October 11, 2026

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by Jacob Ganz

This week, NPR Music’s editor sits in for Ann Powers, and appreciates the effects of one artist’s effort to impose a limit on the experience of fans at her concerts.

Photo of Phoebe Bridgers performing in concert in 2022

Kate Green/Getty Images

The most charming thing I saw on the internet this week was a lie, enabled by an inconvenience. It landed in front of me thanks to the usual writer of this newsletter, Ann Powers, who couldn’t resist dropping into a work chat with a few colleagues to note that content creators had been making videos detailing unexpected, unlikely and unverifiable events taking place at Phoebe Bridgers concerts.

Unexpected like conservative commentators being invited on stage to perform extended readings from landmark works of queer literature. Unlikely as in Bridgers stopping the show to ask the audience for vintage currency in order to purchase the only candy that could make her sad enough to perform. And unverifiable because Bridgers is enforcing a ban on cell phones for the entirety of her Lost Tour — everyone in the audience has to lock up their devices while they’re attending the show.

I’d already seen plenty of people online talking about “the Phoebe Bridgers no phones tour” and watched videos of audience members reacting in wonder at the experience of being among tens of thousands of other people without any devices — and, crucially, cameras. That absence is what makes those charming, outlandish stories, delivered one and all with a straight face and an “I wonder if anyone else had an experience like this,” possible. They wink at the fact that nobody can prove they’re not true, because nobody can prove that anything did or didn’t happen inside the concert venue, at least not using the evidence upon which we’ve come to depend.

What Bridgers fans are proving more than capable of is using creativity to share their experiences. The other notable meme emerging on social media out of the Lost Tour is drawings of the event, sketched in notebooks that are allowed into the shows, or illustrated from memory after leaving. If those efforts match up a little more directly with the earnest stereotype of a devoted Bridgers fan, they also honor the demand that she made of her audience: to be present and attentive, to not let the moment slip away.

I didn’t make it to any of Bridgers’ shows in Brooklyn, but NPR Music’s reporter Isabella Gomez Sarmiento was in the audience for one night, so I asked her to share with me what the scene was like inside the venue. Here’s what she wrote:

The production and set design were immaculate. Phoebe looked, at times, like a hologram projected out of a UFO, or a light orb floating in the middle of Barclays Center. But it was a deeply human show.

She broke up the set between the full-throttle rock songs and stripped-down string arrangements of the folk tunes. Emanating both a deep grief and a cautious optimism, her voice pierced through the screaming fans and seemed to crystallize in the air as a storm of flashing lights broke out around her. She messed up the lyrics to “Bobby” halfway through and had to start over, a mistake that came across as incredibly charming and got even more cheers during the second intro.

When she opened up about her complicated relationship with her father, her experience with loss and her time away from the spotlight, it felt like a real moment of connection between an artist and her audience. She thanked people for putting their phones away, saying something along the lines of “I know it’s annoying,” but it truly felt like everyone in the room was just happy to be there — like musicians are allowed to set boundaries and their fans will respect them.

If phones had been allowed, portions of the show would have surely gone viral. But it was incredibly powerful, given how much Lost Weekend contends with the finicky nature of memory, for the live show to be so fully grounded in the present.

It’s worth noting that Bridgers still hasn’t given any interviews about Lost Weekend or the concerts she’s performing in support of it. (Photos are actually hard to come by: The image at the top of this newsletter is from a concert Bridgers performed in 2022.) That has turned out to mean, generally, that there are a lot of blanks for fans to fill in, and they are rising to the challenge. She designed an atmosphere that prioritized privacy and intimacy at a moment when she’s playing in front of the largest audiences of her career. I wonder how many concert goers in 2026 are going to discover that they prefer the experience.

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