Bridgers has sometimes found that people confuse her name with that of Fleabag‘s Phoebe Waller-Bridge, but she’s okay with that. “I love any association,” she says. “She’s kind of normalizing being regular, doing stuff that everybody does — like masturbating and stealing shit.”
A grocery run in Los Angeles this past February. “Since I’ve been off tour I’ve just been trying to catch up on friendship,” Bridgers says.
Bridgers wanted to make sure she got the right sound for Punisher. “You know what I’m really self-conscious of?” she asks, laughing. “Being adult-contemporary.”
“It’s funny when people ask me what my songs are about,” Bridgers says. “My stuff isn’t normally shrouded in mystery.”
Bridgers contributed guest vocals to the 1975’s new album, Notes on a Conditional Form. “I love seeing examples of people who have not been ruined by being successful,” she says of the band. “They’re handsome pop stars that aren’t fucked up.”
Bridgers cites Conor Oberst’s indie-rock band Bright Eyes as a major influence on her songs. “That was some of the first music closer to my generation [by someone] who’s doing the thing that I value about Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell,” she says.
Bridgers, pictured at a CVS, spends most of her days working on her music, and in her free time reading and walking. “I’m a fucking granny,” she says. “I don’t really drink, I don’t really smoke, so if I’m not in bed by 10 o’clock, I’m alone just watching Netflix.”
“I really did buy all that stuff at CVS,” says Bridgers, who was also happy to get a chance to take this photo. (“I was like, ‘I’ve been waiting to flash my tits!'” she adds.)