Unstuck in time, that was how I felt. Not a clock in sight. None of the timekeeping prosthetics around which I’ve built my life, the way we all build our lives nowadays. No sun or moon or stars either, except for the ephemeral skies projected on the stage. I couldn’t have told you what sort of time had passed. I only knew that I wanted it to stop passing. My mind was already racing ahead to the moment being over, and I kept forcing myself to remember that it wasn’t over yet, that I was here, now, and my own senses were evidence enough.
* * *
Three years ago, as I stood sardine-packed in the pit at Westville Music Bowl, the full moon brilliant overhead, Phoebe Bridgers asked us to put our phones away. I’d been filming much of the concert — I needed the world to see it, needed to curate an Instagram post that interspersed concert videos with photos from my tumultuous first month of college. I had watched the iconic trio perform most of the songs in their discography, along with a song from each of their solo discographies. But when they reached one of their final songs of the set, “Letter to an Old Poet,” Phoebe stopped to ask that no one film this song. It was something too personal, too intimate. She said that she couldn’t stop us, but, to anyone who decided to bring their phone out anyway: “I just won’t like you.”
I put my phone away. They performed the song. It’s one of their more devastating tracks, which is saying something. Phoebe crowd-surfed, and I wasn’t close enough for her to reach me, but I stood on tiptoe watching the crowd carry her. It was beautiful and magical and I tried to tell myself: it’s okay, you got plenty of other great videos of tonight.
When I saw boygenius in 2023, it was the fourth concert I’d ever been to — and all four concerts had been that same year. My very first concert had been the Eras Tour at Gillette Stadium in May. My high school best friend and I had scored second-row seats on the floor, five hundred dollars at face value and worth every cent. It was an utterly out-of-body experience. Gracie Abrams and Phoebe Bridgers were the openers, and Taylor Swift herself performed for over three hours. I stood there in a glittery dress, immersed in the show, at the zenith of teenage bliss. I took as many videos as I could. They were memories, but they were also social currency — I wanted everyone to know how lucky I’d gotten, attaining such proximity to this massive cultural phenomenon. In the following months, I was chasing that high, and every other concert seemed cheap by comparison. Going to see boygenius was a no-brainer. An experience I knew I’d enjoy, and also the logical next step in the identity I was building. My sense of self in my later years of high school had been shaped by my obsession with specific popular musicians (Taylor Swift, Phoebe Bridgers, Conan Gray, Noah Kahan, and Lorde were the front-runners at that moment in my life). As I headed into college, I was convinced that my emotional connection to these mainstream feminine interests would help me make friends.
It would turn out that I was wrong on that count. In college I’ve certainly made friends, fantastic ones, but music seldom played the role I’d been expecting. It turns out that having a very personal relationship with certain songs, albums, and artists doesn’t mean you’re going to build bonds with people based on loving the same work. Everyone interprets art differently, and the music you enjoy is not inherently a reflection of any sort of value system that might connect people on a deeper level. I can’t expect to have lots in common with someone just because we have some shared music taste. After all, we might have utterly different ways of perceiving and appreciating the same art. But still — music preferences are generally linked to a sort of performativity in this day and age. If I can cultivate a social media presence that notes my enthusiasm for the sorts of music that I like, I can give people a general idea of what sort of person I am, what topics appeal to me emotionally, where I stand politically, that kind of thing. I can seem cool to the kinds of people that I think are cool. It’s a way of refining my sense of identity which has admittedly gotten far too intertwined with my digital footprint. And what better way to reinforce my commitment to this aspect of identity than to attend concerts and post about them?
Fast forward to 2026, fall of my senior year. I’ve now been to seventeen concerts and a two-day music festival. Studying abroad in Ecuador in the spring of my junior year, immediately followed by a summer internship in rural South Dakota, put me on a concert hiatus for the majority of this calendar year. I was super excited to finally get back on the concert grind with Phoebe Bridgers. Her music has been an old and constant love for me. I was absolutely thrilled that she finally had new music out. I’d bought tickets back in June.
There was a daunting moment when it seemed our plans might not materialize. We were very nearly thwarted by the nor’easter which hit in force that weekend and led to the cancellation of many outdoor shows. Neither my friends nor I wanted to drive to New York amid flash-flood warnings, but there was no reasonable prospect of public transit since the concert would be ending late at night. Here I give a huge shoutout to my dad, who heroically volunteered to drive us to the show. The weather ended up not being as bad as we’d feared, and we made it to the venue with plenty of time.
* * *
I attended the Lost Tour with one of my best friends — someone who, recently, has been very enamored with the passage of time as a theme in media. In the week leading up to our concert, we’d watched the eight-part TV miniseries Fellow Travelers, a fantastic and devastating story about gay people living through the Lavender Scare of the 1950s and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. This series is incredible and it’s impacted me in a visceral way. I am not someone who typically cries over TV or movies — not because they don’t affect me emotionally; I just don’t tend to express a lot of emotion outwardly in that sort of context, for whatever reason. So take it seriously when I tell you that I was sobbing to the point of nausea at the final episode of Fellow Travelers. My friend and I just sat on her bed for at least twenty minutes after the credits rolled, crying and whispering, “This is so sick and twisted.” Decades pass in that show, and everyone changes so much, and … well, you’ve just got to watch it, because I can’t possibly do it justice. We watched that last episode literally the night before the Phoebe Bridgers concert, so we were in a vulnerable state, to say the least.
Upon entering the venue, we had to empty our pockets and go through metal detectors. The security staff gave us Yondr pouches in which we were required to place our phones, after shutting them down. The pouches sealed and couldn’t be unsealed until we left the venue. It was the only logical way to ensure a phone-free experience. After all, you can’t exactly confiscate thousands of phones and then expect to be able to return them to people in a timely and orderly fashion. This way, everyone still had their devices on their person; they were simply unusable for the duration of the concert.
Once we got inside, we wandered for a bit, finding the bathroom, buying some overpriced water, contemplating the merch line (we decided it was too daunting). We had been given a printed ticket with our section and seat numbers when we entered, so we found our way up to our 200-level section. Our seats were in the back row of our section, right up against the wall, which was actually really nice. We weren’t particularly close up, but we had a great view. The whole stage seemed to spread out before us. We noted the large white dome that featured prominently on the main stage and speculated that she might hatch out of it like an egg (which, yeah, she more or less did, but I’m getting ahead of myself).
Being in a place where no one was on their phones was a truly strange experience. As in, I realized I wasn’t sure when I’d last been in a public space without a cell phone in sight. I could hearken back to the pre-pandemic days of middle school and early high school, when teachers actually somewhat enforced “no phones in class” rules, but it’s all sort of hazy, as these rules essentially vaporized when COVID hit. For the past six years, my academic experience has been one of phones close at hand on desks, easy to pick up and scroll during any momentary impasse or surreptitiously film unexpected events. The one exception being exams, I suppose. But who wants to think about exams after the fact? This was a lively, positive setting full of people who were happy to be here, and nobody had a phone out. That was a profoundly novel feeling.
Being without phones forced us to just sit in our seats and talk. Not that we don’t talk normally, but this was a situation where we couldn’t distract ourselves or supplement the conversation with the internet. If we were thinking about something we’d seen online, we simply had to describe it to the best of our ability. I know I sound like such a screenager here, but I can’t help it. I felt surprised at the revelation that for most of human history, most people had to spend in-between, waiting times either talking to each other or alone with their thoughts. There was no infinite information superhighway with which you could distract yourself.
The opener for the concert was Alex G, and … honestly, I was bored. No hate, but his set really just wasn’t for me. All the songs sounded more or less the same to my ears, which isn’t even necessarily a bad thing — sometimes I like the way all of an artist’s near-identical songs sound — but I didn’t like these ones. We had no clock to check to ascertain when this set might end, or how long it would take for Phoebe Bridgers to come on afterwards, so we just had to wait it out.
Finally, at what I assume was around nine p.m., the first synths of “The Outside” filled the air: Crying in a suit and tie / but you should see the other guy. This song switches back and forth between a vocoder and Phoebe’s typical voice. When it came time to hear her voice in the song, I squinted down at the stage, waiting for her to appear. I didn’t see her. I had no idea where she was. The lights were low, liminal pulsing blue. I thought perhaps she might be wandering amongst the audience, but without the glow of anyone’s phones, it was impossible to tell where she was, or if she was even in the room yet. I am notoriously bad at finding things that are right in front of my face, so I assumed in the moment that I was just experiencing my usual fridge blindness. In retrospect, I realize that invisibility was the point. She was on the outside, watching.
The second song on the setlist, the 2017 hit “Motion Sickness” from debut album Stranger in the Alps, saw Phoebe and the band properly revealed from under the main-stage dome. Suddenly everything was unmistakable under white light. The crowd began to sing along, because “Motion Sickness” is kind of a banger by Phoebe Bridgers standards. Wikipedia describes it as “the most upbeat song on the album [citation needed].” Which reminds me of a wonderfully relevant article from The Onion: Phoebe Bridgers Postpones Concert After Experiencing Twinge Of Happiness. Such is the paradox of enjoying her depressing music. We sang along, grinning madly, there are no words in the English language / I could scream to drown you out, but there was nothing to drown out here, nothing I’d rather hear.
The following track, “Kill Me,” is possibly my favorite off the Lost Weekend album. The song starts out slow but crescendoes fantastically at the end, and this was accompanied on stage by the already half-lifted dome rising and turning in the air, with flashing lights and thick white smoke creating the impression of a launching rocket ship. It was absolutely surreal. The outer space theme continued for “The Governor’s Waltz,” with Jupiter’s roiling cloudy surface projected onto the now-sideways concave sphere over the stage. I found myself wishing more than anything that I could record this somehow, preserve this beauty anywhere besides my fragile brain tissue, but I couldn’t. That was the point. How much memory have I already lost, writing this just a couple weeks later? How much will forever belong to that night only?
I can tell you that when she played “Moon Song,” the lunar surface was projected into the sideways dome, and that the song hit twice as hard in the wake of the devastation of Fellow Travelers. I can tell you about the abruptness after “Moon Song” switching back to upbeat with “Liberty Tree,” as flower-shaped geometric designs flashed over the crowd and swirled around the room. I can tell you that for the instrumental ending of “Lost Weekend,” so many laser pinpricks of light pulsed through pitch-black darkness, it was hard to recall what was real. And I still picture the warm orange lamplight glow from the B-stage during “Funeral,” like waking up in your childhood bed. She was truly sinister for including that one on the setlist. It was all an overwhelm of emotion, music amplified in stunning visual displays, and I can’t prove it, I can’t prove anything, so you’ll just have to believe me.
For all my frustration, I do understand why there weren’t phones allowed. Phoebe took a moment to speak to the audience from the B-stage, to talk about her hiatus from music. She talked about the pressure of existing under the spotlight in 2023 in the months immediately following the death of her dad, with whom she’d had a very complicated relationship. She was struggling to process this loss while receiving greater media attention than she’d ever gotten before, as she opened for Taylor Swift and then toured with boygenius. “It was the worst possible combination,” she said. She’d “basically quit music for a couple years,” unsure if she’d ever want to return to touring and fame. When she finally decided that she would, it was very important to her that she do so in a way where she felt comfortable. She thanked us for complying with the no-phone rule — “I know it’s annoying” — and I felt like I finally got it, why this mattered. We live in a world where even the average person is intensely surveilled. There is so much photographic evidence of our existence that we’re never even made aware of. For instance, when I had floor tickets at the Eras Tour, I ended up unwittingly appearing in the background of a dog influencer’s Instagram story. This was only mildly amusing to me, but I would’ve been less pleased if I had a relationship hard-launched by being in the background of Keith Urban’s TikTok video, which is precisely what had happened to Phoebe Bridgers the previous week. Feeling constantly watched and documented is normal now, but maybe it shouldn’t be.
A halo of light, somewhat resembling a tractor beam, surrounded Phoebe as she began to sing “Still Standing,” a song about the death of her father. It was very subdued, none of the visual effects of the rest of the set. She changed a lyric with the addition of a single word — “I can’t remember what I said, but I didn’t mean it, Dad” — and that was probably the most intensely devastating moment of the concert. It felt entirely too intimate to be filmed. And yet … I know I would have filmed it if I could have. Everyone would have. We don’t know how not to, unless someone stops us.
When she returned to the main stage, Phoebe and the band started playing “Bobby,” only for her to mess up the lyrics on the second verse and start over — probably the best-case song to mess up, honestly, since it’s one of her very few genuinely happy ones and easy to laugh about. She told us that Lance Oppenheim was in the audience right before she played “On Video,” which she wrote for his new movie Primetime. (I later went to see this movie specifically because I knew Phoebe Bridgers was involved, and I actually didn’t like it very much, but that’s another story.) Then, the notes of the next song began to play, and the audience was screaming within a millisecond. It was the opening notes of “Not Strong Enough” by boygenius. Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker emerged onto the stage. I knew this was likely, as I’d seen online that the boys had performed at the previous two shows in Brooklyn that weekend, but I had convinced myself not to expect it, so I was positively thrilled. I was able to see them all together again, just as I did three years ago.
After “Not Strong Enough,” they played “Powers,” which Phoebe explained is about the feeling that the three of them were always unique and meant to find each other in the world. I hadn’t listened to “Powers” all that much before, but that song will always hold a special place in my heart now. Phoebe ended the set with “Kyoto” and “I Know the End” — the iconic, cathartic scream never gets old — and then an encore of “Lost Weekend (Reprise)” and “Scott Street.” The lights came back on during “Scott Street.” The audience was illuminated, thousands of people waving their arms like a colony of coral filtering plankton from the current. No one was holding a phone. All hands were purely in the moment.
Finally, as Phoebe exited the stage, a final recording played: the repeated intonations of “Never Going Back!” That track is only an interlude, the same two lyrics over and over, ending with a voicemail recording from Phoebe’s dad. It’s not really a song — and yet I’ve found myself strangely drawn to this track in the past month or so; it’s become one of my most-listened on the album. I spent the first eight months of this year far away from everything and everyone I’ve known, in several very different parts of the world. Then I returned to college, to things that were almost the same but not quite, and I am constantly haunted by the knowledge that it’s senior year. It’s my last time living on campus with my best friends. With gratitude for everything and everyone I’ve gained in the past three years comes horror that nothing will ever be this way again. I take as many photos as I can, when I can, but it’s never enough. I want to fossilize my memories. I can’t fathom that there’s no going back.