The 10 covers Phoebe Bridgers has played live the most
Since her breakout, Phoebe Bridgers has soared to the top, taking her place as one of the leading lyricists of modern music. As an artist, she’s beloved for her ability to effortlessly articulate tricky feelings. Never content to lean into cliché, Bridgers navigates big topics like love, grief, friendship, and family with a pen that’s at once both hyper-specific and universally poetic. But sometimes, her own words fail her. Sometimes, she has to lean on someone else.
From the very start of her career, Bridgers has never been shy about sharing covers of some of her all-time favourite songs. She embodies the idea that to be a music maker is to still be a music fan, proving that engaging with the music of others can only ever add to an artist’s inspiration rather than take away or diminish their talents. Instead, the artists that Bridgers loves or has covered throughout her career all contribute to building a tapestry of the artist she is.
“None of my family are musicians, but there was a lot of classic rock and country going on,” she said, recalling the sound of her childhood. “I had pretty much every Neil Young album, Tom Waits album. Just kind of what my parents were listening to,” she continued, remembering her first-ever live music experience as she went to see Young with her mother. While none of her family work in the industry, they undeniably shaped her and are right there on the stage with her as she covers some of the songs they first introduced her to.
Tom Petty is also a primary influence, as Bridgers shared a cover of ‘It’ll All Work Out’ on the extended edition of her debut album, Stranger In The Alps. Taking the classic rock song and stripping it back to a tender, acoustic ballad, her regular outing of the cover is so beautifully representative of her artistic identity. On her version, she allows the storytelling lyricism to lead the way, as she does in her own original songs. But still, her clear love for rock music is never lost as she routinely kicks it all up into high gear on songs like ‘I Know The End’ or Boygenius‘ ‘$20’.
That interplay between rock and soft ballads, between heavy and tender, is felt across nearly every song that Bridgers regularly covers. Just as she sits on the line dipping between those two styles, she honours artists who do, too. Radiohead’s ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ is often added to her setlists, as is Sheryl Crow’s ‘If It Makes You Happy’, representing two very different sides of Bridgers and two very different sounds that inspire her.
Elsewhere, Bridgers proves time and time again that she’s a music fan, just like the rest of us. She regularly gives space in her sets to ‘Whatever (Folk Song in C)’, playing her favourite song by her all-time favourite artist, Elliott Smith, a figure that haunts her music like a God. “What if I told you I feel like I know you / But we never met?” she sings about the musician on her own track, ‘Punisher’. In one interview, she discussed the insurmountable inspiration he’s provided her, stating, “It’s like The Beatles to me, and I mean that in every way.”
Alongside her lifelong inspirations, her choice of covers also celebrates the various collaborators and supporters that have built her career. She’s played Bright Eyes’ ‘Bad Blood’ plenty of times, nodding towards the work of Conor Oberst who she was in Better Oblivion Community Center with and has toured with before. The same goes for ‘Part Time Heart’, a song by her long-term collaborator and drummer Harrison Whitford, or ‘Wilt’, a song by her old band, Sloppy Jane. She also regularly performs ‘That Funny Feeling’, a song by her partner Bo Burnham, which she recorded and released as a charity single in 2021, representing not only her collaborative streak but her regular activism from her lofty platform.
But whether she’s honouring the sounds of her childhood or the sounds from people that she’s shared stages with, all of Bridgers’ covers are made utterly her own. When it comes to ‘You Missed My Heart’, a track by Mark Kozelek and Jimmy LaValle that she recorded in 2018 and regularly plays live, anyone who didn’t know the original would easily mistake it for her own lyrical effort. All laid out like stepping stones, the covers she chooses to do feels like a pathway, drawing out blueprints for the artist Bridgers is, and exactly how she came to be.
Phoebe Bridger’ most-played covers:
- ‘You Missed My Heart’ – Mark Kozelek & Jimmy LaValle
- ‘It’ll All Work Out’ – Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
- ‘Everything Is Free’ – Gillian Welch
- ‘That Funny Feeling’ – Bo Burnham
- ‘If It Makes You Happy’ – Sheryl Crow
- ‘Bad Blood’ – Bright Eyes
- ‘Peek-a-Boo’ – Daniel Johnston
- ‘Whatever (Folk Song in C)’ – Eliott Smith
- ‘Wilt’ – Sloppy Jane
- ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ – Radiohead
