PHILADELPHIA — When the lights went out, a crisp, adolescent shriek rose from all sides of the arena, anticipating her arrival. But she did not come, not just yet. Instead, a silence fell heavy and unsettled where the shrieking had been, as if making space for the ball at the other end of the arena, descending ever so slowly, blinking blue, pulsing as if it were alive. More than 40,000 eyes fixated on the descending orb. It was round, but not a perfect sphere, with bumps and craters on its surface like a morning star weapon with all of its spikes truncated, or a children’s bumble ball powder coated in black.
Though I was on the other side of the arena, and thousands of people were between me and the ball, it was dark, and there was nothing but air to separate us. I looked at the ball the way I look at the moon, with an awe bordering on reverence. Then it followed the same slow path back up into the rafters, and for a little while, I forgot about it.
On the main stage a large half-circle dome rested atop the space where Phoebe Bridgers would eventually emerge, like the kind of mesh tents that protect food from the prowling bites of bugs. As the ball on one side of the arena disappeared, the tent on the other lit up. The shrieks began again. And then it lifted, lights gleaming from the edge of it straight down so that Bridgers’ black dress was awash in so much light that it looked gray and the whole dome had the appearance of a UFO lifting off the ground in a movie.
I cannot show you a video, because no video of this exists. On the way in, workers sealed everyone’s phones inside pouches. More than 20,000 people attended the sold out show in the arena in Philadelphia last week to see the first week of Phoebe Bridgers’ The Lost Tour. Outside the arena, on the way in and the way out, a few of the content-deprived took photos of themselves in concert T-shirts or hugging one another. But you will just have to believe me when I say that the lighting at the Phoebe Bridgers concert softened my turbulent mind. Just as you forget the darkness of the night sky miles out from the city, how clouded your view of the Big Dipper can be made by the individual illumination seeping out from everyone’s apartment, phones in a dark arena pollute the concert experience in a way you can’t fully appreciate until they are gone.
This felt most poignant when Bridgers herself finally appeared beneath the dome. I did not see her through the thousands of tiny screens held up between me and her. I did not see the people around me magnified by the flashes of their friend’s recordings, nor was I able to take notes in my notes app, as I usually do by instinct just in case. I know she played the first verse of “The Outside” with its electronic voice distortion and harmonies, so alien and so soft. She played only the first verse, before launching into “Motion Sickness.” A few songs later, the dome around her lifted up on its side and became the moon. We all stared at her: the artist, the controller of the tides in this room. I do not remember much else of the first act of the show because of what happened next.
An instrumental played as the dome lowered over her again. From our seats, almost directly side-stage, we could see her scamper down the stairs at the back of the mainstage before she emerged a few seconds later on the other side of the arena, weaving through the crowd, touching people’s hands, to stand on the smaller stage and wait for the ball.
The ball! We had forgotten about the ball, which was negligent and also, in retrospect, astounding. It descended above her, glowing blue, shining rays of light outward like a disco ball. She played the soft, rhythmic “Lost Weekend,” from her new album. “I had the thought, you would outlive me, I loved you, and you couldn’t forgive me for that,” she sang, and the ball crept closer to her. All around her, it was so dark.
Bridgers often sings the way a person prays: her voice soft, almost a whisper, a tugging plea for help. Part of what has made Bridgers a defining star of her generation is that her songs embrace a world in which things are hard and feel bad. Often, her songs are stuck in the miserable, terrible present. At her best, her work is laden with sorrow, open to misery, and full of the recklessness you can only reach for in the worst moment of your life.
“It’s gonna be alright, we’ll make it through/You know me, and I’ll never forgive you for that,” she sang as the last line on “Lost Weekend.” On the album, the beginning of the song is instrumental with a low, humming rhythm that rises through a kind of staticky heartbeat. In the arena, as the song swelled, the ball began to spin faster, the lights racing across our faces, until there is a single big breath of pause in the outro and it burst. As the quivering instrumentals swelled and swelled the ball threw bright, fizzling static onto the crowd. It felt like how I imagine being inside one of the internet cables that runs along the floor of the ocean might feel.
On the smaller stage, Bridgers stood alone. The ball dimmed. Her stage began to rotate slowly, and Bridgers reached for the songs in her oeuvre that are so intimate and painful: for “Funeral,” and “Graceland Too”, for “Haunted,” and “Still Standing,” and “As Above.” The lights—now blue and soft, then a single white cone illuminating her, sparkling with microscopic confetti—made me feel as if I were listening to these songs the way I had in January when my friend died, or in February when my life fell apart, and I wept the kind of hot, fast tears that fall when you’re alone. Except that I was of course in a massive arena, and surrounded by other people who were also weeping.
At some point during her time on the small stage, Bridgers spoke to the audience. She thanked us for not using our phones, for not knifing the pouches open in a desperate attempt to hold their terrible connective devices. She explained that part of the reason she wanted to do this was because her father had died in the last year. She said she remembered watching documentaries about artists’ lives when she was a child (Johnny Cash, Billie Holiday, etc), and thinking about how hard and traumatic they were. Now, she said, she realized that trauma and heartbreak and loss affect everyone. That’s what it is to be human. Art is just an attempt to manage it.
She returned to the main stage to play a few more upbeat songs including “Bobby” and “Kyoto.” The past few times I have seen Bridgers perform, she has closed with “I Know the End,” a song that ends in a guttural, almost violent scream that carries and carries. Everyone in the arena screamed with her so loudly I had to plug my one good ear to save it from the feelings behind me. But she did not finish the night there, with the heavy guitar and the big band under the dome of space with a scream in the air in front of her.
The encore returned to the northern light of the show: the ball, and the small stage. This time, it illuminated straight down on her like an alien beam, her dress glowing blue in the dark, her eyes painted with glow-in-the-dark paint in tears streaming down both of her cheeks, her bleached hair white as a star. She sat on the ground in front of a piano, also glowing like a moth in the middle of a completely dark auditorium, as if there nothing stood between you and her. She could be tiny and next to you, or infinitely large and far away. She returned to “Lost Weekend,” the calm after the static storm, and then finished with “Scott Street.” For this, the finale, our departure, she turned the house lights up. Someone in the big crowd began to wave at her with the beat. “Anyway, don’t be a stranger,” we all sang as we waved at her, at the people across from us, at the beautiful ball, all made less strange to each other in that brief, unrecorded time we spent together.
