Last night, Phoebe Bridgers’ living room was a basketball arena

I was hoping the Madison Square Garden security guards wouldn’t search my bag too thoroughly. The contraband in question? A pen and a few sheets of ripped-out notebook paper. I’d seen reports on Reddit of concertgoers having their writing utensils confiscated and thought it had to be hearsay. But I decided to leave my designated Concert Journal—a slender, beat-up notebook partially made from a recycled Mountain Goats tour poster—at home rather than risk losing it. Taking notes on my phone was out of the question. Upon entry, our seat numbers were written on slips of paper and our phones tucked into Yondr pouches, where they’d remain for the duration of Bridgers’ MSG stop on her current semi-secret cross-country trek. At her request, her first solo live performances in three years are designed to be an “internet-free space.” No photos, videos, no transcription of lyrics from unreleased songs. 

From my almost-floor seats (which cost one American dollar and were assigned at random), I could see a living room setup—a couch draped with a chevron blanket, a coffee table, a mid-20th century television and a few lamps—on a tiny stage, dwarfed by the 22,000-cap stadium. Being as it was Game 2 Eve, the whole place was lit up in orange and blue (I don’t personally know of anyone whose weekend plans include two nights at MSG in a row, first for Phoebe Bridgers, then for the Knicks, but if that’s you, please reach out for comment. If you’re working both nights, I don’t care how much you’re making, you deserve a raise.).

Bridgers opened with a solo acoustic rendition of 2017’s “Motion Sickness,” before inviting Christian Lee Hutson and Nick White onstage to offer some multi-instrumental assistance (she introduced herself and Hutson and “The Basketball Band”). The jumbotron showed their faces in a warm, washed-out haze, occasionally cutting away from them to the onstage TV. Her first few songs all built themselves up quite similarly to each another; “Motion Sickness,” “Waiting Room,” “Kyoto,” and “Moon Song” were all measured and restrained until their respective bridges, at which point Bridgers would finally let her voice and strumming fill the stadium. In the quieter preludes to each song’s peak, we could hear every hitch in her breath and every liftoff of her fingertips from the strings reverberate and dissolve midair. The loud-and-quiet game was perhaps most intriguing on her rendition of “Moon Song,” when her voice grew noticeably wispier almost every time she sang the word “I”—that one letter became nothing but a breath, like some conscious de-emphasizing of the first-person narration that Bridgers has built her name on. 

Then came a run of six or seven songs in the middle of Bridgers’s set. There was yodeling. There was beatboxing. There was a ska track. There was a twelve-minute spoken-word piece recited in four different languages and fed through a restored vacuum tube amp and, okay, I’m totally making all of this up. Save for a few hints at honest-to-God country balladry and one song that I can only describe as having a piano melody reminiscent of the beginning of “Bohemian Rhapsody” and a chorus structured like the inverse of Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps,” the new stuff sounded like the old stuff—which isn’t bad news if, like me, you’re a fan of the old stuff. Some of the lyrics will no doubt spark some impassioned discourses in the Genius annotations and some celebrity sleuthing, but that was never the main draw, and thankfully, it still isn’t. (I did break the “no writing down lyrics” rule slightly, but the choice lyrics I chicken-scratched at MSG will not be repeated here. I’m sure half of them will be on Reddit by the time this goes live anyway).

Bridgers and the crowd bantered together between songs with an ease that matched her living room set, jeans-and-faded-Black-Sabbath-t-shirt getup, and characteristically candid demeanor. She thanked the audience for supporting the Immigration Bond Freedom Fund, saying that she “fucking hate[s]” ICE agents and calling them “cops squared.” Before kicking off the portion of the show consisting solely of unreleased material, she quipped, “If any of you figured out how to stick an Apple Watch up your ass and record, please don’t put it on the internet.” Later in the show, Bridgers revealed that she’d be formally announcing a tour the following day (June 5): “We’re gonna tell everyone tomorrow, but I’m telling you now.” 

She closed with “I Know The End,” whose traditional outro-scream honestly did feel more cathartic knowing that no one was filming it—knowing that our wordless howls would dissipate without record once the song and the show were over. That, and seeing a stadium full of lighters instead of phones in the air had me romanticizing the intimacy of a phoneless show played to an audience that has an accurate reputation for being a little too online. Think of it as Nickelodeon’s Worldwide Day of Play for zillennials on Lexapro. The mere fact that Bridgers is playing shows again at all is bound to get the internet talking, and she’s at a point in her career where she doesn’t need to build viral, clippable moments into her live set, but it seems that creating a phones-free environment (at least for this run of shows) offers some reprieve from the type of fandom that has a habit of letting the memes overshadow the music. 

Afterward, I found myself in standstill foot traffic as we were all headed toward the exit to unlock and return our Yondr pouches and go home. I began eavesdropping on two girls nearby. “What if I wanna keep it?” her friend asked, clutching the pouch containing her phone. The first girl responded, smiling wide through tear-smudged black mascara, “Yeah, I never wanna go on the internet again!”

Watch Phoebe Bridgers’ Paste Session below.

Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, ANTICS, Marvin, Swim Into The Sound, and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.

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