Phoebe Bridgers Has Auspicious Astrology

The day before we meet, Phoebe Bridgers left her therapist's office only to discover that her car, a red Toyota Prius, had been hit by a bus.

“I saw a note on my car and was like, I got a ticket,” she recalls. “And then I was like, Wait­—nope, I did not.” She took it in stride, more amused than resigned.

“It's drivable, so whatever.”

If a bus slamming into your car while you were in therapy feels like a heavy-handed signal from the universe, it would also be a perfect line in a Phoebe Bridgers song. The singer-songwriter, 25, first made waves with her 2017 album, Stranger in the Alps, a collection of confessional and melancholic folk-rock tracks textured with the mundanities of day-to-day life. Her debut landed her on best-of lists and the late-night TV circuit; John Mayer tweeted out her song “Funeral,” writing that it signaled the “arrival of a giant.” She followed up Stranger with two collaborative projects: boygenius, the supergroup she formed with similarly openhearted musicians Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, and Better Oblivion Community Center, a duo act with sad-boy legend Conor Oberst. Oberst told me he was “floored” when he first heard Bridgers's music, describing her voice as “an old friend you didn't know you had.”

Bridgers can feel like the avatar for a micro-generation that chronically divulges its feelings, discusses being sad and horny like it's small talk about the weather, and is extremely, debilitatingly online. For instance, she is an avid fan of the internet-culture podcast Reply All and is especially active on Twitter, where she posts wry missives like “hey there delilah are you mad at me” and “if eating ass is wrong I don't want to be right.”

When I first encounter Bridgers in the kitchen of her collaborator and close friend Marshall Vore, her middle-parted platinum hair and soaring cheekbones make her look like an apparition from beyond the veil who can tell me exactly when I'm going to die. She speaks in a rapid spill of words that's tempered by the dudes and rads of her native-Californian lilt. While her music reveals aspects of her personal life in the most crushing manner possible, she discloses them with far more buoyancy during conversation. “I hate the idea of a wedding so fucking much,” Bridgers says. “Understandable with a dysfunctional family. But I also think it's badass when women are like, Yeah, well, my third husband is… I think it's kind of romantic, and it means you do what feels right. I'm marrying everybody I fall in love with. Prenups up the wazoo, but…” This dissonance between Bridgers's devastating songs—which include lyrics like I hope you kiss my rotten head and pull the plug—and her goofy in-person exuberance is so striking that I ask her to tell me which feels more like her true self.

She begins to explain it using astrology—which internet-addled millennials have widely embraced with a fervor previously reserved by their eccentric aunts—bringing up the idea that your sun sign, rising sign, and moon sign each reflect different aspects of how you exist and present to the world, but neither of us can remember exactly how it works. (For the record, Bridgers is Leo sun, Pisces rising, Capricorn moon.) So she pulls up the popular horoscope app Co-Star—which, of course, I have on my phone too—first checking her daily push notification.

“Wait, it said, ‘Be reckless.’ Fuck.”

Bridgers lives alone in a tiny Silver Lake apartment but is constantly over at Vore's place, which feels like the millennial version of a late-'60s Laurel Canyon dwelling. Four musicians and two dogs—a blue heeler named Billie and an Australian shepherd named Forty—reside there, and visitors drift in and out all day long.

Deep into her second album, Bridgers is actively trying to have more fun with the process—Stranger, she tells me, was written after a bout of depression. “I don't think that's true this time,” she says, curled up on an emerald velvet couch. “Maybe I'm overwhelmed, but not depressed.” Mostly she's itching to play more than the same 10 or so songs over and over again at shows. Her new work will touch on her favored themes of death and relationships, as well as “sour friendships and family shit.” At one point she mentions that she loves getting her tarot read. “I feel like that's the easiest way to connect with people,” she explains. “In the worst version of it, it's trauma, connecting over something fucked-up that happened. But in the sweet version, it's like, Oh, my God, you know, my fucking car just got hit by a bus.”

Bridgers was born and raised in Pasadena, not far from where we are today. Her mom, with whom she's especially close, was a housewife who worked a variety of odd jobs and nowadays does stand-up comedy. Her parents divorced when she was 20. Dad was a scenic carpenter who, she says, was abusive and had a “drug thing,” and Bridgers didn't have her first drink until she was 19. “I wasn't square necessarily,” Bridgers explains. “It just scared the shit out of me. I was like, I don't want to lose control.” As far as musicians go, her lifestyle is pretty tame; as far as 25-year-olds go too. She doesn't drink (“I think I'm straight up allergic to alcohol”), despises weed (“I hate weed”), hasn't eaten processed sugar in two years (“I haven't been on antibiotics since”), and wakes up at 6:30 a.m. to start off her days with a walk (“It's just clearing your head”). When she was touring with boygenius, she says, the band was often on their bus and in pajamas by 11:30 p.m., watching the Eddie Murphy movie Norbit.

When she was 13, Bridgers auditioned for and was accepted to the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. She shows me a picture of herself from her teen years in which she's sporting an early-era Bieber haircut and dressed as Lieutenant Jim Dangle from Reno 911! Over time, her exaggerated and colorful performing-arts-school clothes gave way to a mostly black uniform: “The all-black thing is just such a weight off, as far as choices.” True to form, she's currently wearing a black shift minidress layered over a black short-sleeve turtleneck, with an empty gold-heart locket hanging around her neck. Bridgers was going to put a photo of her beloved late pug Max—who died in February at the age of 17—in there, but between the time she ordered the necklace and the time it arrived, she got a tattoo of his name inside a heart on the back of her left arm instead.

Starting in high school, she played bass in her best friend Haley Dahl's band, Sloppy Jane, a delightfully deranged noise-rock outfit. When they were offered the chance to appear in an iPhone commercial in 2014, Dahl declined to participate because she saw it as selling out. (As of this writing, Dahl is undertaking a project where she's trying to eat her own suit, à la director Werner Herzog eating his own shoe in 1979.) So Bridgers took her place and ended up leveraging that opportunity into even more commercial work with companies like Taco Bell and HomeGoods. This, in turn, allowed her to pay her rent and focus entirely on making her album. “The commercials were fucking awesome,” she says. “My parents don't have money, and it felt like my parents had money.”

When Bridgers was 20, shortly before she got a manager and signed with the indie label Dead Oceans, she met musician and producer Ryan Adams, then almost 40. Their relationship started out professional, with him expressing an interest in helping her record her music. It quickly turned romantic, until it wasn't. She went on to write “Motion Sickness”—a catchy, eviscerating breakup anthem in which she sweetly sings, I faked it every time, but that's all right—about him. (In the video for the song, she zips to a karaoke bar on a scooter, wearing a black suit and tie accessorized with a bike helmet. “I love women in suits. I feel like all my references for it were like PJ Harvey or all these beautiful, hot, tiny women in suits,” she says, “When I put it on I was like, oh my god I look pathetic. I wanted to create kind of a pathetic character.”)

In February the New York Times published an article with extensive accusations against Adams for a host of emotionally and sexually abusive behavior, including sending explicit messages to an underage girl. Bridgers told the paper that Adams had become obsessive and controlling soon after they had slept together and rescinded his offer to have her open for him on a European tour when she ended the relationship. The morning I was due to meet Bridgers, I opened Twitter to discover that Adams had broken his silence for the first time since his initial response, denying the allegations in the Times story five months prior. “I have a lot to say. I am going to. Soon. Because the truth matters,” he wrote. “All the beauty in a life cannot be reduced to rubble for lies.”

When I ask her how she's feeling about Adams's sudden resurgence, Bridgers shakes her head and offers up an exasperated smile. “He can go fuck off.”

“I just hope everybody is okay,” she elaborates. “He's, as Orson Welles would say, ‘such a pest.’ I feel like the anger I have about it is just for other people. I'm just like, Go the fuck away, dude.” When I muse about the inconvenient timing of Adams resurfacing, Bridgers has exactly two words: “Retrograde, dude.” She's referring to the astrological concept of Mercury retrograde, the period when a planet appears to be traveling backward in the sky, which can dredge up unwanted people from the past.

Bridgers feels like she's in a solidly better place now than when she was 21—bus hit-and-runs during therapy included. “It's so much more fun to live in my body,” she says. “I'm better at acting out the things that make me happy now.”

“I think for a while I also looked for relationships where someone would tell me where to stand. I wanted someone to tell me how to be,” she adds. “I certainly am fucking over that.”

Gabriella Paiella is a GQ staff writer. She is a Gemini sun, Libra rising, Taurus moon.

A version of this story originally appeared in the October 2019 issue with the title "Phoebe Bridgers Has Auspicious Astrology."

PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Lindsay Ellary
Hair and makeup by Hayley Farrington

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