As the indie superstar makes her Glastonbury debut, she explains why she is much more than just the ‘patron saint of sadness’
Last modified on Fri 24 Jun 2022 13.04 BSThoebe Bridgers is spinning me around her bedroom with her phone camera. Last year, the 27-year-old songwriter swapped her studio apartment for a bigger place, still in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake neighbourhood. “I’m still a poster-y person instead of a mounting-art person, so it kind of looks like a teenager’s house,” she says, pointing at a gothic floral print tacked to the wall. There’s Tom Waits; her beloved. Her duvet is illustrated with cute rockets.
That said, it is seldom just great songwriting that makes a star. As sad as Bridgers’ skin-prickling songs are, touching on domestic abuse, death and alienation, she is uneasy with her reputation as a patron saint of sadness; she can be also madly funny.
She writes so slowly that usually she wouldn’t have spare songs, or they would be too “hyperspecific” for a soundtrack. “Who wants to hear about a bisexual from California getting stoned in a parking lot before a TV show?” she says. “It doesn’t really work!” But her drummer, Marshall Vore, had started writing a song called Sidelines in 2020. He suggested they finish it. It’s a love song, about how people having faith in you makes life worth living.
It’s also about Mescal, obviously. “Writing about my relationship with only good shit, because that’s all I feel, is hard,” she says with a happy squirm. “But it makes it easy when you’re actually having those feelings.”, wearing an intricately beaded dress and flanked by Mescal sporting a superb moustache. Moments before leaving the hotel, she took a deep breath and her gown popped open. “They literally sewed me into it,” she says. “It was terrifying, in a very fun way.
She was also bothered by “people with good intentions saying: ‘Don’t say it was easy for you to make that decision – it was clearly really emotional.’ And I wasn’t fucking emotional at all. Hormonally crazy! But I don’t think you should assign ‘it tore me up’ to me. No! I don’t think about it as a baby, of course not.”
Bridgers says she was lucky to have “pretty radicalised parents – the good radicalised”. When Bush was elected a second time, the 10-year-old Bridgers woke up to a weird sound. “I went into the living room and my dad was sobbing. I grew up with the weight of what stuff means, which I think is really important, especially because if I wanted to, I could just close my eyes to it and disappear.
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