The arena was completely dark. Not a single phone glare in sight. Any and every light that shone was intentional. You couldn’t scroll through your phone to pass the time. You could not check your phone for the time. You didn’t know whether it was 8:30 p.m. yet; you could not calculate whether half an hour had passed since the opener finished their set. You could not click the red record button in anticipation of the artist’s grand entrance. Then suddenly, a disco ball descends from the ceiling, flooding the arena with light.
In June 2026, Phoebe Bridgers took to Instagram to announce her The Lost Tour with the caption “I’m going on tour no phones.” This was hardly a dealbreaker for me; the concept of Phoebe Bridgers releasing an album since 2020, let alone announcing a tour, was downright astonishing. However, I worried I would need my phone in case of an emergency or something important. Then again, I’d been to dozens of concerts without a hitch. The idea that it could, though…
I had to face up to the fact that I was afraid of losing access to my phone, and everything that says about me and broader society. But my fear of not hearing “Graceland Too” live? Even more threatening.
When buying the tickets, I looked into how the “no phones” rule would be implemented. As it turns out, the policy is enforced through Yondr pouches: lockable fabric bags commonly used in schools and at private events. My friends and I waited in line for workers to scan our Ticketmaster tickets, then handed our phones to a staff member, who placed the devices in a fabric bag and pushed down on the pin mechanism until it clicked and sealed shut. The pouch comes with a large neon-green lanyard that you can wear around your neck. I don’t know why I imagined my phone going into a large organizer with pockets—that would have been a chaotic choice for an arena holding 20,000 people.
Since this was a phone-free event, I hadn’t seen any footage of the tour, her outfit(s), or the stage setup. But I had seen drawings. Whether they were artistically inclined or not, concertgoers brought pens and notebooks to sketch what they remembered from the show. Through these drawings, I learned that the stage featured strobe lighting and a spherical disco ball. Seeing people return to physical art when they could no longer use their devices felt like a micro-example of the kind of impulses that technology has taken away from our society.
For Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour, people made friendship bracelets, and for this concert, I saw numerous people bedazzle their lighters. As a 2005 baby, I couldn’t recall a time when people lit cigarettes during slow songs, but without access to phone flashlights, dozens of lighters pinpricked the arena. The warm orange glow of the cigarette lighters in the crowd was nothing like the white iPhone light: it was softer on the eyes, transforming the arena into a more intimate space. Funnily enough, at a Phoebe Bridgers concert, those lighters would run out of fluid, someone’s hair would get singed in the pit, or a thumb would get burned because all her songs are sad.
At a phone-free concert, you have no choice but to look at and interact with the people around you—even those you don’t know. Two girls a row down from us noticed one of my friends crying and mentioned that it was her favourite song too.
Concert videos are gold to me, so I understand the heartbreak of not being able to record your favourite song or part of the live performance. But in my experience, when your favourite song is playing, you tend to watch it through your phone screen, so focused on adjusting the lighting, zoom, and camera focus to capture the perfect memory that you never actually watch it live.
I held my breath in disbelief during “Scott Street,” the last song on the setlist, when Phoebe asked the audience to wave their arms back and forth. With no phones to obscure the pattern, so many arms swayed back and forth in the air that, though you knew logically they couldn’t be in perfect synchronicity, it looked as though they were. It was a perfect metaphor for what Bridgers had cultivated: a sense of connection not only between the audience member and the headlining artist, but also with every person whose arm was raised in the air, from the people you came to the show with to those you did not even know. On a large scale, and to me as an artist, that is what good art does: bring people together.
I struggle to feel present at many concerts: usually, only the last few songs completely enrapture me in the experience I paid for. But during Phoebe Bridgers’ The Lost Tour, I was incredibly connected to my emotions and cried more than I ever had before. And of course, that had to do with the content of Bridger’s discography, but I also think it was the safety of not feeling surveyed. I could sob, scream, dance, and hold hands with my friends without feeling watched. As Penelope Cloonan writes, “Fans are not asked to memorialize or document, only to feel.”
Bridgers and Yondr users, or people pushing for device-free spaces today, are radically defying the rising culture of surveillance we live in today. She thanked the audience in the middle of the night for coming to her show and sacrificing their screens, explaining that, beyond wanting fans to be present in the moment, she wrote an incredibly vulnerable album about her father’s passing, imbued with emotions that had not yet settled. She felt safer sharing these emotions without phones in her face and people documenting such deeply emotional moments. I want to note that Bridgers even messed up a couple of lyrics during this show, laughed with the audience, and restarted the song. That exemplifies a vulnerability easier to reckon with when you do not have it recorded on thousands of phones. It is exclusive, for the concertgoer’s eyes only, a raw human experience of live art.
Though I mourn not having Phoebe Bridgers “On Video” (yes, that was a Primetime (2026) reference), she isn’t mine to keep at my disposal, in my camera roll. She is not mine to survey; her performance was mine to experience as a ticket holder, and she delivered just that on October 3rd. The phone-free concert experience becomes something so singular and special precisely because it crystallizes into a memory. There were no Instagram stories to post of her, and it gave me a tangible example of how not to share everything, lowering the stakes of needing to update my social media. Instead, I felt present; my heart jumped at every instrumental string of a new song because, without access to the setlist, I was connected to the music that I loved so much through my earbuds that I needed to hear it live.
So, I extend a special thank you to Phoebe Bridgers and Yondr pouches for giving me an experience that, as someone who has attended dozens of concerts, I never even knew I was missing. A phone-free concert is something I would love to see more of—and naysayers may say, “Well, then just don’t take out your phone. You don’t need to ruin it for everyone else.” But to that, I say there is very little comparable to the perfect synchronicity of arms raised in the air to “Scott Street,” the pure red lighting during “I Know the End” as everyone screams into the void in a ritual of catharsis, or the waves of technicolour lighting that catch every person’s eye during “Lost Weekend,” when the venue was otherwise shrouded in darkness. There is very little comparable to human connection and synergy, and her show was full of that.