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Phoebe Bridgers may have just announced her first solo tour in three years – dubbed the Lost Tour – hours after she headlined New York’s Madison Square Garden, but the prolific songwriter and guitarist gave Guitar World an insight into her universe and unique playing style back in 2020, shedding light on what we can expect from her upcoming material.
“I actually fucked up my finger like a year and a half ago, and it stopped me from playing E and F, which was in so many of my songs,” she recalled.
Speaking about this incident and how it ultimately impacted her playing, Bridgers said, “I was cutting stems on flowers, and the knife flipped and just hacked right on my knuckle. Since then, it’s been really stiff, and it hurts like shit. I hope that one day it heals, but that’s been making me be more experimental with chords [and tunings].”
As a result, Bridgers admits that, “I play guitar in a weird way. When I met Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska, who produced both my records [2017’s Stranger in the Alps and 2020’s Punisher], I was basically a folk artist. It was sounding a little basic.”
The singer-songwriter has totally changed her writing process, and views the studio as a space to “fuck up the thing that I just wrote… I try to trick myself to write a song in an open tuning and not even worry about what the chords look like and focus on the melody instead.”
In more recent news, Bridgers’ boygenius bandmate, Lucy Dacus, joined John Mayer in singing the praises of a certain emerging guitar genius.
