I can’t tell you exactly what time Phoebe Bridgers starts or ends her Friday night concert. I hesitate to say which of the band members was dressed as a crocodile because I can’t check my memory with a photo.
Unfortunately, I can’t convey the exact words Bridgers used to describe her difficult relationship with her late father when introducing her song “Still Standing” — although I to be Let’s just say his language so silenced the thousands of people in Inglewood’s Intuit Dome that it almost felt like you could hear his thoughts.
Friday’s concert, the first of three hometown shows on the Bridgers’ Lost Tour, was a phone-free experience: When you entered the arena, you handed your device to a venue employee, who locked it in a cloth pouch that would keep you, including your watch, camera and voice recorder, out of reach of the digital world until you came back out.
Addressing how abuse can shape ideas of love in the lengthy prologue to “Still Standing,” a chilling highlight from the singer’s latest album, “Lost Weekend,” Bridgers thanked her fans for adhering to her phone-free policy, framing it as a necessary condition for performing such intimate material.
If phones were allowed, she added, “there would now be a TikTok video with someone commenting if they don’t like my face.” (It’s such a sharp quote that I can easily recall it.)
Expected to receive multiple nominations for February’s Grammy Awards, “Lost Weekend,” which touches on the death of Bridgers’ father as well as the blossoming of her romantic relationship with comedian Bo Burnham, complements all the emotional bloodshed with a sharp sense of humor. Friday’s show opened with “The Outside,” which, like the album, directs the listener to his father’s funeral with: “I’m crying in a suit and tie / But you should see the other man / One more time for old times’ sake / I’ll watch him pass out.”
At Intuit, after inviting Billie Eilish to join her for her song “Savior Complex” — otherwise guaranteed Instagram content — Bridgers said, “You don’t have your phones with you,” then literally added “ha-ha.”
It’s anyone’s guess whether Bridgers would have mustered the depth of emotion she revealed on Friday had she not banned handheld computers, whose bluish glow has become a ubiquitous feature of the concert scene. For all his vulnerability in “The Lost Weekend,” he remains a professional who has been performing since his youth; My suspicion is that he will probably find a way to get there.
What I know is that he I did get there: Dressed in a Peter Pan costume the night before Halloween, Bridgers sang folk ballads like “Kill Me” and “The Governor’s Waltz” with a tenderness that belies her rather harsh view of her experiences over the past few years; Meanwhile, relatively rowdy rock songs like “Bobby” and “Lost Boys” crackled with an energy that bordered on exhilaration.
The show consisted of two stages: one under a lighted dome that resembled a spaceship or an old-fashioned greenhouse, and the other under a smaller circle positioned near the middle of the arena floor. Bridgers and her musicians (dressed in the attire of Tinker Bell, John, and other Pan-related characters) moved between the two several times, which was as elaborate as the production required.
Beyond Eilish, Bridgers also hosted indie-pop group Muna, who performed their song “Silk Chiffon,” and her younger brother Jackson, who sang vocals on “I Can’t Wait,” which Geese’s Cameron Winter covers on her new album. At the beginning of the title track of “Lost Weekend’s,” Bridgers had to struggle when her keyboard wasn’t doing what she wanted.
“Of course it happens in this house,” he said.
The lack of phones in the audience provided a level of engagement you could practically feel; This was no less so than on “As Above,” which he did after “Still Standing,” in which he centers himself alone at the base of a cone of light.
“I thought my mother took herself to the hospital,” he sang, perching his green felt hat on his head and daring us not to turn our backs.