So, speaking of how amazing Phoebe Bridgers’ opening night was at the Intuit Dome in Los Angeles on Friday night, which part of the show do you talk about first? Could this be the emotionally gripping middle section of the series, in which Bridgers used the phone-free setting to painstakingly explore, in song and monologue, her complex family dynamics, including grieving the loss of a sometimes abusive father who had both a positive and impactful impact on her life? You don’t get moments of frankness and quiet devastation like that in an arena show every day, or ten years.
Orcould this be the part later where Billie Eilish came out in her pink pajamas? The duet on “Savior Complex” where she and Eilish on stage danced in their Peter Pan-inspired costumes? Because, come on. Dude.
Phoebe Bridgers and Billie Eilish kiss at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California on October 30, 2026
Matt Grubb
This “Lost Weekend Tour” stop at the Intuit Dome (the first of three sold-out weekend shows closing out its U.S. tour) provided a wealth of atmospheric moments to talk and write about, so no one can be blamed for picking the most emotional or goofy part of the show to highlight. Eilish’s cameo will surely trump all the other popular vote highlights that are (for once, without images) social media. Regardless, for the Inglewood house audience, it was a beautifully holistic experience, belying the notion that a Bridgers concert would ultimately be anything but a joyous, celebratory experience, these days. Even if she is also perfectly equipped to answer Leonard Cohen’s last rhetorical question: You want it to be darker?
Perhaps the most talked about aspect of this tour is also the one that seems least relevant: the artist’s insistence that all smart devices be encased in Yonder sleeves, which isn’t entirely uncommon for shows in smaller theaters where artists want to keep a secret, but has rarely been done at the arena level. (That’s probably not a small expense on the tour budget, when you have 18,000 covers and the employees to manage them as a line item… so it involves sacrifices for Bridgers as well as the audience.) After returning my Apple Watch as well as my phone, I continued to have the same thought that was running through my head during Alex G’s opening set, as well as the intermission: I know the ending. But I don’t know the time.
But probably few people would say that it didn’t make for a more compelling experience, the feeling of being alone in the dark with no more lighting than what was coming out of the stage and the audio verification that everyone else in the same oversized space is also feeling those sensations. I hate to go too far in praising a crowd, but there was a particularly impressive moment during the evening’s most arresting number, “Still Standing,” which Bridgers performed accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, without a band. There was absolute silence throughout this performance, but toward the end of the song, Bridgers’ strumming became so muffled that I was afraid unnecessary applause would break out because some of the crowd might think it was the end, as often happens at concerts. But this audience was too savvy to be faked, and their silence was maintained during this most delicate passage – which, combined with the lack of visual intrusion from an 18,000-strong camera crew, created heartbreaking magic.
Phoebe Bridgers at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California on October 30, 2026
Wes Eillis
Bridgers commented on his choice to be a bit of a pioneer in banning phones on such a significant level. She didn’t phrase it in the language of a techno-rebuke, but in wanting to allow the possibility of speaking freely and unabashedly about what it would look like the next day in a world that cares far less than those who managed to get a ticket. Midway through the segment of the show where she talked about her father and mother, she said, “I can’t thank you enough for being willing to go without your devices for a few hours,” noting that otherwise the revealing things she had just said “would have been a TikTok moment, where someone who doesn’t like my face would have commented on it.”
At the same time, she had a sense of humor later, when, just after Eilish left the stage in costume pajamas, Bridgers blurted out: “You don’t have your phones. Ha ha!” If it looked like jubilation for a second, the crowd seemed ready to laugh along with her. Before Eilish’s guest spot, they also had a value-added moment when Muna came out to join Bridgers for “Silk Chiffon,” another moment that had everyone reaching for their absent phone, as if it were a phantom limb. Everyone enjoyed these viral moments in exchange for not being able to make them viral.
Bridgers performed 14 of the 16 tracks from his two-and-a-half-month-old “Lost Weekend” album (leaving out only a few short interludes), and his belief that his audience would want to hear this latest release completely dominate the setlist was not misplaced. The album oscillates – sometimes within the same song – between her mixed feelings about her father and his death, the negative side and the positive side, her seemingly happy relationship with Bo Burnham. He occasionally deviates from these two threads, as with “The Governor’s Waltz”, a breakup song about a past relationship of some importance, poignant in its sense of disappointment but also hilarious and sarcastic in places. But above all, he crosses the poles, on the one hand, grappling with death and its consequences, and, on the other, a great old fresh romance. The concert, like the album, feels like a successful case of holding two thoughts at once: the irreversibility of death and grief and the major rise of true love. You could spend the rest of your life writing about these two subjects, so it’s no wonder that “Lost Weekend” feels like such a complete meal, and certainly a great journey to take an audience through an hour and 55 minutes of concert.
Bridgers reserved most of her more intimate material for a second act in which she moved to a B stage toward the back of the floor section. There, she sat cross-legged on the floor in front of a synthesizer that initially malfunctioned. “Oh no, it’s broken,” she said. “Of course it happens at home.” While she may not have been in an ironic mood at the time, it seemed somewhat fitting that the song she was about to do, the title track of “Lost Weekend,” was a song about a broken engagement. Once the synth’s powers were restored, she was able to work her way through the chilling ballad, which culminated in a partial line that many people could relate to after an intense relationship gone wrong: “You know me, and I’ll never forgive you.” On record, the song then transforms into a slightly unsettling one-minute instrumental coda. Live, it was something else entirely: a total auditory and visual panic in which bursts of light struck all parts of the audience in rapid, intense bursts as the sound system became overloaded. Intuit’s lobbyists included the usual warnings about strobe presence in production, but they really weren’t kidding in this case.
Phoebe Bridgers with Muna at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California on October 30, 2026
Wes Ellis
But that last minute of “Lost Weekend” (the song) was the only part of the night that could be described as aggressive. The crucial middle part of the show continued to deal with difficult emotions, but in a gentle way. On stage B, she brought in four acoustic musicians – handling a violin, mandolin, double bass and banjo/mandocello – to support her in what sounded like a long, spacy-hootenanny section. “Graceland Too” from his previous album, about a friend in need, stood out here. And it was followed by its new album cousin, “Haunted,” which on record represents a Boygenius-meets-Nickel Creek moment (literally and figuratively) – the Americana song of the year, perhaps? – and which sounded just as beautifully playful with this lineup. Ironically, it’s a song about the old feeling of touring dread that’s so joyous in its root delivery that it convinces you that Bridgers has had a change of heart and loves being on the road now.
And then it got personal. “I’ve always loved Halloween; it’s always been my favorite,” she said, explaining why everyone in her group and crew was dressed as someone from “Peter Pan,” from the Darling family to pirates to a crocodile…with Bridgers herself as Pan, the first lost boy. Turning to her offstage brother to confirm this memory, she said, “I was supposed to be Tinker Bell when I was little,” but she “threw a tantrum” and insisted on being Captain Hook — “internalizing some of my feelings about men,” she surmised.
This led to more insightful thoughts that spawned the heartbreaking songs that followed. “My father died about four years ago – a complicated man to say the least,” she said. Anyone who had heard her sing about their sometimes estranged relationship in her biggest hit, “Kyoto,” already knew that, but there was a lot more to dig into now. She said they had “a relationship that we talked about every couple of years”, usually at a time when she was working on material for her next project, and indicated that she was struggling to go through many of those cycles now – writing, recording, album releasing -…
Gn entert
