Phoebe Bridgers Made Me Put My Phone Away
On September 19th, I saw Phoebe Bridgers at the United Center and had the most memorable concert experience of my life to date. It's well known at this point that the entire show was phone-free, utilizing Yondr pouches at the entrance to keep everyone from accessing their phones during the performance (or at all once you stepped foot in the arena). I'm a fan of taking photos and videos at concerts, like most people are, so I was a bit skeptical, but of course on board. Because of my want to still have some sort of keepsake and memory of the concert, and my love for documenting, I brought inside a small notebook and pen to take notes about the standout moments.
After I was let inside the arena and found my seats, I started by drawing the stage setup from my seat's perspective and writing small thoughts about my friend and I's thoughts prior to the show starting. The general view was a big igloo, half-globe style dome at the front of the arena with a smaller B-stage closer to our seats. Since I went in blind regarding the show as a whole (other than the setlist), I drew predictions on where she'd be performing, with my main guess being her on top of the igloo on a sort of hidden stage.
The opener of the show was Alex G, who I'm also a fan of. The general idea of his set was much more rock-focused and heavy than I expected it to be, as he's always had a rock influence, but I was more familiar with his acoustic and stripped-down works. The lighting was definitely a major part of the show, with the highlight of his set being the visuals for "Sarah", his closer song (and one of his most well-known). They featured a variety of multicolored lights sort of "dancing" around the pit and circling around the venue, and the tone was much more upbeat than a lot of the other songs performed. Overall, my personal favorites of his set were definitely his performances of June Guitar and Harvey, but him & his band were great performers, though a bit stilted at times.
After Alex G, the pre-show playlist rotated between ambient music and Phoebe Bridgers instrumentals, as well as a play-through of "Have A Quick One Before The Eternal Worm Devours Connecticut" which I found neat. There were lots of moments of earnest connection before the show started that I found particularly beautiful. All of the levels would switch off between doing the wave over and over, engaging in competition in who could do it the best, and clapping when other levels finished one off successfully. Audience members with lighters would call out to others across the stadium and flicker their lights back and forth and wave. The couple next to me started discussing if they wanted to get married. Groups of people on the pit floor would trade handmade bracelets in the corner and dance to nothing as they waited.
This was the first indication throughout the concert that showed just how much the phone-free format was going to affect the experience. There was a lot more interaction between strangers than I usually see at concerts. People were asking each other about their outfits, talking about how they knew Phoebe's music, and just generally being more present in the moment. I watched strangers become friends and people look up from their phones to actually acknowledge where they were and who was around them.
Once Phoebe came on, the production immediately became the focus. The concert itself opened with a vocoder intro of "The Outside", the first track off of Bridgers' new album, with the igloo dome rising to reveal her and her band underneath it, with a beautifully haunting space-themed set behind her.
The lighting throughout the show was probably one of the strongest parts of the entire performance for me. There were so many different approaches to the visuals that it would be difficult to describe all of them, but the second half of "Lost Weekend" was the most impressive, and by far the most recreated part I've seen online. The stadium went completely dark for a split second before suddenly being filled with incredibly colorful strobes. From my seat, the transition felt almost like being inside an edit, where the entire visual environment changes between frames. It was fast and intense, and no video would actually communicate what it felt like to see it in the arena. It's an experience that I don't think could be pulled off if cameras of any sort had been allowed, as they'd have definitely destroyed the sensors of more modern builds.
"Kyoto" had some of the more playful visuals of the show, with colorful and surrealist imagery involving fish, planets, and other shapes moving across the screens. Later, "Moon Song" used a much more realistic image of the moon, which gave the performance a completely different atmosphere. The visuals didn't tend to rely on the actual physical set so much as they did on the performance, so even when the stage setup itself remained relatively consistent, the environment around the performers could completely change.
The B-stage was another strong point of the show as a whole, with Bridgers' spending a decent chunk of the show performing more stripped-down versions there. One of the main visual elements looked almost like a comet or mirror ball, scattering light around the stage as it moved. The B-stage felt much more intimate because of the acoustic quality and the more grounded visuals in general, with fans much closer as well. The second half of her performance of "As Above" was the clearest example of this. Phoebe stood in the middle of a conical beam of light while wisps of light moved above her in different patterns. It was a relatively simple setup compared to some of the more elaborate visuals earlier in the show, but I thought it was one of the most effective, which is also proving to be true based on the sheer number of recreations off of social media.
There was a memorable moment before "Still Standing" (one of the most personal tracks off her new album) where Phoebe spoke about her father and about her relationship with the media recently. She became emotional while talking about it, and she specifically mentioned how meaningful it was to perform without phones in the audience as she could see people's faces rather than having phones held up in front of her. From the audience, it was also noticeably different. There was no wall of screens between the performer and the people watching, and it meant that you could actually pay attention to the person onstage rather than constantly seeing the concert through someone else's recording.
Her "surprise song" for this show was her new single "On Video" from the movie PRIMETIME, which she also acts in. Prior to performing this, she commented on the influences being more 2000s and rock-focused than most of her work, and how she tried to draw from those angrier rock mixes from that time period. The song references the phrase "Angel in the Snow", which Bridgers tends to use a lot (shown by its presence in Still Standing), and is originally from Elliott Smith's song of the same name (an artist she's talked about her love for at length).
Her final performance was, as always, "Scott Street", a song about growing apart and together all in one. Unlike her previous performances of this song however, this one had no phones recording or distraction pulling away from the moment. People in the pit danced and spun around on the floor, and the lights turned on for the first time all concert so everyone could see each other in the venue singing along as "Anyway, don't be a stranger" repeated.
After she closed out by thanking her band, who played through "Never Going Back!" as people left the venue, I was able to collect my final thoughts onto the notebook. Looking back, I think the phone-free format was definitely the biggest reason this concert stands out so much compared with other shows I've attended. The obvious advantage was being able to see the performance more clearly, because there weren't phones constantly being held up in front of me, and I wasn't distracted by people trying to get a particular shot or checking their screens during songs. It also meant that the lighting and visuals were much easier to appreciate because I was seeing them directly instead of seeing a stadium full of screens pointed toward the stage.
More importantly, though, I think taking away the phones changed the way the audience interacted with each other. People had to talk to the people around them because there wasn't an easy way to escape into their phones while waiting. I saw people bonding over wearing the same outfits, asking each other where they were from, trading bracelets, and participating in little things like the wave. None of this was particularly extraordinary on its own, but it happened constantly throughout the night, and it made the audience feel much more like a group of people who had come together to appreciate this artist rather than a group of strangers who wanted to record an experience for their social media.
I also think the format allowed Phoebe to seem much more comfortable onstage. The speech before "Still Standing" was probably the clearest example, but even outside of that moment, there was a different feeling to watching a performer who could actually look out at the audience and see people's faces. It seemed like the lack of phones gave her a greater sense of privacy and connection despite being in front of thousands of people. Considering the break she had taken before returning to performing, I imagine that being able to perform in an environment like that made a significant difference.
The only downside that I can think of is that I have almost no visual record of the concert. I consider myself a documenter and archivist at heart, through videos and photos alike. But I can't pull out my phone and look at a video of the second half of "Lost Weekend" or "As Above," and I don't have pictures of the stage to remind me exactly what everything looked like. Instead, I have several pages of notes and some extremely rough drawings of the stage from before the show. I wrote down things that I thought I would forget, including the lighting, the audience, the songs I liked most, and random details like the Julien Baker song that came on immediately post-show. And when reflecting on the experience as a whole, I think that ended up being more meaningful than hundreds of pictures sitting in my camera roll would have been, because it meant I was present enough to take the time to document what I could, and enjoy what I couldn't in the moment.
By the time I left the United Center, I had a bunch of merch, a half-filled notepad, and what was probably my favorite concert experience so far. The production was obviously a huge part of that, with the lighting being consistently impressive, and the overall atmosphere being son distinct. But what I remember most is how connected everyone felt throughout the night, including Bridgers. I went in expecting the lack of phones to be an inconvenience and brought a notebook because I was worried I would have no way to remember the show afterward. Instead, the lack of phones probably made the concert more memorable than it would have been otherwise. I was able to actually watch the performance, pay attention to the people around me, and experience the concert without constantly thinking about documenting it. After seeing how much of a difference that made, I would have a hard time arguing against doing the same thing for more concerts.
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