Phoebe Bridgers says “it's hilarious to me that people care so much” about her SNL guitar smash

When Phoebe Bridgers attempted to lay waste to her Danelectro Dano '56 last month on Saturday Night Live, she probably didn't anticipate quite the level of backlash she received.

In a new interview with Variety, Bridgers addresses the controversy, and explains why she's sticking to her guns after calling David Crosby a “little bitch”, following his tweet labelling her performance as “pathetic”.

“I stand by it!” she exclaims. “The fact that it made people so mad is kind of what’s punk rock about it. No thought whatsoever went into what it represented or meant: I’d never done it before, so might as well do it [on Saturday Night Live], where it’s gonna be immortalized.”

She continues, “It’s hilarious to me that people care so much, but, I mean, there’s a video of a steamroller crushing a bunch of Gibson [guitars] as a tax write-off because they weren’t selling all of their stock – let that piss you off!”

The video Bridgers alludes to was uploaded to YouTube back in 2019 by former Gibson employee BJ Wilkes, and shows the destruction of hundreds of Firebird X electric guitars. 

Gibson issued a statement shortly after, stating: “The Firebird X destruction video that surfaced months ago was an isolated batch of Firebird X models built in 2009-2011, which were unsalvageable and damaged with unsafe components. This isolated group of Firebird X models were unable to be donated for any purpose and were destroyed accordingly.”

Since the controversy, Gibson – now under CEO James “JC” Curleigh – founded the Gibson Gives foundation, which donates guitars to music development programs, including musicians who lost instruments in last year's Nashville tornadoes.

To hear more from Bridgers, check out her new “sadder version” of Kyoto and cover of John Prine's Summer's End – both released as part of the Spotify Singles series.