the third act reveal accomplishes here and elsewhere in the Bridgers' discography is it takes songs that might feel a little fragmented in some ways and turns them into something that packs like a bigger emotional punch. And it's also like an element of surprise as well, which is doubled in this particular case of Kill Me when she introduces this new voice.

voice into the mix. It actually belongs to the lead singer of geese, Cameron Winter. Really? He's credited on this album as Son John Johnson. Basically, the entire internet has concluded that it's Cameron Winter, and he'll, spoiler alert, make another appearance later. So, add him to the mix of collaborators, a lot of whom have been working with Phoebe for a while. We've got Ethan Gruska, Christian Lee Hudson, orchestrations. We got Rob Boos,

who was on the show. Jack Antonoff is here as well. But now we've got some new folks, in addition, Cameron Winter. Maya Hawk shows up on some of the writing credits in this album. So there's an interesting cast of characters here.

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opening couplet about hiding in the bathroom like Shelley Deval. It's the governor's waltz. Two kids in a trench cold. Living alone, I was too happy to feel at home. There's a lot of moments in this record where there'll be a harmonic shift that will connect to something happening lyrically. I think we get a nice one of these in the second chorus of governor's Walt.

Let's see how lonely watch me pretending to sleep. I'm next to you. You're next to nothing. You promise that you never leave. But maybe you'll do it. Oh, yeah. Feels like a Tim Burton soundtrack. Totally.

So spooky. I mean, she loves ghosts and haunted things, but what just occurred? It does feel like a harmony borrowed from a Vincent Price special or something. Let's hear that one more time. That we modulate to the parallel minor, have this eerie vocal on top. Wow. And it's a little bit haunted.

There are many ghosts looming over this record. Did you say haunted, Charlie? It is not this house that's haunted, but I don't want it either way. What a perfect segue. because this is another track I wanted to talk about called Haunted. And I was thinking about you when I was listening to it, Charlie, because it is the most bluegrassy moment I think we've encountered from Phoebe Bridgers so far.

Someone who definitely leans into a country Americana sound at points, but this is like full bluegrass. We even have the members of Nickel Creek appearing here. Chris Teely, Sarah, and Sean Watkins, and Phoebe's not like cosplaying. It's like a really successful bluegrass adjacent track. I mean, she's bringing together all of her peers in the Los Angeles all folks scene. And so there is just a fluidity to these people who are in her lives, but also, I think musically, are really fitting at this sort of midpoint of the record

where we've begun in that frozen vocally. coder. We have moved through these carthartic codas with giant bands with, you know, often like with some synthesis in the background supporting it to get those big bombastic moments. And then just stripping everything back a way of, you know, really feeling like Phoebe has arrived. I agree. And I think we get some of the most exquisite turns of phrase in this song. feelings and I know those go away.

There is a difference you know and deciding what not to say. That's a really good line. That's growing up, you know, that is maturation. That is like, oh, yeah, I can't always say it exactly as it is because I might hurt somebody, but I also need to make sure to tell the truth. Yeah. Yeah. And this is one of the songs on

the album that points towards some kind of healing or like self-awareness or hopefulness. The final chorus is very moving. I think we've got Lucy Dacus and Julian Baker in there doing some harmonies with her maybe. Interesting. They're on the credits. Oh yeah. Alex G is also on this album. Probably should mention that. Connor Oberst. Gosh. The classical voice arranger Carolyn Shaw. Oh, yeah. There's a sense of like putting all the pieces together in this really careful way,

like getting all the right sounds from all the right people to build the tapestry of this album. I feel like she does that on the album's title song, Lost Weekend, which begins very contemplative with a sort of eerie. background. reflective, looking back at an early part of her life, when we get to the end, there is a radical sonic transformation. I can only pause it reflecting on maybe her own internal transformations. You know what that is, Charlie, a third act reveal.

A cathartic coda. It is. It totally is. And it's a very, very moosey moment. Yeah, I mean, you've got the Robin Moose beautiful strings on top. Then you've got Chris Deely playing the mandolin in a way that reminds me of this this like 2000s indie group, the books where you match up the sounds of acoustic instruments with the skittering electronics of like, almost like fru-fru, the image in heap former project.

it is a I just never hear these kinds of organic electronic elements mash up in such a way in contrast of something which begins as like a solo contemplative organ and voice song

there's one other sample that really took me by surprise here from the electronic composer Paul Lanski not just more idle chatter where he takes his wife's voice Hannah McKay and he processes it in these really kind of skittering, sped-up ways.

Wait, where does that appear in the Bridger's song? At the very end of Lost Weekend. Just for like a second. Wow. It's odd. It's powerful. And it's, again, a testament to like this idea of putting all these little pieces in their exact right place to make the hole that is more than the sum of its parts.

Well, which is, you know, when we think of Phoebe Bridgers, I at least think of someone who is like solo acoustic guitar on a stage as she basically performed at Madison Square Garden with, you know, two musicians supporting her. But it's like, she gets sort of put in the like singer, songwriter sort of place. And yet, there's always been this supporting orchestration of samples and synthesizers and sometimes banjos and strings. These records feel so cinematic. And there's something very tasteful about how she does it, though, because her voice, the song, is always front and center. The cinematics are there to support the underlying meaning of the work. They're never the thing which sort of takes center stage except at these very particular moments. Yeah. There's a lot of craft at work. If we go back to Haunted for a moment, there's one other thing I wanted to say about it. I actually called it like a chorus at one point when we were listening to a clip. But it's a funny song because it doesn't really have a chorus. It doesn't have any lyrics that really repeat throughout it. It constantly is giving you the same melody, but with constantly changing lyrics.

Yeah. And I feel like the mirror to that song or the inverse of that song is never going back, which is the exact opposite. If Haunted is constantly generating new lyrics, never going back is just repeating the same lyrical phrase over and over again. The whole song The way it used to be Is not the way that it is Never going back again The way it used to be

It's not the way that it is Never going again The whole song just continues like that Never going back again The way it used to be It's not the way that it is Except for the voice note that we get From her father

She's obviously confronting The nature of time is marching forward grief is happening. It's performed in this very live sort of way, this mantra, she's singing over and over again, but we hear it as if she's singing far away from the microphone, standing at the back of the studio. It feels like a, almost like a verite moment,

just like something captured that she was just happened to be singing. Yeah, I agree. This is like the most journalistic moment in some ways of the whole album. And then, as you mentioned, it has a artifact from the singer's actual life, this voicemail from her father. Hey, baby. You just had, I know you're busy. Being a rock star takes up the lot of your time.

Since this figure of her father has, like, played such a role throughout her musical career, it's very kind of arresting when you hear that. And like I said, it does feel like the most torn from the journal moment in the, this whole album in some ways. And to me those two tracks haunted and never going back are really

the two extremes of like how you might approach writing. One is very haunted is very lyrically kind of playful and verbose

and tongue and cheek and never going back is just very like straightforward and just unadorned in this way and repetitive. So it's like these two extremes of how someone can write a song, basically. Once again, someone who presents as here I am standing on a stage with my guitar. And yet, there's a lot of craft and thought about the different ways that a song can present itself. Let's do one more. And to be clear, we're not going to talk about every song on this album. We're not going to talk about the banger that is Bobby, the Miss

mysterious panorama, the shout out to the dying malls of America, Liberty Tree, and a few other wonderful tracks here. But let's end with I Can't Wait, which is another exploration of themes of like horror and fear, but also gives us a final cathartic coda that sums up a lot of the themes of the album. Okay, before we get to the cathartic coda, those lines feel like they're an answer to what we heard at the very beginning of the album. You know, what does she sing?

I'm outside watching. The sense of distance from yourself. Yeah. Now it feels like towards the end of the album, she's more comfortable being in her own skin in this way. Yeah. I'm not good, but I'm better. Miss my cue, but whatever.

It's now or never. psyching herself up to be who she is and let people take that however they will. It's a little bit of a magic trick. Like, oh, I miss my cue. Whatever. Yeah, I'm just like, I'm just doing this thing. The band's playing in the background. I happen to be singing.

You know? And then the return of Cameron Winter. Side by side. Jekyll Hyde finally together. That's powerful. And it's another moment where the music mirrors the lyrics in this way. Because their two voices couldn't be more different. Like Phoebe Bridgers, kind of high, timorous, angelic, Cameron Winter, like kind of low,

vibrato, kind of rough. Yeah. They're literally Jekyll and Hyde, like vocally. Yeah. But they're also singing these perfect hard. harmonies and mirroring this idea of Jekyll and Hyde finally together, like embracing all of who you are as one. It's such a powerful moment. There are so many contrasts on this album. You know, those contrasting lyrics of things that are beautiful and things that are profane

next to each other. Yeah. The idea of straight from the journal and extremely crafted and thoughtful and the merging of voices and both, you know, literal but also internal coming together in a, really stunning way. Yeah, I told you, I wasn't ready for this. Like, I might cry. Yeah, no. It's, it's very profound. It's emotional.

That's good, Charlie. It's good. It's good that you're in touch with your emotions. You know what you should go do? What's that? Write in your journal. You're right? Maybe it's time.

Get that moleskin out. And I thought I would end this episode by reading the rest of this journal. So sit down and get comfortable. here we go. December 13th, my last night news said, no, I'm kidding. Instead, we'll roll credits.

But yeah, maybe in addition to the takeaway of all the highs and lows and Jekyll's and hides in this album, maybe it's time to put down the phone and pick up a journal. Two and five Canadians will hear the words you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca.