Inside Phoebe Bridgers’s Secret Show at Madison Square Garden

Illustration by Laura Sandoval Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story“If any of you figured out how to stick an Apple Watch up your ass or whatever to record, just please don’t put it on the internet,” Phoebe Bridgers told a crowd of some twenty thousand at Madison Square Garden on Thursday night. She was sitting on a drab sofa over which was slung a seventies-style chevron wool blanket. Beside her, the musician Christian Lee Hutson tuned his guitar. Their rapport was relaxed; Bridgers, who is thirty-one, wore a faded Black Sabbath T-shirt and periodically sipped a mug of tea. She hadn’t done a headline solo show in New York in almost half a decade. After her 2020 record, “Punisher,” shot her into the spotlight, it had been less and less clear whether she would continue to make music at all.

The M.S.G. concert—the grand finale of a run of hush-hush pop-ups she’d staged across the country to début a trove of new music—had been announced just three days earlier. In order to maintain the confidentiality of the unreleased material, everything was heavily restricted. Tickets were disseminated via lottery, with sliding-scale entries starting at one dollar; all proceeds went directly to the Community Justice Exchange’s Immigration Bond Freedom Fund. Attendees’ phones were locked in Yondr pouches upon entry. Smart watches, smart glasses, cameras, recording devices, and even writing implements were forbidden. (Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield was apparently briefly ejected for daring to scribble in a notebook.) Security guards in dark suits and ties patrolled the aisles for the duration; one paused to make sure a teen-age girl ahead of me was just tying her shoe and not, one imagines, activating an anklet recorder whose contents she would hawk on the internet.

Overhead monitors showed a live feed of Bridgers’s performance in a grainy, bluish resolution that recalled Nirvana’s “MTV Unplugged,” which was shot just ten blocks away, in 1994—not least because of Bridgers’s startling resemblance to Kurt Cobain. The gauzy, nostalgic V.H.S.-style footage suited the lo-fi vibe of the whole show; despite the enormous venue, it was quaint, shambolic, alive. There were only ever three musicians onstage: Bridgers and Hutson were joined on keys by the longtime Bright Eyes collaborator Nick White. (Hutson also brandished a harmonica, and Bridgers occasionally leaned on a coffee table to play Mellotron.) A few times, Bridgers started strumming the opening chords to a song before realizing Hutson still needed to tune. Christian was always tuning, Bridgers complained, affectionately. She added, “These songs shouldn’t be in tune!” They were just two friends, jamming in someone’s living room.