{"id":621880,"date":"2026-10-06T02:56:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T02:56:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/621880\/"},"modified":"2026-10-06T02:56:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T02:56:14","slug":"phoebe-bridgers-and-her-collaborators-on-creating-lost-weekend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/621880\/","title":{"rendered":"Phoebe Bridgers and Her Collaborators on Creating ‘Lost Weekend’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tSix years passed between Phoebe Bridgers<\/a>\u2019 second and third solo albums, but it was hardly time off. Between 2020\u2019s Punisher \u2014 her major breakthrough, which yielded her a best new artist Grammy nomination \u2014 and 2026\u2019s Lost Weekend, the singer-songwriter, with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, dropped The Record, their Grammy-winning debut album as boygenius; toured as a solo artist, with boygenius and as an opener on nearly a dozen Eras Tour dates with Taylor Swift; launched Saddest Factory Records as an imprint of her label, Dead Oceans (which ultimately absorbed Saddest Factory in June); and filmed her acting debut in Lance Oppenheim\u2019s recently released Primetime. Amid all those professional milestones, Bridgers also ended a high-profile relationship with actor Paul Mescal; lost her father, Tony Bridgers; and started dating comedian Bo Burnham.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat deep well of experiences informed the songs that would become Lost Weekend. While some ideas on the album date back as far as 2022, Bridgers began writing and recording for the project in earnest in 2024. Though her first two albums were mostly made with producers Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, Calif., Bridgers added to her recording locations this time around \u2014 visiting Electric Lady Studios in New York and Tamarind in Los Angeles \u2014 and her production team, bringing on perennial Grammy favorite Jack Antonoff for the first time, with additional work from Alex\u00a0G. With more musicians in tow as well, Bridgers stretched her predominantly rock sound to new melodic territory, from ambient electronic to driving country.<\/p>\n

\n\tBridgers first shared the new material in May at a club in New Mexico, kicking off a series of phone-free, secret pop-up shows at smaller venues across the country that culminated with Madison Square Garden in New York on June\u00a04. Upon announcing Lost Weekend\u2019s August arrival later that month, she logged back-to-back appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in July, playing new single \u201cLost Boys\u201d each time, first with a rock band of children and the next night an acoustic rendition with veteran musicians. Bridgers capped off the unorthodox rollout by hosting worldwide release-week listening parties at planetariums.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe critically acclaimed album (which reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200<\/a>) has made Bridgers, who took home four Grammys<\/a> in 2024 \u2014 more than anyone else that year \u2014 one of indie-rock\u2019s front-runners for the 2027 ceremony. With nine of her collaborators, Bridgers explains how the emotional, unusual and expansive world of Lost Weekend came together.<\/p>\n

\n\tTony Berg, producer: Initially, you might look at her career and go, \u201cGee, six years between solo albums and 10 or 11 years to produce three solo albums.\u201d It was a long time because there was a lot of material, and Phoebe, if she senses something can be better, doesn\u2019t have a problem coming to us and saying, \u201cI want to start this over.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tEthan Gruska, producer: After Punisher, there was boygenius, and after that, I very clearly remember Phoebe going, \u201cI\u2019m going to take some time off,\u201d and a year or two into her lost weekend, her time off, time away, I was starting to get glimpses from her that she was writing.<\/p>\n

\n\tChristian Lee Hutson, songwriter: My memory is, right after Punisher came out, some of the first ideas for the record came, but not in any grand, fully realized way.<\/p>\n

\n\tGruska: Phoebe kind of started by saying, \u201cI want to really bring in new musicians and new people to inspire us and surprise us.\u201d She wanted an injection of freshness that\u2019s hard to provide when you\u2019re so entrenched in a flow.<\/p>\n

\n\tPhoebe Bridgers: I knew I wanted to work with Tony and Ethan again \u2014 you know, \u201cif it ain\u2019t broke\u201d and so on and so forth. Tony and Ethan are my family. But I knew I wanted to change the sound of this one and that fresh blood would help.<\/p>\n

\n\tGruska: Alex [G] kind of was brought into the mix before Jack [Antonoff], and I was thrilled about that because I\u2019m such a huge fan of Alex. Alex and \u00adPhoebe and Christian were writing and making sketches of stuff.<\/p>\n

\n\tMarshall Vore, songwriter-drummer: We went to Philadelphia to see Alex for four or five days or something and we went into a studio \u2014 Christian, Bo [Burnham], me and Alex and Phoebe \u2014 to make songs.<\/p>\n

\n\tBridgers: I have wanted to work with Alex for over a decade. Went to Philly with Alex and Christian to work. One of the times, he played me a \u00addiscarded idea that turned into \u201cLost Boys.\u201d He\u2019s the most creative person I\u2019ve ever met. And definitely the funniest.<\/p>\n

\n\tBerg: As funny as I think all the people in the room were, he\u2019s funnier. His take on the world is unusual. I would describe it as quixotic. He is just an unusual person with a real musical gift, and it comes from a field that is neither left, right nor center. It is a different field altogether.<\/p>\n

\n\tGruska: Generally, we would bring in musicians for their expertise on a particular instrument or style. But with Alex, we were like, \u201cWe just want you to play anything on everything.\u201d The ending of \u201cLiberty Tree,\u201d when it goes into this very strange, dissociated \u201cooh\u201d-ing melody, the whole palette at the end was Alex in 40 minutes on a Mellotron.<\/p>\n

\n\tBridgers: Then when the L.A. fires happened [in January 2025], I was evacuated from my house for three weeks, so I went to New York. Lee [Foster, studio manager] at Electric Lady gave me a writing room and one day Jack [Antonoff] crashed.<\/p>\n

\n\tHutson: He\u2019s the ghost of Electric Lady. Anytime you\u2019re there, you\u2019ll expect a haunting \u2014 Jack to wander down the stairs, find you in some cavernous basement studio and bless you with his presence for a moment.<\/p>\n

\n\tBridgers: I certainly wasn\u2019t looking for more producers, but I had been mostly looking at my phone and not writing. He brought me a little drum machine, and that was it. He appears to those who need him most.<\/p>\n

\n\tJack Antonoff, producer: I kind of live upstairs at Electric Lady and I think she was in the middle room or something. But it was truly one of those stories that reminds me of stories I heard from like the \u201970s, where two people were in the same studio not working together, kind of run into each other, get talking, start playing a few things here and there.<\/p>\n

\n\tGruska: I remember Phoebe playing me something that Jack had put together from the voice memo that ended up being the first \u201cLost Weekend\u201d song, because there\u2019s three iterations of it on the record.<\/p>\n

\n\tVore: The way I remember [\u201cLost Weekend\u201d] was that she was sort of having writer\u2019s block, and she found that melody from Damien Jurado [from his \u201cThe Last Great Washington State\u201d<\/a>]. She was like, \u201cI love this melody so much. I\u2019m going to write to it just to try to get lyrics out.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tGruska: It went from that voice memo to this outro because Phoebe had showed Jack [composer] Paul Lansky. Jack sampled it [Lansky\u2019s \u201cNotjustmoreidlechatter\u201d], and I was just hearing from \u00adPhoebe that Jack was a wizard and took it and sampled it and created what was the framework and kind of the basis and really like a majority of that outro. The kind of flurry of that outro and I just remember hearing it, and I remember seeing her excitement about it.<\/p>\n

\n\tAntonoff: I think it was, well, what if it is the voice note? And then what if it goes from the most nonsonic thing possible, just like a little voice note on the phone, to the most sonic exploration possible of this sample and this chaos and all this stuff? I felt like what Phoebe was articulating, it\u2019s where she was at from the writing of this, and all the grief and all the joy and all the terror mixed together. There was just something really interesting about going from zero to 1,000 without any warning. It\u2019s simple enough to gently make something sound this way or that way. But in my experience, it\u2019s when you really just say f\u2013k it and take a big swing with people that you actually build a different kind of trust.<\/p>\n

\n\tGruska: From there, Jack was just slowly introduced in the process. To be able to enter into a group of people that have been working together for nine years the way that he did, and to share his expertise and also bring a level of comfort and personability and friendship was just so impressive.<\/p>\n

\n\tVore: There had been a decade of precedent, and he was a completely different energy, which was really necessary. It needed to be fun again. I found him to be so kind and just made you feel like you were 15 in your garage again.<\/p>\n

\n\tHutson: I think that Jack\u2019s gift as a producer and as a person is that he\u2019s a really good listener. He\u2019s very selfless and listens to what you want and is not afraid to try things, even if they don\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

\n\tAntonoff: I don\u2019t know if I\u2019m a good listener or anything like that, but my philosophy on why I do this doesn\u2019t come from hearing solely my ideas come to life. My ego and spirit come from realizing a vision. That\u2019s the whole job. There\u2019s so many twisting alleyways within that, but it\u2019s like, that\u2019s it. When the real fun times happen is when you have that clear direction, and everyone\u2019s sort of flying a plane together.<\/p>\n

\n\tBridgers: There\u2019s a reason he\u2019s the guy. He really knows what is great about everyone he works with and gave me so much confidence to experiment. The best example of his brain is \u201cKill Me.\u201d He made the whole album 30% stranger.<\/p>\n

\n\tGruska: It went from an insular group to a very large group of people and musicians, and it was beautiful. Chris Thile, Caroline Shaw, unbelievable talents that would just come in and throw this amazing paint and then we all got to collage it together.<\/p>\n

\n\tChris Thile, Nickel Creek: We had three days together [at Sound City in November 2025]. The freaking \u201cLost Weekend\u201d situation was so fun when that happened. I play this funny instrument [mandolin] that\u2019s only used for seasoning unless it\u2019s in a bluegrass context. I\u2019ll try every now and then [to] take a big swing, and almost always it\u2019ll get voted off the island. \u201cOh, we were thinking a little bit more like that R.E.M mandolin thing, \u2018Losing My Religion\u2019 at the end.\u201d Mandolin\u2019s most fundamental moment in the history books. Whereas this situation was just like, \u201cHey, try some s\u2013t on the outro of this,\u201d and so I\u2019m like, \u201cI mean, I could go like this,\u201d and they were like, \u201cYeah, do that!\u201d And there it is at the end of the title track, that outro.<\/p>\n

\n\tCaroline Shaw, vocal arranger: I met up with her at her apartment in New York [on March 23, 2025]. I\u2019ve been in rooms with big stars and lots of producers around, and sometimes it feels like there are lots of sharks, like, producers getting their stuff on and I sense the artist being a little overwhelmed by that. So I just remember telling her, \u201cYou stay in control of what you want.\u201d It was nice to be in a room of \u2026 I would say they\u2019re more like whales.<\/p>\n

\n\tBridgers: We were all working together in the end, but I really enjoyed hopping around from place to place, with fresh ears every time. The nice thing about so many producers was that it was like having a reverse band. Lots of input, but ultimately, I make the final call.<\/p>\n

\n\tHutson: [Phoebe] is extremely focused and has a lot of what I think all of my favorite writers have: enough doubt to make sure that you try really hard to get it right.<\/p>\n

\n\tThile: This is a fearless record. There\u2019s a couple of illustrious producers, and she is in there, hands-on and exploding with ideas.<\/p>\n

\n\tGreg Leisz, pedal steel guitar: The thing that I noticed the most was that there was a lot of respect for her ideas. She was really driving the enthusiasm for the event as it was going on. She would be walking around listening. She wasn\u2019t passive at all.<\/p>\n

\n\tShaw: I remember her really wanting to not be always singing small, but to sing out big and resonant and not just put the echo on later, but like, \u201cLet\u2019s do it real,\u201d as much as she can do. \u201cI want to do this as real as we can.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAntonoff: When we first started, the big conversation, which became a huge conversation on the whole album, was obscuring [the] organic-synthetic [divide], playing with all of it until it just is its own Lost Weekend thing and not something you can even identify anymore. That\u2019s the whole point, productionwise, of the album and the thing we put such a microscope on, of obscuring those two things.<\/p>\n

\n\tGruska: I knew that it had to feel different and not like Punisher 2.0. With every artist and with every project, you live in the shadow of the thing you just did until you don\u2019t. I think the subject matter was so nude that [it had to be] surrounded by tones and sounds [that] had to have the kind of roughness and rawness that the songs had.<\/p>\n

\n\tBridgers: The first and last song was \u201cAs Above.\u201d It was a kind of Pavement-sounding indie rock idea I was playing at sound checks on tour in 2022. Something about walking around Saint Petersburg [Russia] because I was reading [Elif Batuman\u2019s] Either\/Or. It stayed pretty aimless for a while. Then it was about abortion\/my dad\u2019s death making me consider having a kid someday for the first time. When Christian and I were trying to crack the end and wrote, \u201cYou won\u2019t have to believe in magic, leave it to me and I\u2019ll make it happen,\u201d we both cried.<\/p>\n

\n\tHutson: \u201cAs Above\u201d took a long journey. I think that one was the most frustrating because we kept coming back to it and being like, \u201cOh, you again.\u201d (Laughs.) Even that was kind of fun though, like a crazy crossword that you\u2019ve been working on for a long time. I think the fastest one was \u201cHaunted.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tVore: I remember being a big champion of that song because I love country music and bluegrass music and Irish music. I remember her being pretty reluctant about it, like, \u201cIs it just kind of like, cheugy?\u201d And I was like, \u201cThis is so good.\u201d But I also earnestly listen to Megan Moroney.<\/p>\n

\n\tAntonoff: [We spent a] ton of time at Sound City. I think all studios look like the inside of the person whose studio it is, and there\u2019s no doubt in my mind that Sound City is a living map of Tony. Tony would pull out some child tape recorder that someone sent him from Indonesia, and it didn\u2019t work, but it exploded, and as it exploded, the whole thing\u2019s like a Rube Goldberg machine. Tape shoots out and knocks into something that falls into something else and then hits a harpsichord, and someone gets an idea. There\u2019s a slapstick nature to that place where there\u2019s just stuff, and all the stuff is informing this great desire to just try things.<\/p>\n

\n\tBridgers: The freakiest night by far was one with Jon Brion. He brought a U-Haul full of priceless instruments to Sound City at 9 p.m., gave Tony a Guatemalan marimba, played a synthesizer that looks like Battleship \u2014 that sounded so good we opened the album with it \u2014 ripped a guitar solo and left at about 5 a.m.<\/p>\n

\n\tGruska: The general throughline of everybody that worked on the record is that there\u2019s a lot of extremely f\u2013king funny people. It\u2019s a lot of work, but it\u2019s also a lot of hanging and shooting the s\u2013t and laughing. Sometimes on sessions, you\u2019re nose to the grindstone, but if we\u2019re working and there\u2019s several hours of hanging out, it does actually make the hours of work, which end up being less, more productive.<\/p>\n

\n\tAntonoff: The process was full of wonderful \u00adsurprises. That\u2019s when you know you\u2019ve reached something, when you\u2019re split down the middle: half completely comfortable and familiar with something and half completely shocked by it.<\/p>\n

\n\tBerg: It was only in the home stretch that it was clear to me that Phoebe felt the need for all 16 songs to be on the album. I thought initially it might be more concise, but she had a broader story to tell and more things that she wanted to deal with.<\/p>\n

\n\tLeisz: It\u2019s an artist\u2019s record. It\u2019s somebody that is really focusing on their art without, I think, a whole lot of trying to make something commercial. It\u2019s adventurous.<\/p>\n

\n\tBridgers: It\u2019s all my ideas. I\u2019m very lucky to not have to do anything I don\u2019t want to do, so I don\u2019t show up resentfully anywhere anymore. I was fixated on the idea of LARPing [live-action role-\u00adplaying] in general for this album because of my old \u00adskeleton suit. I was thinking about people whose lives revolve around dressing up. Because I dress up as myself. It was [director and Primetime co-\u00adproducer] Ari Aster\u2019s idea to do the ren faire thing with Lance [Oppenheim, who co-directed the \u201cLost Boys\u201d music video]; he wanted to see slo-mo LARPers beating each other up. I\u2019ve known Lance since I was a teenager and trust him with my life.<\/p>\n

\n\tLance Oppenheim, director: I met Phoebe back in 2014. She was basically the same then as she is now: so chill, so funny, so sharp. We had such a great time working together [on Primetime], and I kept thinking during production how much I wanted to work with her again. I was so happy when she thought of me for \u201cLost Boys.\u201d Phoebe knew she wanted something LARP-adjacent and to be the leader of a vagabond troupe living off the grid. She also wanted to work with Skyler Gisondo again \u2014 they share a lot of screen time in Primetime. We shot the video over two days in Atlanta [in April].<\/p>\n

\n\tLeisz: I was in Europe on vacation when she did The Tonight Show. They called me to play [on \u201cLost Boys\u201d], but I was on vacation. So I was curious because I didn\u2019t play on the song [on the album], and there wasn\u2019t any reason for me to be on it that I could see. And then I watched it, and the first thing I saw was all these kids. And then I became aware that she did a version with old people, and I realized that she wanted me to come and play in that band. (Laughs.)<\/p>\n

\n\tShaw: I did one of those planetarium listening sessions in Portland [Ore.]. I hadn\u2019t heard [the album]. I think it\u2019s really beautiful.<\/p>\n

\n\tGruska: If we\u2019re talking about growth, it was another cut above for me. Like, \u201cWow, we\u2019re really going for something,\u201d and it comes through when I listen back. I feel the team all just going, \u201cNo, let\u2019s not stop until it\u2019s weird and perfect.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHutson: This is what happens when people who really, really, really love each other come together to serve something that is greater than themselves. I think it\u2019s a feat of what love and friendship and taking care and listening actually looks like and what it can do. You can end up with this beautiful piece of art that is very healing for everyone that worked on it.<\/p>\n

\n\tBridgers: Having the album in the world is wild. It was very intense to write and very acutely painful to release. I\u2019ll never get over how profound it is to have people sing the songs I wrote about my dad back to me. I wish he could have seen it.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis story appears in the Oct. 3, 2026, issue of Billboard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Six years passed between Phoebe Bridgers\u2019 second and third solo albums, but it was hardly time off. Between…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":621881,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[10779,156,20137,21726,4974,157,3296,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-621880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-awards","tag-entertainment","tag-genre-rock","tag-grammys","tag-magazine","tag-music","tag-music-news","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=621880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621880\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/621881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=621880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=621880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=621880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}