I love live music. I went to my first concert in fourth grade, One Direction with 5SOS as the opener, and I’ve been chasing that high ever since. I’ve been to shows at outdoor amphitheatres, arenas, stadiums and had everything from barricade tickets (Abel Tesfaye, please come back to the US) to lottery seats in the 400s (love you, Harry).
I get horrendous concert FOMO. I lost the Ticketmaster war for Tyler, the Creator’s Chromakopia tour, and to this day, I’m still fuming. I don’t even speak Spanish, and I was crying, throwing up, sliding down the wall while watching videos my friends took at Bad Bunny’s DtMF tour. So, when Phoebe Bridgers dropped Lost Weekend, I promised myself that if there was a tour, I would go no matter what. And then, Ms. Bridgers took a touring route that is all-too-familiar: TN → NC → GA → TX. No love for the third most populous state in the country? Fine, I’ll just go to Atlanta. The Atlanta stop’s on a Tuesday? Oh. This made finding a friend to go with pretty tough. So tough, in fact, that I couldn’t find one at all. The day before the show, I had a choice to make. I could (A) skip this concert and regret it for the foreseeable future or (B) brave an out-of-state show alone. I chose B.
There was something eerily peaceful about getting to my hotel room before the show. Typically, I would spend the days and hours leading up to a concert watching TikToks about what happened at previous stops or scouring Instagram for info about the opener. This time, I couldn’t. To be fair, there are other instances where I’ve gone into shows blind. For example, I saw opening night of both Noah Kahan’s The Great Divide Tour and Drake & J Cole’s It Was All A Blur Tour. That’s an understood aspect of every tour’s first stop, but Atlanta was the 14th stop on Phoebe’s tour. On most tours, by this point, usually the whole set is circulating social media. Not Phoebe, not this tour. I left my hotel room with my phone and wallet, a scrawled out setlist that I found on Reddit, and zero expectations on what I was getting myself into.
If you’re keeping up with the Lost Weekend tour (or concert culture at large), you’ve probably heard that Phoebe Bridgers has banned phones at her shows. This is half true. You can have your phone with you at all times, it’s just locked away in this little Yondr pouch that you physically cannot open until the end of the show. You’re literally given a printed out slip of paper with your seat information because you can’t open up Ticketmaster. Before putting my phone into the pouch, I admittedly felt a brief sense of panic. However, I think this was more so because I was alone. I texted my mom that I was safe, powered it off and headed in.
Walking around the concourse, for the first time, I realized how dependent I was on not only my phone, but on my Apple Watch. Going into the show, I had already mentally come to terms with the fact that I couldn’t be on my phone, but my smartwatch was a different story. I found myself instinctively checking my wrist at least a dozen times, only to be met by no watch and an aggressive tan line. This was my small talk entry point with the people around me. Nobody had a real watch on, so we were all guesstimating what time it was and approximately how long we had until Phoebe came on. I chatted with the woman next to me.We talked for a while about State Farm Arena’s bag policy, living up North, and of course, Phoebe’s music. There was a moderate buzz of similar conversations happening around me, something that isn’t absent at other shows but was definitely amplified here. We started talking about my senior year, and then the lights went out.
I don’t have words to describe Phoebe’s set. It was a perfect storm of techno-ethereal that made me feel like a figment of my own imagination. The set design and lighting were genuinely otherworldly. There was a moment during her performance of “Lost Weekend” where I felt like I was being taken up by aliens. She gave a speech about conservatism in this country that I think is best described as sloppily poignant. It was no Nobel Laureate poem, but I feel like the jagged edges added a level of earnestness to her message that would’ve been absent in something more polished. She performed one of my favorite songs, a cover of Manchester Orchestra’s “The Gold,” for the first time live, and I almost cried.
Looking around the arena and seeing faces, swaying hands, and tealights, instead of phone after phone, was beautiful and unexpected. People were crying and dancing to “Haunted” and “Never Going Back” without fear of ending up in someone else’s Instagram reel. I know this sounds pretentious, but there was an air of humanity that I’ve never experienced at a concert—or really anywhere—before. The show ended, the woman standing next me wished me a safe trip home, and I left.
Outside the venue, I took a picture of the tour poster on a billboard. Two girls standing next to me missed it, and I offered to AirDrop it to them. They happily agreed, saying that this would be their only “proof” of attending. I sat with that thought in my hotel room, on my walk in the morning, and on my drive home. In fact, I’m still sitting with it now, as I write this article.
“Proof.”
I tell myself that I record concerts so that I have the memories to look back on later. And that’s at least partially correct. I still rewatch the videos I have from past concerts, but not often enough to warrant the thousands of other clips that represent distractions from moments I could’ve savored. I think back to literally last month, how I didn’t sing along to the first verse of “Kiwi” at Harry’s residency in NYC because I wanted to get a good video. And for what?! The video sucked, by the way. I had much more fun dancing along to the second half of the song.
This time around, Phoebe forced all of us to put our phones away. I thought I would hate this, but looking back, there’s truly something special about each and every show “existing” only to the extent of each attendee’s memory. I have physical “evidence” that I went to Phoebe’s show: a T-shirt from the merch stand, a printed-out ticket and some pictures outside the venue. However, the intangible, an experience so fulfilling, yet so fleeting, is something that I’ll cherish forever.
Let this be your sign to do the damn thing, whatever it is, even if it means doing it alone.