The mysterious other supergroup of Phoebe Bridgers
It started with a bench. In January 2019, a poster on a bench on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and North Alvarado Street in the heart of Los Angeles’ Echo Park advertised the Better Oblivion Community Centre. Today, we know it better as a band consisting of Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes and Phoebe Bridgers. At the time, however, only those deeply connected to those artists’ online fan base knew they were working on music together.
Looking at it today, the poster still has a surreal edge. The kind summed up by its location in the heart of Los Angeles. The ‘City of Angels’ is a place where you can look one way and see The Museum of Broken Relationships, and in another find a guy in a Tigger suit getting beaten up by the Dollar Tree Avengers. Everything is steeped in a haze, deeply sincere yet patently ridiculous.
One can imagine more than a few people looking at this poster, clocking its promises of “chosen family therapy”, “free human empathy screening”, and, alarmingly, “sacred crystal implanting and removal” and thinking, “Yeah, sounds like LA.” Perhaps they even visited the website or called the hotline number pasted across the poster. After all, what else are people looking for in that city than the promised “Better Oblivion”?
Those who called were greeted by a message recorded by Reverend Christian Lee Hutson, who welcomed the caller to the flock. He promised that he would be visiting the community centre on January 24th, 2019, and hoped to see you there. Then a group of people started chanting, their voices growing louder and louder until the call ended abruptly. Categorically, the whole project would never, ever get cooler than that very moment.
How was Phoebe Bridgers involved with Better Oblivion Community Centre?
Shortly after the posters started getting around, those signed up to Oberst and Bridger’s PR companies started getting flyers in the mail. These flyers were expanded versions of the posters, and it was there that the rumour mill went into overdrive. Many people online pointed out that Christian Lee Hutson was also the name of a musician, a singer/songwriter that Phoebe Bridgers had called one of her favourites of all time.
Barely a year after Bridgers had released the first Boygenius EP, it was becoming clear that she’d done it again. This time around, though, her fellow “boys”, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, had been switched out for a man who, two decades previously, was feted as an actual “boy genius” of emo, Conor Oberst. The signs had long been around. Oberst had appeared on Bridgers’ debut album, singing backup vocals on the track ‘Would You Rather’ and Bridgers had given interviews about producing music. No one had put this together, though.
However, there was one more swerve in the storyline. Everything from the phone line to the flyers to the website pointed to January 24th being the day everything would be unveiled officially. They were not wrong. It would even be the band’s live debut, Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst appearing on that night’s edition of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. What nobody was expecting was that their whole debut album wouldn’t just be announced that day, but also arrive on streaming platforms in its entirety.
The album is decent—nothing that wouldn’t be completely blown out of the water four years later when Phoebe Bridgers reunited with Boygenius to make The Record. However, I can’t remember the last time an album rollout was shrouded in this level of imagination, theatre, and creativity.
At the moment, social media is being used to strip mystery, excitement, hell, even basic creativity and artistic identity away from bands and artists. In its place, everyone is forced into the same identikit promo cycle of scarfing down hot wings mid-interview and being bullied into making TikToks in the name of cringe-laden “relatability”. Is it all technically just a publicity stunt? Sure, if you want to be boring about it. Call me crazy, but I believe it means more than that.
Artists should be allowed to create their own universes with their records, and as Better Oblivion showed, it absolutely works. One hopes that an artist is given that level of freedom sometime soon. There’s literally no reason for them not to have it and run with it.
