Item: Lost Weekend
Rating: 9
Author: exclaim

Wavelength

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Lost Weekend by Phoebe Bridgers reviewed by exclaim — 9.0/10 | Wavelength | Wavelength

Give or take, it's also been about 18 months since Phoebe Bridgers retreated from the spotlight following the 2024 Grammy Awards (where she took home four trophies) after her supergroup with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, boygenius, were unequivocally the band of 2023 with their debut LP the record.

"We fought about John Lennon / Til' I cried," Bridgers sang on "Moon Song" from her 2020 magnum opus Punisher, the release of which also coincided with the borders of time as we knew them collapsing with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. For his part, despite the name he gave the time period (lifted from the 1945 noir drama The Lost Weekend), Lennon remained adamant that he and Ono always knew they'd get back together, claiming they'd talked every day during their separation.

Bridgers returns to us similarly now, after the loss of a parent and falling in love in her own fast-slow-fast interval where clocks and calendars elapsed into a rupture of inevitably for things to be as they were before, admittedly shaken by all that's transpired: "Times are scary / My boys are getting married," she sings, lumbering through ghostly reverb at the top of "Kill Me," as acoustic guitars, pedal steel and strings burst into the foreground with the same irregular regularity as life's rhythms.

The folksy ballad opens up wide following a breath just past the three-and-a-half-minute mark, the instrumental outro suddenly crescendoing with foreboding fuzz before the craggy baritone voice of Son-John Johnson — allegedly a pseudonym for Geese's Cameron Winter — and Bridgers's own holocene alto collide in a careening funeral-hymn refrain that cuts out without warning; an em-dash to follow the ellipses that followed the repetition of, "This is going to kill me," before the breathtaking palm-muted interjection: "Wait."

Waiting is key, since Bridgers's music has always rewarded patience. "This could be the end of wanting," she sings on "Bobby," as though the ecstatic terror of that realization is happening in real time. That track, evidently about Bo Burnham, is sequenced directly after the haunting, stately breakup song "The Governor's Waltz," the lyrics to which fans have quickly interpreted as being about Paul Mescal — complete with a petty Gracie Abrams diss ("She can pretend to be me / Since she took my place on my bed, on that stage") inspired by bedsheets with an outer space motif.

"I'm supposed to be married, but I called it off," Bridgers sings on the title track, further fuelling the rumours of her and Mescal's engagement that had once circulated. But when I speak of the patience her work rewards, it's most adamantly not in the vein of parasocial lyrical Easter egg hunts; it's in letting the songs reveal more and more of themselves, one by one, over time, feeling into the space between the words as much as the poetic revelations.

Lost Weekend is anchored by breath, stark and startling as you hold yours while she waits 18 seconds to come in on opener "The Outside," garbled by vocoder: "Crying in a suit and tie / But you should see the other guy." At the crest of the outro of "Kill Me"; through the sonic anxiety attack of the title track's whirring breakdown; before the scream and after the giggle that brings in the fiddles on campfire jam-turned-barn burner "Haunted": "If you're gonna make a wish, then / You'd better be specific / You're gonna have to live it / Every day."

For us all, something's lost and something's gained in that everyday living. (It would be more the latter if someone could please teach me how to two step really fast to the aforementioned "Haunted," thanks!) Following the melodic mirror to "Graceland Too" in the vocable section of "Liberty Tree," the quiet triumph of the brief, noisy "Never Going Back!" is both bolstered and tainted by a voicemail from Bridgers's late father. "Being a rockstar takes up a lot of your time, I guess," a memory says, swallowed by a slight chuckle, intermingling with a plucky banjo's gradual diminuendo.

"If I ever come out of hiding / You won't have to know how to find me again," the singer-songwriter later reflects on "Lost Weekend (Reprise)," inviting instant replay value to Alex G-indebted lead single "Lost Boys" by recontextualizing what, as a standalone release, landed as an underdeveloped narrative in its final chorus line ("Lost boys find me"), bringing the record full-circle. Instead of merely a Bono-esque "Yeah!," the understatedly clever turn of phrase gets its due over the course of the body of work's diaphanous, spellbinding whole.Where Punisher felt apocalyptic with its closing suite "I Know the End" and a hearty dose of divine timing, Lost Weekend is a transmission from a hero's journey back to herself through a dystopian emotional landscape. Often, there isn't one moment of clangorous percussion before it all goes black, but the world ending for each of us, in small ways, time after time.

Panning left to right, Lost Weekend comes in and out, a matrix-glitching signal infiltrated by artful sonic detritus that takes after ambient and country music in equal measure — like a blurry photograph of a nascent moon, it's grand in scale and even grander in the dots it tries to connect in this true epic from one of the greatest songwriters of her generation.

"The album is vastly different than it was when I started. It's nothing at all like like I imagined," Bridgers said in the album's press notes. All she'd known was that her relationship to her music, and the world she was setting it free into, needed to change, and then life intervened in the way it does.

Because some of us can never look at the mound of ruddy, untouched clay and see a shape immediately emerge. Some of us have to feel its smooth, cool porousness and dense weight as we mould and re-mould it, expanding the horizons of possibility in our hands. "I'm not good, but I'm better," Bridgers sings on "I Can't Wait," letting the first-person singular ring out like a rarified statement of reintroduction. "Missed my cue, but whatever."

Ultimately, John Lennon's infamous "lost weekend" — the 18-month period in the '70s where he separated from Yoko Ono and had an affair with their assistant, May Pang, as well as used substances to excess, completed multiple albums for himself and others, and reunited with Paul McCartney — ended much the same way it started (i.e. coming back home to his wife), but it changed everything. Give or take, it's also been about 18 months since Phoebe Bridgers retreated from the spotlight following the 2024 Grammy Awards (where she took home four trophies) after her supergroup with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, boygenius, were unequivocally the band of 2023 with their debut LP the record. "We fought about John Lennon / Til' I cried," Bridgers sang on "Moon Song" from her 2020 magnum opus Punisher, the release of which also coincided with the borders of time as we knew them collapsing with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. For his part, despite the name he gave the time period (lifted from the 1945 noir drama The Lost Weekend), Lennon remained adamant that he and Ono always knew they'd get back together, claiming they'd talked every day during their separation. Bridgers returns to us similarly now, after the loss of a parent and falling in love in her own fast-slow-fast interval where clocks and calendars elapsed into a rupture of inevitably for things to be as they were before, admittedly shaken by all that's transpired: "Times are scary / My boys are getting married," she sings, lumbering through ghostly reverb at the top of "Kill Me," as acoustic guitars, pedal steel and strings burst into the foreground with the same irregular regularity as life's rhythms. The folksy ballad opens up wide following a breath just past the three-and-a-half-minute mark, the instrumental outro suddenly crescendoing with foreboding fuzz before the craggy baritone voice of Son-John Johnson — allegedly a pseudonym for Geese's Cameron Winter — and Bridgers's own holocene alto collide in a careening funeral-hymn refrain that cuts out without warning; an em-dash to follow the ellipses that followed the repetition of, "This is going to kill me," before the breathtaking palm-muted interjection: "Wait." Waiting is key, since Bridgers's music has always rewarded patience. "This could be the end of wanting," she sings on "Bobby," as though the ecstatic terror of that realization is happening in real time. That track, evidently about Bo Burnham, is sequenced directly after the haunting, stately breakup song "The Governor's Waltz," the lyrics to which fans have quickly interpreted as being about Paul Mescal — complete with a petty Gracie Abrams diss ("She can pretend to be me / Since she took my place on my bed, on that stage") inspired by bedsheets with an outer space motif. "I'm supposed to be married, but I called it off," Bridgers sings on the title track, further fuelling the rumours of her and Mescal's engagement that had once circulated. But when I speak of the patience her work rewards, it's most adamantly not in the vein of parasocial lyrical Easter egg hunts; it's in letting the songs reveal more and more of themselves, one by one, over time, feeling into the space between the words as much as the poetic revelations. Lost Weekend is anchored by breath, stark and startling as you hold yours while she waits 18 seconds to come in on opener "The Outside," garbled by vocoder: "Crying in a suit and tie / But you should see the other guy." At the crest of the outro of "Kill Me"; through the sonic anxiety attack of the title track's whirring breakdown; before the scream and after the giggle that brings in the fiddles on campfire jam-turned-barn burner "Haunted": "If you're gonna make a wish, then / You'd better be specific / You're gonna have to live it / Every day." For us all, something's lost and something's gained in that everyday living. (It would be more the latter if someone could please teach me how to two step really fast to the aforementioned "Haunted," thanks!) Following the melodic mirror to "Graceland Too" in the vocable section of "Liberty Tree," the quiet triumph of the brief, noisy "Never Going Back!" is both bolstered and tainted by a voicemail from Bridgers's late father. "Being a rockstar takes up a lot of your time, I guess," a memory says, swallowed by a slight chuckle, intermingling with a plucky banjo's gradual diminuendo. "If I ever come out of hiding / You won't have to know how to find me again," the singer-songwriter later reflects on "Lost Weekend (Reprise)," inviting instant replay value to Alex G-indebted lead single "Lost Boys" by recontextualizing what, as a standalone release, landed as an underdeveloped narrative in its final chorus line ("Lost boys find me"), bringing the record full-circle. Instead of merely a Bono-esque "Yeah!," the understatedly clever turn of phrase gets its due over the course of the body of work's diaphanous, spellbinding whole.Where Punisher felt apocalyptic with its closing suite "I Know the End" and a hearty dose of divine timing, Lost Weekend is a transmission from a hero's journey back to herself through a dystopian emotional landscape. Often, there isn't one moment of clangorous percussion before it all goes black, but the world ending for each of us, in small ways, time after time. Panning left to right, Lost Weekend comes in and out, a matrix-glitching signal infiltrated by artful sonic detritus that takes after ambient and country music in equal measure — like a blurry photograph of a nascent moon, it's grand in scale and even grander in the dots it tries to connect in this true epic from one of the greatest songwriters of her generation. "The album is vastly different than it was when I started. It's nothing at all like like I imagined," Bridgers said in the album's press notes. All she'd known was that her relationship to her music, and the world she was setting it free into, needed to change, and then life intervened in the way it does. Because some of us can never look at the mound of ruddy, untouched clay and see a shape immediately emerge. Some of us have to feel its smooth, cool porousness and dense weight as we mould and re-mould it, expanding the horizons of possibility in our hands. "I'm not good, but I'm better," Bridgers sings on "I Can't Wait," letting the first-person singular ring out like a rarified statement of reintroduction. "Missed my cue, but whatever."