You can’t bring your phone to the surprise Phoebe Bridgers show at Madison Square Garden on June 4. You cannot bring digital recorders, cameras, smart watches, or even pencils and paper. Your iPhone and AirPods should be sealed by a happy professional and sealed in a thick black Yondre pouch. If you’re writing about the show for a magazine, you’re not allowed to write lyrics to new songs performed by Bridgers. Offenders will be unceremoniously removed by security.
These situations make reporting a difficult task. In lieu of a recording device, I brought along my daughter Edie, who has an amazing memory for lyrics and everything. She is ten years old, has never abused any drugs, even shies away from the occasional sip of champagne offered by strange relatives, and never even stays up late. His brain is pink and elastic. She’s also, at this moment, my mule – we put a two-inch Blackwing pencil and a little blue notebook in her bag before she came here. This is Eddie’s first concert and first major act of rule breaking.
She is pale with worry. “What should I say if they confiscate it?” she asks, and I give her the advice that’s been given to journalists since time immemorial: “Be stupid.”
We stand in a sea of young women, waiting to be discovered. Bridgers’ final solo album, PunisherHis second, came six years ago on the Dead Oceans. In the interim, she and Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus made an acclaimed album and two EPs as Boygenius. This year, she’s playing small, pop-up shows, singing songs from a new, unreleased album, and urging her crowd not to record them or put the songs online. Still, the songs have popped up on Genius. they have come forward reddit, However, the Phoebe Bridgers fan community—a veritable army of skeleton-shirt-wearing young women—is mostly self-controlled. They encourage each other to respect her wishes. They ask mods to remove the lyrics.
Tonight, they are enthusiastically complying with the technical ban. They are happy to get rid of their phones. We all hate our phones, I agree. Get them out of here. A twenty-one-year-old from South Jersey tells me, “I don’t like having to choose whether to record or be in the moment.” Tickets for tonight’s show were distributed via lottery – fans who donated $1 to $20 to the Immigration Bond Freedom Fund were entered to win – and the mood at MSG is close to ecstatic. It may just be up in the air: The Knicks defeated the Spurs in Game 1 of the Finals two days earlier. New York is up!
People I talk to have taken the train from Long Island, New Jersey. I talk to two girls from Rhode Island, two girls from Georgia, a girl from San Francisco, another couple from Long Island. A father wearing a shirt that says “Mr. Perfect” is here with his fifteen-year-old daughter. A mother and daughter had come looking for tickets. All the ladies are excited to hear “Graceland Two”. They are excited to listen to new songs. They wear ankle-length white skirts and tube tops. virgin suicides Florals, Doc Martens or chunky Mary Janes, bedazzled skeleton shirts. Some have braces. He has been listening to Bridgers’ music since high school in 2020.
We crawl towards the entrance. Security is airport level, although we are allowed to wear our shoes. There’s a bag scanner, which finds my laptop – I was working on the train ride – but not Eddie’s pencil. “You have to get it checked,” they say to me and I look around wondering how to do it, swimming upstream against hundreds of twenty-two-year-olds in fishnet trunks, before giving up and thinking that if it’s an issue they’ll send me back to the next check point.
