Stream: Phoebe Bridgers, ‘Motion Sickness’

Kevin Bronson on July 18th, 2017

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Phoebe Bridgers (Photo by Frank Ockenfels)

Phoebe Bridgers has been holding listeners rapt since her days playing tiny club shows and the Room 5 (R.I.P.) songwriters circle with fellow teenagers like Charlie Hickey. Her 2015 Ryan Adams-produced single “Killer,” a re-recording of a song she’d self-released in 2014, exposed Bridgers to a wider audience, as did ensuing tours with Conor Oberst, Julien Baker and Adams.

Today, the Pasadena native, now all of 22, announced that her debut “Stranger In The Alps” would be out Sept. 22 via Dead Oceans. With the news comes the new song “Motion Sickness,” which — like the stunner of a single “Smoke Signals,” released in January — finds Bridgers weaving a tender narrative in a voice at once cherubic and worldly-wise. “I have emotional motion sickness / Somebody roll the windows down,” she sings, finding a new twist on an emotional roller-coaster, this one involving somebody who was “in a band when I was born.”

“Stranger in the Alps” was produced by Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska and includes: a duet with Oberst on “Would You Rather;” a cover of Mark Kozelek’s “You Missed My Heart;” a third version of “Killer” (this featuring vocals from John Doe); and two other re-imagined songs, “Georgia” and “Chelsea,” originally self-released in 2014.

Bridgers says of the album: “I wasn’t trying to be too lo-fi, too hi-fi, too self-serious, too disingenuous. … I feel pretty confident that I’m finding my voice. I wanted the album to completely represent who I am and these songs are representative of what I set out to do.”

||| Stream: “Motion Sickness”