Phoebe Bridgers Has Auspicious Astrology

With her devastating 2017 debut album, PHOEBE BRIDGERS arrived like a bolt of lightning, a premonition of indie’s electric future. And now the astrology-loving, early rising, slightly witchy 25-year-old is focused on her next album—and learning how to be comfortable in her own skin.

- Gabriella Paiella

THE DAY BEFORE we meet, Phoebe Bridgers left her therapist’s office only to discover that her car, a red Toyota Prius, had been hit by a bus.

“I saw a note on my car and was like, I got a ticket,” she recalls. “And then I was like, Wait—nope, I did not.” She took it in stride, more amused than resigned.

“It’s drivable, so whatever.”

If a bus slamming into your car while you were in therapy feels like a heavy-handed signal from the universe, it would also be a perfect line in a Phoebe Bridgers song. The singer-songwriter, 25, first made waves with her 2017 album, Stranger in the Alps, a collection of confessional and melancholic folk-rock tracks textured with the mundanities of day-to-day life. Her debut landed her on best-of lists and the late-night TV circuit; John Mayer tweeted out her song “Funeral,” writing that it signaled the “arrival of a giant.” She followed up Stranger with two collaborative projects: boygenius, the supergroup she formed with similarly openhearted musicians Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, and Better Oblivion Community Center, a duo act with sad-boy legend Conor Oberst. Oberst told me he was “floored” when he first heard Bridgers’s music, describing her voice as “an old friend you didn’t know you had.”