Phoebe Bridgers at the Greek Theatre
On Oct. 21, indie pop artist Phoebe Bridgers performed a show at the Greek Theatre in Hollywood, CA, with guest headliners Charlie Hickey and Katie Gavin from band MUNA.
Phoebe Bridgers performs on stage at the Greek Theatre in Hollywood, CA, in the evening at Oct. 21, 2021. (Sarah Nachimson | The Corsair.)
In the middle of her Oct. 21 show at Hollywood’s Greek Theatre, Phoebe Bridgers took a pause and said “my mom is here tonight.” Looking out at the sold-out venue, Bridgers reminisced about her own childhood in Silver Lake, CA, and memories she had of driving to the theatre for concerts.
On that same stage of those concerts Bridgers watched as a teen, the four-time Grammy-nominated singer, who emerged with her EP “Stranger In The Alps” (2018) and catapulted over the COVID-19 lockdown to stardom with album “Punisher” (2019), performed for an audience of her own. Bridgers earned a following for her lyrically poignant music’s relatability. Her discography, reflecting on painful pasts or overcoming hardship, accompanies thousands of videos from fans on social media platform TikTok.
Bridger’s mid-autumn show was one of the first for many since COVID-19 pandemic measures began. Out of caution, Bridgers decided to perform all shows outdoors and require proof of vaccination or negative test for entry. Iris Lynch, a freshman at Santa Monica College (SMC), who attended the Oct. 21 concert, said, “ I’m still pretty anxious about COVID, so I wore a mask the full time, but I did feel safe because they had to check everyone’s vaccine [status] or negative test.”
Charlie Hickey peforms on stage to open for Phoebe Bridgers at the Greek Theatre in Hollywood, CA, in the evening at Oct. 21, 2021. (Sarah Nachimson | The Corsair.)
The crowd of concert-goers, returning after shows paused because of lockdown, seemed to also surprise performers. Charlie Hickey, the opening act who, at 13, covered one of Bridger’s songs and impressed her, remarked on unfamiliarity after performing “Two Haunted Houses” from his EP “Count the Stars.” “Some of you need to leave,” he said on stage. “There’s too many people.”
Any nerves from performers, however, did not affect the crowd’s excitement. Audience members cheered when Katie Gavin from the band MUNA emerged for a slow, haunting rendition of Hickey’s song “Seeing Things.” Even louder applause accompanied Bridgers’s entrance, an hour before her headlining set, to sing “Ten Feet Tall,” a track featuring her on Hickey’s EP.
During her performance, Bridgers and her entire band donned the artist’s iconic skeletal body design. Bridgers built a stage presence that felt unusually hypnotizing, personal and intimate, even amid a large audience. A pop-up digital tableau behind them with song-specific visuals added to the emotional transformation. To introduce songs, she remarked on the lyrical inspirations ranging from alcoholism to ex-boyfriends to Halloween. “This is a song for anyone who ever had to lie to CPS,” Bridgers said before the upbeat, euphoric trumpet-accompanied “Kyoto.”
Her discography also touched a bit on politics and activism. During “Smoke Signals,” the entire crowd belted “f*** the cops.” “Garden Song,” accompanied by a tableau 2D digital display of a bridge and garden behind the performers, was based on a former crush of the artist “who live[d] next to a nazi and used to joke about just killing him and burying him in the garden,” she wrote in a tweet on Nov. 10, 2020.
The concert’s finale, after Bridgers sang her own song “I Know The End,” was a cover of another Gen-Z celebrity’s work: comedian Bo Burnham’s “That Funny Feeling” from his special “Inside” on Netflix.
