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by Brandon Bertram<\/strong><\/p>\n Phoebe Bridgers doesn\u2019t remember a time she wasn\u2019t into music. \u201cI listened to a shit ton of music when I was a kid, I went to concerts all the time when I was a teenager. I can\u2019t remember not playing or not wanting to be a musician,\u201d she tells me over the phone from L.A. <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIt started with Joni Mitchell and Jackson Brown and the Laurel Canyon songwriters and stuff. And then it turned into, you know, Bright Eyes and Mark Kozelek and songwriters who were basically doing the same thing except in this new way that felt like more my generation, or closer to home as far as subject matter and stuff that was still very emotional singer-songwritery. And now, it\u2019s like that except women,\u201d is how she describes the arch of her musical upbringing. Bridgers has toured with Bright Eyes\u2019 Conor Oberst and he is featured on Bridgers\u2019 song \u201cWould You Rather,\u201d and she covers Mark Kozelek\u2019s \u201cYou Missed My Heart.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Bridgers, now 23, was born and raised in Pasadena, CA. \u201cA strange place, but I love it, it\u2019s beautiful. It\u2019s right by the mountains, and I went to a hippie school where we didn\u2019t even have to wear shoes. I had a very Los Angeles upbringing.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n Growing up in L.A. and attending a performing arts high school, she had access to a lot of art and culture. \u201cYou would get free museum passes if you went to my school, so I did that a lot.\u201d Her uncle was a film critic, her brother a visual artist. \u201cI Just feel like I was exposed to a lot of art,\u201d says Bridgers. <\/span><\/p>\n The first time I heard Bridgers\u2019 song \u201cSmoke Signals\u201d I was immediately struck by its ethereal production (featuring reverb-soaked baritone guitar and a jet engine) and evocative snapshot-like imagery; a collection of memories time stamped by celebrity deaths that reads like an unreleased Noah Baumbach film set to a Twin Peaks soundtrack. By this time Bridgers had only released one 7\u201d EP on Ryan Adams\u2019 Pax-Am label in 2015, just over a year before signing to the Dead Oceans and beginning work on her debut full length. 2017\u2019s <\/span>Stranger in the Alps is <\/span><\/i>a collection of songs written between the time she was 16 years old up until the album was recorded. \u201cI wrote Chelsea when I was like 16, Chelsea\u2019s probably the oldest,\u201d says Bridgers.<\/span><\/p>\n Bridgers\u2019 brand of melancholy is not put on. \u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019m playing into anything necessarily, I think it\u2019s just where I am at a certain time. A lot of my songs were written in a very heavy time period where I was feeling all that stuff.\u201d Songwriting, for her, is a kind of therapy and also a form of documentation: \u201cIt is a little bit cathartic but I think that later it\u2019s fun to look back and see exactly how I was feeling at a certain time even if I don\u2019t feel like that anymore. It\u2019s like seeing an old picture of yourself or something but even more intense,\u201d says Bridgers. <\/span><\/p>\n The songs on <\/span>Stranger in the Alps <\/span><\/i>are categorically sad, and brilliantly so. \u201cFuneral,\u201d for example, is about her singing at the funeral of an acquaintance (\u201ca kid a year older than me\u201d) who died of a heroin overdose. But there is hope on the album, too. \u201cI buried a hatchet it\u2019s coming up lavender,\u201d Bridgers sings on \u201cSmoke Signals.\u201d \u201c\u2018Smoke Signals\u2019 is more like me looking back on those feelings, and it is like a little bit hopeful because inherently I was like not feeling super intense when I was writing it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Since the release of <\/span>Stranger in the Alps <\/span><\/i>late last year, Bridgers has been touring steadily and performing often, and the list of dislikes about touring (\u201cI don\u2019t like inhaling other people\u2019s fucking farts all day,\u201d she laughs) is longer than the likes, \u201cbut I do like playing my music every night to people that give a shit,\u201d she says. <\/span><\/p>\n And as for what\u2019s next for Bridgers: \u201cI\u2019m still writing [the next album], and I hope it\u2019s not a ways off. It is funny playing, you know people request some of my songs when I\u2019m on stage they\u2019ll yell requests at me, and I\u2019m like dude, I literally have one record, literally I have basically an hour of music I can play, so of course I\u2019m gonna play that fucking song, so uh, I can\u2019t wait to have another record so that I can do a different set every night.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n Phoebe Bridgers is playing Winnipeg Folk Festival this weekend.<\/span><\/p>\n