Phoebe Bridgers’ ‘Lost Weekend’: All 16 Tracks Ranked

At only 56 seconds, this interstitial track takes what sounds like a live recording of a marching band riffing on the “Liberty Tree” melody and slowly turns up the volume so you can hear a crowd cheering before it fades out. The track’s credit list includes storied producer Jon Brion on electric guitar and Nate Walcott on trumpet, so perhaps this is just studio session magic, but the live effect is still fun. 

The inverse of “Lost Weekend,” “Panorama” starts experimental before arriving at Bridgers’ lyrics, comprising one verse that reads like a poetry stanza. Banjo and mandolin combine with synthesizers and guitars to create a mellow vibe that buzzes and grows moodier as the song progresses. “A panorama hotel room/ I chose this number for the view,” she sings, setting a brief scene for the album’s halfway point. This would definitely work in a planetarium. 

This under-two-minute track starts with Bridgers singing a cappella, running through the mantra of “Never going back again/ The way it used to be is not the way that it is.” The song has a forceful, driving rhythm, led by guitars and drums, that aligns with its message of forward momentum, while a closing voicemail from her dad signifies a connection to the past without letting it put a stranglehold on the future.

Compared to the other Lost Weekend songs, “Other Plans” has a lean credit list — only Bridgers, Antonoff and Gruska — and a musical simplicity to match, with Bridgers playing piano and Gruska on synths, adding atmosphere; lyrically, it’s both vividly specific (“I got blood on my favorite shirt/ You were shaking like a final girl”) and vague (“Our love had other plans for us”).

One of the songs Bridgers performed at her Madison Square Garden show in June, “Kill Me” starts quietly with an acoustic guitar playing in an unsettling, hazy atmosphere. “Times are scary,” Bridgers sings uneasily, before a chorus of “This is gonna kill me/ Wait” sustains the tone. Though it’s a somber song, the heavy breakdown that closes it out is a fun, slo-mo headbanger. This also marks her first reference to “Bobby,” presumably Burnham, whose birth name is Robert (“Bobby, you taught me that I know nothing”). And that voice you hear at the end, singing “tamam shud” (Persian for “it is finished” and popularized by a mysterious 1940s murder)? It’s credited to Son-John Johnson — though it sure does sound a lot like Cameron Winter. 

On the album opener, Bridgers filters her voice through a vocoder on the verses (“Crying in a suit and tie/ But you should see the other guy”) and sheds the effect on the chorus (“When I am on the outside, watching/ I am on the outside, watching”). The verses  — one of a fist punching through drywall, the other with a fist enthusiastically pumping in the air — play off each other, as the intimate, keyboard-driven track tees up the emotional and sonic oscillations of the album, but it’s a gorgeous song in its own right, too.

A final moving tribute to her father closes the album. Bridgers is specifically credited as playing the “church organ,” whose sustained notes give the song a dirge-like quality, though her voice floats above it, revisiting the “Lost Weekend” melody. “He’s not coming back as a bird,” she sings, accepting his absence while still acknowledging his presence in the lessons she retained. 

Burnham grew up in Hamilton, Mass., which is only about 15 minutes from the Liberty Tree Mall, the scene for this up-tempo track that finds Bridgers and Burnham capturing a moment in a photo booth. “You were made in the image of god/ But you look like your mom/ In this picture of us/ Falling in love that night/ After our fight,” she recalls, detailing their early days. It’s a slice-of-life that Bridgers ends on a darkly sentimental note: “Don’t die, Bobby/ Before I die/ It feels so good to have you in my life.” 

The first couple minutes of this song (which credits Damien Jurado’s “The Last Great Washington State,” perhaps for the melody) play like classic Bridgers — detailed memories, closely mic’d vocals supported only by sustained notes, admissions of love and rupture (“I’m supposed to be married, but I called it off,” likely another Mescal reference) — while the last minute explodes. Glitchy snippets interrupt swooping strings, and nonsensical vocal chatter — sampled from “Notjustmoreidlechatter” by composer Paul Lansky — rushes by. It’s a fitting title track that marries Bridgers’ old and new styles as she pushes her music into uncharted territory. 

Don’t let the sing-song music-box melody (and, naturally, waltzing rhythm) fool you: Bridgers is taking shots on this one. “I was the belle of the Governor’s Ball,” she sings, a role it’s fair to say she played in 2021 when she was on red carpets with Mescal. Fans have speculated that one lyric is a thinly-veiled dig at Mescal’s current girlfriend (and avowed Bridgers fan) Gracie Abrams, but the real dagger comes from the way she details a relationship on the fritz: “So, let’s see how long we can go without talking/ Watch me pretending to sleep/ I’m next to you, you’re next to nothing/ You promised that you’d never leave/ But maybe you’ll do it for me.” Caroline Shaw’s soaring background vocals give the song a ghostly quality — fitting for what feels like an oddly pleasant musical exorcism of a failed relationship. 

Nickel Creek virtuoso Chris Thile appears with his mandolin on half a dozen Lost Weekend songs and brings his full band along for the ride twice, including here. The group is a fitting addition on “Haunted,” where Bridgers, harmonizing with her boygenius-mates Dacus and Baker, leans into upbeat, folksy Americana as she finds the benefits of going through it and living to tell the tale: “You won’t have to open a heart that’s broken,” she sings. “Water’s gonna flow in either way/ My heart is growing either way.” It’s an empowering moment for Bridgers, as she pushes her writing beyond reflections on the past and looks toward the horizon. 

Bridgers focuses on her complicated relationship with her father, recognizing the struggles he faced (“Just to be thrown in the street when you dressed like a girl”) without excusing his behavior (“You tried to make me afraid”) or forgetting the scenes of physical violence she recalls from childhood (“I found her bleeding over the sink/ But when you said sorry, you were looking at me”). The low hum of a synthesizer starts the song, but acoustic guitars, mandolin and some light pedal steel join in to uplift the heavy mood, with Bridgers ending on a forgiving note: “Thank you for everything.” Shaw, mixed with Bridgers and perhaps also Maria Taylor, who is credited, returns for another haunting vocal set that sends this devastating song off into the air like a paper lantern.

Bridgers sounds agitated on Lost Weekend’s hazy penultimate song, singing, “Trying not to look down/ Making faces at a kid on the plane/ Trying not to freak out about being a couple days late.” Regret creeps in, as she confesses to a fear of dying “before I take you to Coney Island/ screaming on the Wonder Wheel.” The song reaches its climax as a low rumbling sound builds and Bridgers forcefully declares, “You won’t have to believe in magic/ Leave it to me, and I’ll make it happen.” The proclamation sounds a little unhinged, like Bridgers is buckling under the weight of making someone’s dreams come true, but the song’s initial quiet returns for the closing, “As above so below/ As it was, so it goes.” 

“The Governor’s Waltz” leads straight into a proper love song — on which Burnham himself is listed among the vocalists — but in her own disquieting style: with distant screaming, thundering drums and promises that she’d kill her friends if her new love wasn’t feeling them. The word “love” isn’t said, but everywhere, not only in the admission that her partner is “walking around with my heart on your sleeve” but also in the personal details learned from cohabitation (“You sing in the shower/ I talk to myself”). “Now I don’t know if I can make it tonight/ But what are you doing the rest of my life, Bobby,” Bridgers coos, ending the song on a breathless note.  

Bridgers excels at slow songs with lyrics that will either bring death by a thousand cuts or take a listener out with one big wallop, but some of her best work happens when she speeds things up, as she has done with “Motion Sickness,” “Kyoto” and now “Lost Boys.” The album single is playful, ever-so-detailed (“That one time in East Berlin/ When you threw a tantrum with a 57/ And broke a rib”) and a totally unforgettable earworm, thanks to a trumpeting (both literally and figuratively) chorus about juvenile behaviors no one ever totally outgrows. This one should be on her setlist forever. 

Everything — the varying musical styles, the past and the present, the uncertainty and self-assurance — comes together on “I Can’t Wait,” the third-to-last song on Lost Weekend. The electronic static and ambient voices she’s played with the entire album mingle with a straightforward, repetitive guitar, the two styles finally overlapping in a clear way. She imagines being abandoned by her partner (“Baby, baby if you leave me/ Can you take me with you/ I can sit in the back seat”), but she also sees a life together (“Until we’re dead or die trying”). It’s a very present song, and Bridgers sounds like someone both at the end and the beginning of her journey.  

There’s a very Antonoff-ian moment where a dance beat kicks in, lightening, and that probably-Cameron-Winter voice returns to duet with her as she sings, “All my life/ Side by side/ Hyde Jekyll Hyde/ Finally together,” while an acoustic guitar plays and a harmonica, credited to Conor Oberst, joins in. The song steadily crescendos before stopping abruptly, a definitive ending that befits the confident track, one of her best.