Happy 5th Anniversary to Phoebe Bridgers’ debut album Stranger in the Alps, originally released September 22, 2017.
At age 24, I started watching Twin Peaks. It was Fall 2017 and I’d just moved to a small New England town, living in a converted garage with terrible insulation, and I wanted a television program that would aesthetically match the crisp air of my surroundings. Indeed, the show started to feel like my newfound, picturesque autumnal world, but as the weather got colder, the episodes got darker. I spent my evenings under three layers of blankets in thermal clothing, watching night descend on that small town. I still had the optimism that my twenties would be an exciting time—new job, new town, new experiences—before the world started to seriously fall apart. When I think back on that time, I still feel that chill on the tip of my nose and hear the guitar riff that defines the show’s opening credits.
The guitar part is a feature of that autumn for another reason, of course: it’s quoted on “Smoke Signals,” the first track on Phoebe Bridgers’ debut album Stranger in the Alps, which was released that September. I loved the way Bridgers’ voice hung out over the word “smoke,” but then glided almost unprettily down to “beach” at the end of the chorus. Charmed though I was, the record seemed to replicate the chill that I was finding in Lynch’s universe and the very air around me.
I appreciate Stranger in the Alps for its honesty; a lot of albums by young singers are full of bravado, mock-maturity, attempts to fit into the cool kids’ club. Kurt Cobain was 24 when he wrote “here we are now / entertain us,” whereas Bridgers released “I’m singing at a funeral tomorrow / for a kid older than me” when she was 23. (Even if she wrote it earlier, she chose not to edit it.) She plants her feet firmly in childhood, even in her twenties, and childhood’s vulnerability lets her write from a perspective that’s not available to the adult-pretenders.
And yet she finds herself in an adult world, where boyfriends are abusive (“Motion Sickness”), people move on with their lives and leave us behind (“Scott Street”), and loneliness reigns supreme. While my own life is perhaps not as tumultuous as Bridgers’, I was drawn to her honesty: there’s a lot going on in this adult world, and I am out of my depth.
She tries to cope but doesn’t know how. On “Funeral,” she swears off dream interpretation, figuring she had outgrown it even though her nightmares continue to freak her out. She turns elsewhere: On “Demi Moore,” she gets high, sends off nudes, and regrets it, resenting the haze of the drugs and the feeling of isolation. She’s experimenting with ways to cope with the changing world around her and finding all of it further alienating and unsatisfying.
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While the text shows this vulnerability, Stranger in the Alps is noteworthy for keeping much of the intensity of Bridgers’ experience contained to the words. Most of her songs are about emotional crisis, but on tunes like “Demi Moore,” “Funeral,” and even the uptempo “Motion Sickness,” she barely raises her voice. The sadness is obvious, but the urgency that this sadness implies isn’t anywhere to be found. She keeps the listener at a distance, as if drenching them in it all would be a bridge too far.
Except for “Georgia,” the earliest composition from Stranger in the Alps and the one with the most blatant desperation. Narratively, the song positions the love interest as a savior, someone who is going to come along and rescue Bridgers from the darkness she’s been singing about the whole time. But her moment of true desperation is when she asks, “If I fix you, will you hate me?” This is the first time we hear Bridgers’ voice at full throttle, as she asks whether fixing this person—asserting herself—would lead to rejection. It’s a trap: she feels like she needs someone who is not right for her but feels like she can’t act because it would push them away.
“Georgia,” the loudest moment on a quiet album, now invites comparisons to both “Me & My Dog” and “I Know the End.” On the former, Bridgers dreams of an adventure where she and her (dearly departed) dog Max blast off into space together. It’s an attempt to re-imagine a lost childhood in order to escape yet another toxic relationship.
“I Know the End,” from 2020’s Punisher, another quiet album punctuated by a scream, is about wrestling with the apocalypse (and also features Max allusions). In the Bridgers Cinematic Universe, the end of the world and the irretrievability of childhood get the same treatment.
Maybe they’re the same thing: finding that the world you live in now is not the one that you grew up in. When Stranger in the Alps came out, and I found myself on my own and rebuilding my life from scratch, I felt this, too.
While many have praised Bridgers for the details in her writing and the strength of her narratives, I find Stranger in the Alps rewarding for maybe a simpler reason. The sadness that runs through the album is a representation of that feeling like you’ve stepped off a cliff into a strange, mixed up and cold world. Many of us can picture the place and time in your life when that happened, and for me it involved a cold bedroom, some David Lynch, and a new singer named Phoebe Bridgers.
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