“And if you didn’t like either one of my friends / I’d kill them, I’d kill them / Bobby / This could be the end of wanting … This could be the end / This could be the end / This could be the end / This could be the end / Now I don’t know if I can make it tonight / But what are you doing the rest of my life, Bobby?” — “Bobby” by Phoebe Bridgers
“Bobby’s just a friend of mine / He’s on his back / … / I’d leave him for you / If you want me to / I’d leave him for you / If you want me to” — “Bobby” by Alex G
Phoebe Bridgers’ “Lost Tour” came to South Philly last Monday, Sept. 28. Many times throughout the night, but especially when these two songs (both entitled “Bobby”) were performed back-to-back, only one question came to my mind: “What the hell is wrong with these people?”
For Bridgers, the night was a long time coming. Prior to 2026, she had not performed solo since opening for Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour” in 2023 and had not released solo music since her 2020 album “Punisher.” On May 8, 2026, after nearly three years of relative radio silence, she made her much-anticipated return to solo performance.
Her first show back was staged at The Liberty in Roswell, New Mexico, a venue with a capacity of just 400. From then on, Bridgers embarked on a pop-up tour of rapid-fire surprise shows in small venues in seemingly random corners of the United States (though largely speculated to be locations associated with extraterrestrial behavior). Beginning in Roswell, the tour then continued to Lubbock, TX; Little Rock, AR; Memphis, TN; Jackson, MS; Mobile, AL; Macon and Savannah, GA; Greenville, SC; Chattanooga, TN; Lexington, KY; Huntington, WV; Toledo, OH; Champaign, IL; Davenport, IA; Eau Claire, WI; and Fargo, ND. Each of these shows were announced less than 24 hours in advance, with tickets priced at or under $50. At the inaugural show of this secret tour, she debuted three entirely new songs, “Kill Me,” “I Can’t Wait,” and “Still Standing,” all of which were later released on her 2026 album entitled “Lost Weekend.”
The pop-up tour culminated in a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden in New York City, with each ticket priced at just $1 with all proceeds going to Community Justice Exchange’s Immigration Bond Freedom Fund, a fund which pays bonds for ICE detainees.
The tour garnered a great deal of attention from her “Pharbs” and adjacent music lovers, and left everybody — especially those who couldn’t make it to the pop-ups — wanting more. However, Bridgers made strides to ensure there was no way to know exactly what happened in the venues. Every show from Roswell to NYC was severely locked down. Attendees were not permitted to bring pens and paper into the concert, let alone cameras (film or otherwise), their phones, smart watches, or other recording devices. At first, I (among others) thought that the disallowance of phones, cameras, recording equipment, pens, and paper was just a measure to prevent people from leaking her unreleased music. It later became clear that she had a multiplicity of reasons to make this decision.
Days after her sold-out NYC show on June 4, Bridgers announced “The Lost Tour,” a three-month phones-free tour which would hit 23 U.S. cities and twelve internationally. Nineteen days later, she announced that she would be releasing a new solo album entitled “Lost Weekend” on Aug. 14.
The no-phones-allowed aspect of the tour raised quite the controversy, but I was wholly unsurprised. When I saw her tour with boygenius — a triad composed of herself, Julien Baker, and Lucy Dacus — at the Mann Center in Sept. 2023, she asked the audience to put their phones away before performing “Letter To An Old Poet.”
Her reasons for the phone ban became even more evident once “Lost Weekend” was released. The album is largely about the 2023 passing of her father, with whom she had a tumultuous relationship. These songs, along with “Letter To An Old Poet,” are some of the most vulnerable on her discography, and she has stated at multiple shows that she did not want to perform such emotional songs live with thousands of people filming. As a friend of mine put it, “We need to accept the fact that Phoebe Bridgers doesn’t want to be faced with hundreds of cameras while singing about her turbulent relationship with her father!”
Furthermore, I rebuke critics who say they want to film shows for the memories. I know firsthand that nobody ever rewatches concert videos: I filmed half of the 2023 boygenius videos, and I’ve never rewatched a minute of it.
All this to say, not being allowed to have access to my phone did not prevent me from wanting to attend the tour whatsoever. I was able to snag presale tickets for the Philadelphia date back in early June and eagerly anticipated the show, before I even knew a new album would be out by the show date. I stayed up until midnight on June 25 and Aug. 14 to give her lead single “Lost Boys” and her album “Lost Weekend” late-night listens.
The show itself was everything I anticipated, and a little bit more. Although people who had attended previous shows posted some information about the set, setlist, etc. online, I didn’t see nearly the number of spoilers that I might have if people were able to record the show.
My co-Pharbz and I arrived at the show a solid two hours prior to the slated opener performance time, but we were far from the first Philadelphian Pharbz to hit the Stadium District. The lines to enter and to buy merch were long, and as soon as we entered the venue, we were asked to put our phones and smart watches in YONDR pouches that we then carried around for the remainder of the show.
Our group split to go to our respective seats as soon as we entered the venue, and my friend Andy ’27 and I took our seats. Roughly four minutes passed before Andy pulled their physics problem-set out of their bra to pass the device-free time. They didn’t spend long on the problems though. We instead opted to get $20 baskets of Chickie’s and Pete’s fries (absurd!) and talk about how funny we found it that half of the songs on “Lost Weekend” were about Bo Burnham, Bridgers’ long-term partner.
A few hours later, Havertown’s own Alex G began his opening set. A few more hours later, Alex G was just barely halfway through his set, or at least that’s how it felt. There were mixed reviews of Alex G’s performance all over social media and among my friends. Andy looked like they were being physically restrained in the seat against their will. When he announced that there were still three more songs left in his set, we both audibly groaned.
I’m not an Alex G fan, but I listened to some of his music ahead of time, and I must say that the studio versions of the songs he performed were extremely different from the live versions. I whispered in Andy’s ear multiple times throughout the opener that each and every song was “somehow bad in a different way.”
A friend of mine, Mirix Robertson-Leich, attends Hamilton College in New York and went to the NYC show. She had a slightly different take on his performance telling me that he was “nowhere near as bad as people online were making him sound,” but also that “there was a point where he said ‘this is our last song’ and then proceeded to play genuinely eight more songs.” This checks out, given that he played a whopping nineteen songs at the Philly show. Although Mirix enjoyed it, she said that some songs constituted “formless noise and vocaliz[ation],” and that she “burst out laughing for a good two minutes because [she] just couldn’t take his singing seriously.”
Andy had a stronger negative opinion, telling me that she felt that “watching the opener was like watching your dad get his college band back together and play ten of the unreleased hits from their debut and only album.”
When Bridgers finally took the stage, she played a total of 26 songs, including all but two songs from the “Lost Weekend,” which has a 52 minute and 42 second runtime. She also played six songs from “Punisher” (2020), three songs from “Stranger in the Alps” (2017), two singles, and one cover.
Throughout the night, grainy and dreamy images of Bridgers, constellations, and members of her band were projected onto a massive curtain behind the main stage. A standout moment of the show was the ending of “Lost Weekend,” during which an asteroid-looking disco-ball-ish apparatus projected hundreds of rainbow lights beamed out into the audience in a way I’d never seen before. According to Mirix, at the NYC show, Bridgers cited another reason for the phone-free policy was to ensure the lights stood out: “because the lights were so important to the show, they wanted to make sure the light was coming only from the production.”
As Andy put it, “the spacial/visual/audio effects were unique and distracted from the heavy references to Bo Burnham throughout the album.”
She opened with the first song from “Lost Weekend,” and “The Outside,” before transitioning to “Motion Sickness,” a favorite of mine from “Stranger in the Alps.” The bulk of the concert was performed on the main stage, which had been hidden under a UFO-esque dome for the opener and first song. Interludes took place on the secondary stage on which Alex G had performed, with many of the lights emanating from the faux asteroid above the stage. Standouts from the intermediate section of the concert were “Lost Boys,” “Garden Song,” “Funeral,” and “Haunted” (my favorite from her newest album).
After playing Bridgers’ “Bobby,” (the only song to explicitly name Burnham), she brought Alex G back out, much to Andy’s initial chagrin. The two of them then performed a duet of his 2017 song “Bobby,” after which we each came to the conclusion that he had partially redeemed himself.
She then performed “Waiting Room,” which was much to the excitement of the screaming sixteen-year-olds seated in the row behind us. “Waiting Room” is one of her lesser-performed songs, and was at one point removed from Spotify.
Next up was “I Can’t Wait,” on which Geese’s Cameron Winter is featured. Winter was presumably preoccupied with Geese’s current tour, so in lieu of his presence, Bridgers brought out her younger brother, Jackson Bridgers, to accompany her.
This was followed by her performance of “On Video,” which is a newly-released single from the soundtrack of “PRIMETIME” (2026), a Chris Hansen biopic that Bridgers also starred in. “On Video” was a standout to Mirix, who saw it at the NYC show: “she used her very metal-looking electric guitar and with the way she was playing and everything I thought ‘oh, she’s literally a rock star.’”
Bridgers closed the main set with a fake-out ending of “Kyoto,” “I Know the End,” and then “Lost Weekend (Reprise),” the final song of “Lost Weekend.” She then returned for an encore on the B-stage donning an all-white outfit with fake glow-in-the-dark tears streaming down her face. There, she sang “Scott Street,” which ends with the lines “anyway, don’t be a stranger / don’t be a stranger,” before her band played her off with an instrumental version of “Never Going Back!”.
Friends of mine particularly enjoyed the “depression hits from her discography” with one of them going so far as to say that “It was sick and twisted … I nearly threw myself down three flights of stairs into a rat king of curly haired futch lesbians all tangled together by their carabiners below.”
Throughout the show, Bridgers made multiple comments about her dad’s passing. Though, in a moment of comedy, she asked if there were any dads in the audience, at which point a very Delco dad loudly made himself known. When she asked if anybody’s dad was dead like her own, he shouted even louder.
Afterwards, a friend of mine, Menah ’28 said she appreciated the no-phones policy: “reflecting on what was seriously one of the best concerts I’ve been to, I can confidently say that it enhanced the concert experience.” Andy told me the policy was “worth it because [she] didn’t have to watch five fifteen-year-olds film the entirety of the concert just for it to rot in their camera roll.” Mirix told me that “the no phones thing was really special because in some sense it feels like a return to what concerts are meant to be like,” and that she felt that people relinquishing their phones “gave her a more safe space to be a little vulnerable [about her father’s death.]”
So what the hell is wrong with these people? It turns out that it could be any number of things.
