Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic
So, in talking about the marvel that was Phoebe Bridgers ‘ opening night at L.A.’s Intuit Dome Friday night, which part of the show do you talk about first? Would it the emotionally riveting middle section of the show, in which Bridgers used the no-phones setting to elaborately explore, in song and in monologue, her complicated family dynamics, including figuring out how to grieve the death of a sometimes abusive father who had both a positive and impact on her life? You don’t get moments of candor and quiet devastation like that in an arena show every day, or decade.
Or , would it be the part later where Billie Eilish came out in her pink onesie pajamas? The duet on “Savior Complex” where she and Eilish on the stage danced around in their Peter Pan-inspired costumes? Because, come on. Dude .
This “Lost Weekend Tour” stop at the Intuit Dome (the first of three sold-out weekend shows there wrapping up her U.S. tour) provided a wealth of moments of moods to talk and write about, so no one can be blamed for picking either the most moving or goofiest bit of the show to single out. The Eilish cameo will surely outweigh all other highlights in the popular vote that is (for once, picture-less) social media. For the audience in the house down in Inglewood, anyway, it was a magnificently holistic experience, putting the lie to the idea that a Bridgers concert is finally going to be anything but a joyfully celebratory experience, these days. Even if she is also perfectly equipped to answer Leonard Cohen’s final rhetorical question: You want it darker ?
Possibly the most talked-about aspect of this tour has also been the most seemingly irrelevant: the artist’s insistence that all smart devices be locked up in Yonder pouches, which is not completely uncommon for shows in smaller theaters where the artists want to keep a secret, but has rarely been done at the arena level. (It’s probably no small expense on the tour budget, when you’ve got 18,000 pouches and the employees to manage them as a line item… so there’s some sacrifice involved for Bridgers as well as the audience.) Having turned in my Apple Watch as well as phone, I kept having the same thought rolling around in my head during Alex G’s opening set, as well as the intermission: I know the end. But I don’t know the time.
But probably few on hand would argue that it didn’t make for a more mesmerizing experience, the sensation of being alone in the dark with no more illumination than what was coming off the stage and the audio verification that everyone in the same oversized space is also feeling the feels. I hate to go overboard in congratulating a crowd, but there was a specifically impressive moment during the starkest number of the night, “Still Standing,” which Bridgers performs just accompanying herself on acoustic guitar, sans band. There was a pin-drop silence throughout this performance, but toward the end of the song, Bridgers’ strumming got so hushed that I feared unnecessary applause would break out because part of the crowd might assume it was ending, as often happens in concerts. But this audience was too savvy to be faked out, and their silence was upheld during that most delicate of passages — which, combined with the lack of the visual intrusion of an 18,000-strong filming crew, made for some heart-ripping magic.
Bridgers did comment on her choice to be a bit of a pioneer in banning phones at this big a level. She framed it not in the language of being a techno-scold but in wanting to allow for the ability to speak freely without self-consciousness about how it would look the next day to a world that cares a lot less than those that managed to score a ticket. In the middle of the part of the show where she spoke about her mom and dad, she said, “I can’t thank you enough for being willing to be without your devices for a couple of hours,” noting that otherwise the revealing things she’d just said “would have been a TikTok moment, where someone who doesn’t like my face would have been commenting on it.”
At the same time, she had a sense of humor about it, a little later on, when, right after Eilish left the stage in her costumed PJs, Bridgers blurted, “You don’t have your phones. Ha ha!” If it seemed like a gloat for a second, the crowd seemed willing to laugh with her. Prior to Eilish’s guest spot, they’d also gotten a value-added moment when Muna came out to join Bridgers for “Silk Chiffon,” another moment that made everyone grab for their absent phone, like it was a phantom limb. Everyone enjoyed getting these viral moments as a tradeoff in not actually being able to take them viral.
Bridgers performed 14 out of 16 tracks from her two-and-a-half-month-old “Lost Weekend” album (leaving out only a couple of short interludes), and her faith that her audience would want to hear this latest release thoroughly dominate the setlist was not misplaced. The album veers back and forth — sometimes within the same song — between her mixed feelings about her father and his death, on the down side, and on the up side, her apparently contented relationship with Bo Burnham. It departs from these two threads occasionally, as with “The Governor’s Waltz,” a breakup song about a past relationship of some note that is poignant in its sense of disappointment but also hilariously snarky in spots. But mainly it traverses between the poles of, on one hand, grappling with death and its aftermath, and on the other hand, a big old fresh romance. The concert, like the album, feels like a successful case of holding two thoughts at the same time — the irreversibility of death and grief and the major head rush of true love. You could spend the rest of your life writing about these two subjects, so it’s no wonder that “Lost Weekend” feels like such a full meal, and certainly a big journey to take an audience on for an hour and 55 minutes in concert. Related Stories ‘Joker’ Composer Hildur Guðnadóttir Confirms She’s Scoring Sarah Polley’s ‘The Bell Jar,’ Starring Billie Eilish 'SNL' Sets John Mulaney's Seventh Time Hosting With Phoebe Bridgers as Musical Guest, Plus Druski and the Strokes
Bridgers reserved most of her most intimate material for a second act in which she moved to a B-stage toward the back of the floor section. There, she sat down on the floor, cross-legged, in front of a synthesizer, which was initially malfunctioning. “Oh no, it’s broken,” she said. “Of course this happens at home.” Although she might not have been in the mood for irony right at that moment, it did seem a little bit appropriate that the song she was about to do, the title track of “Lost Weekend,” was a song about a broken engagement. Once the synth’s powers were restored, she was able to make her way through the spooky ballad, which came to a partial line a lot of people might relate to after an intense relationship has gone awry: “You know me, and I’ll never forgive you for that.” On record, the song then goes into a minute-long instrumental coda that is a bit unsettling. Live, it was something else altogether — a complete aural and visual freakout in which shards of light hit all parts of the audience in fast and intense bursts as the sound system went into overload. The lobbies of the Intuit included the usual warnings about strobe being part of the production, but they really weren’t kidding in this instance.
But that last minute of “Lost Weekend” (the song) was the only part of the night anyone could call assaultive. The crucial middle section of the show continued to deal with tough emotions, but in a gentle fashion. To the B-stage she brought out four acoustic players — handling fiddle, mandolin, upright bass and banjo/mandocello — to back her up on what felt like an extended spacy-hootenanny section. Her previous album’s “Graceland Too,” about a friend in need, was a gorgeous standout here. And it was followed by its cousin from the new album, “Haunted,” which on record represents a Boygenius-meets-Nickel Creek moment (literally and figuratively) — the Americana song of the year, maybe? — and which sounded just as beautifully sprightly with this lineup. Ironically, it’s a song about the old feeling of dreading touring that is so joyful in its rootsy execution, it convinces you that Bridgers has changed her mind and loves being on the road now.
And then shit got personal. “I’ve always loved Halloween; it’s always been my favorite,” she said, explaining why everyone in her band and crew was dressed up as someone from “Peter Pan,” from the Darling family to pirates to a crocodile… with Bridgers herself as Pan, the original lost boy. Looking to her offstage brother for confirmation of the memory, she said, “I was supposed to be Tinkerbell when I was little,” but she “thew a tantrum” and insisted on being Captain Hook — “internalizing some of my feelings about men,” she supposed.
That led to the more pertinent musings that set up the harrowing songs that followed. “My dad died about four years ago — complicated guy, to say the least,” she said. Anyone who’d heard her sing about their sometimes estranged relationship on her biggest hit, “Kyoto,” already knew that, but there was much farther to dig now. She said that they had “a relationship where we’d talk about every two years,” usually at a point that she’d be working on material for her next project, and indicated that she has struggled with going through several of those cycles now — writing, recording, album release — in his absence, yet talking more than ever about him in song.
“Shout out to my mom,” Bridgers added, thanking her for “giving me space to grieve someone who was abusive… and made himself into such a main character in my life, when all my mom ever did was help me. Go, Mom. Anyway, this one is for my dad,” she added, as the preface thst led into “Still Standing,” the song she sang by herself on acoustic guitar, with simple, spirit-rending lines like: “Feeling indifferent, wearing black / Sometimes I want you back / But not today.”
That was followed by what might be the most powerful song from the new album, the majestically portentous “As Above,” which references her father’s abusive moments before going into a moving bridge about the possibilities of the present day. “You won’t have to believe in magic,” she wailed at someone — presumably her current love; “Leave it to me and I’ll make it happen,” she vowed. As the music crested (provided by her band warming back up over on the A-stage), Bridgers stood facing a thin sheet of white light, filled up with what looked like a shower of celestial glitter. As a conjuring of what the rejuvenating power of love might look and sound like amid a life of casual disappointments, this conjoining of songcraft and stagecraft was good enough to send a chill down your spine, in you believe in all that stuff, and in how a really great concert might manifest it.
And, then, yeah, it was a short trip from that heavy catharsis to the sight of Bridgers and Muna lead singer Katie Gavin indulging in a Peter Pan-vs.-Captain Hook swordfight during “Silk Chiffon.” But of course, it was the more upbeat pleasures and spirited anthems of the show’s first and third acts that set the sparer drama of the second act in stark relief. Certainly there were some weighty songs as well when Bridgers was with her full band on the main stage, but these came with the promise of a healthy scream — like the extended howl that inevitably erupts amid the audience as well as on-stage as the climax of “I Know the End” — instead of the anticipation of a pin-drop.
The production design is worthy of a few sentences of praise. There’s a bit of UFOlogy that lingers in some of Bridgers’ visuals, but it’s mostly not too obvious. The show begins with Bridgers and her band on the A-stage under a half-dome that could be a giant igloo. It tilts up to reveal not just the musical ensemble but an additional circular screen, onto which can be projected, for example, a moonscape (during, duh, “Moon Song”). A giant curtain behind the stage — which I was never quite sure if it was a real curtain or an LED representation of one — is a backdrop onto which are projected the requisite big-screen images of Bridgers and her band, for the folks not in front. The practically infinite ripples in this curtain ensure that the video of the musicians being thrust onto it remains a little bit distorted and not too digitally literal, while satisfying the need in the rafters to see the star as something more than a distant avatar. (Needless to say, maybe, Bridgers is cool enough that this is one of the few arena productions out there that doesn’t have pyro or confetti cannons.)
What’s most remarkable about the Lost Weekend Tour is its ability to be two things at once, or in close juxtaposition. It’s a conflicted elegy, and a romantic comedy. It’s a big, boomy soundscape, and also a celebration of folk music, in its most delectably finger-picking moments. It’s a showy, expensive-looking extravaganza that never seems the slightest bit too small for its 18,000 seats, but it also has the intimacy of a soul-baring bullshit session back at the apartment after a night out at the club. And it brings us Phoebe Bridgers, who can be pretty hardboiled, in her lyrics, but who will always carry a vocal or personal softness wholly uncharacteristic of just about anyone else at this level of pop stardom.
That sort of spectacular intimacy is kind of a miracle, in other words. So it’s all right if you don’t have your phone, because you were never going to capture all that on it anyway.
Setlist for Phoebe Bridgers at Intuit Dome, Inglewood, Calif., Oct. 30, 2026:
A-stage: The Outside Motion Sickness Kill Me The Governor’s Waltz Lost Boys DVD Menu Garden Song Moon Song Liberty Tree Panorama (instrumental)
B-stage: Lost Weekend Funeral Graceland Too Haunted Still Standing As Above
A-stage: Bobby Silk Chiffon (with Muna) Waiting Room Savior Complex (with Billie Eilish) I Can’t Wait Kyoto I Know the End
Encore (Bridgers on B-stage, band on A-stage): Lost Weekend (Reprise) Scott Street Never Going Back! (without Bridgers)
Source: Entertainment
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