Phoebe Bridgers: “I’m at a level where it’s probably not advantageous for people to fuck with me.”

From her apartment in Los Angeles, Phoebe Bridgers bids Hot Press good afternoon. Or, if you’re many time zones away, good morning. Whatever the line of longitude, it’s clearly been a pretty good 2020 for the indie singer, whose Punisher was one of the year’s most acclaimed records and who has followed up that success with four Grammy nominations and now the Hot Press gong for Female Artist of the Year.

As it happens she was in this part of the world over the summer to shoot the video to her new single, ‘Saviour Complex’. It was filmed on a grainy beach in Scotland, with her near-namesake Phoebe Waller-Bridge directing and Normal People’s Paul Mescal starring (alongside a melancholic Chihuahua). The really big bombshell dropped in the vid, however, is that Bridgers can drive a tractor.

“I was sent a lot of different tractor samples,” she laughs. “And I’d never driven stick shift. The car situation over there, I just can’t do it.”

For all her accomplishments, it’s clearly been a strange 2020 for the 26-year-old native of Pasadena. Punisher was released bang in the middle of lockdown. Later, LA was an epicentre for the Black Lives Matters protests. And then came the American Presidential election and the very slow ousting from office of a certain Orange Ogre.

“Surreal, unprecedented… it’s all those things. I think that if I hadn’t put out a record this year, I don’t know what I’d be doing. I’m trying to take stock and appreciate things. I was starting to get pretty road-weary. At the start of the year I was in New York on a press trip. And I was like, ‘fuck’, I forgot how hard parts of this are.”

Bridgers has become famous quite quickly. However, she certainly isn’t an overnight arrival. She was playing in Ireland as far back as February 2017, when she opened at the BGE Theatre, Dublin for Conor Oberst. She and Oberst were back here in 2019, with their Better Oblivion Community Center project.

Around that time her name began trending for reasons not directly related to her music. She spoke to the New York Times in an exposé of behaviour by Ryan Adams, headlined, “Ryan Adams Dangled Success. Women Say They Paid A Price”.

Bridgers had touched on the subject previously, when talking to the Daily Telegraph.  “A mutual friend in LA was like, ‘Ryan would like you’. He really was just trying to get me recording and trying to get Ryan to hear me, but Ryan was like, ‘Let me see a picture of her’,” she said in 2018.

She and Adams “ended up hanging out all night and recording a song together called ‘Killer’”, she told the newspaper. “Then, a couple of weeks later, he was suddenly trying to hook up with me. I was super-down and had just broken up with my high-school boyfriend.

“In the weeks that followed, Adams’s attention turned obsessive and emotionally abusive,” the New York Times piece reported. “He began barraging her with texts, insisting that she prove her whereabouts, or leave social situations to have phone sex, and threatening suicide if she didn’t reply immediately.” In July this year, Adams apologised for his “harmful behaviour”.

“It’s been a lot of emotional labour, but I’ll gladly take that on for the most part,” she told Hot Press’s Lucy O’Toole last June. “After the article about Ryan came out, I had these people from my past reaching out, and people who were in completely different situations, saying, ‘Oh my god, thank you for saying something’. I got tagged in a couple of things that were like, ‘I called out my abuser because I saw that article – thank you’. It’s just a ripple effect, and I hope to normalise it.”

“I’ve had people get called out for inappropriate behaviour around me,” she says now. “And I’m like, ‘oh shit... I’m at a level where it’s probably not advantageous for people to fuck with me’. Whereas, when I was 20, Ryan Adams… I was just a kid playing in Pasadena.

“He came to one of my shows once and I was literally playing for five people. And one of them was my mom. I don’t think he thought it would really go anywhere if he was horrible to me. Or that I had anybody to really talk about it to.”

She knows these sort of people are still out there. It’s just that they won’t mess with her now, because of who she is.

“I’m like, ‘damn… I’m not going to be able to spot [them] as easily. Because people are putting their best faces on for me now.”

In addition to the Hot Press Female Artist of the Year accolade, Phoebe has received four Grammy nominations. The Best Rock Performance category is all-female for the first time: in addition to Bridgers, it includes Fiona Apple, Haim, Grace Potter, Brittany Howard and Adrienne Lenker’s Big Thief.

“I think nobody wants to get in trouble,” says Bridgers of the all-female list. “So I think that being represented…it’s about time, I guess. But also, it’s great. If the social tide is putting pressure on companies to recognise people in that way. I don’t really care what it is. I don’t care if it’s pandering. I think it’s awesome.”

Bridgers may have been locked-down for much of 2020. Nonetheless she has seen history on her doorstop. Over the summer, LA was swept by Black Lives Matters protests. And then came the Presidential election. Afterwards Bridgers fulfilled her promise that, in the event of a Biden win, she would cover ‘Iris’ by Goo Goo Dolls (Maggie Rogers duetted).

“In LA we live in a liberal bubble. But a lot of the administration here is still really backwards. It was nice to watch the community rise up. I went to a couple of different marches. At one, mothers shared stories of their kids being murdered. The details were so harrowing., I can’t believe they weren’t on the news [previously].”

Going back to the Normal People TV series – she’s a massive fan. So what is it about two miserable teenagers in Sligo that spoke to someone half a world away?

“I read the book when I was making my record. It was Phoebe Waller-Bridge who convinced me to watch the series. I was so depressed after finishing the book. I thought the show was going to depress me too much. And it did, it really did. But Paul and Daisy [Edgar-Jones] being so human and funny, in real life, pull you out of the depressive episode of it. You fall for these characters being real and out in the world. The universal thing for me is that it’s about how miscommunication can cause years of pain. All you want the whole time is for them to sit down and talk about how they actually feel. And they just have too much pride.”

• Punisher is out now.