Hear Me Out: ‘Waiting Room’ is Phoebe Bridgers’ best song
Phoebe Bridgers has swiftly become one of the leading songwriters around, and for good reason. With an incredible ability to articulate unspeakable feelings, mastering the sad and the difficult, her works are delicate nuggets of rich emotion.
Shrugging her off as a “sad girl songwriter” does her a disservice. Since her breakout debut album, Stranger In The Alps, in 2017, she has proved herself time and time again to be a true poet. Even her earliest tracks, like ‘Smoke Signals’ and ‘Scott Street’ are so intricately made. They weave universal messages of sadness and heartbreak into completely singular images that tie her work tightly to her own life. Even on her biggest and more boisterous pieces like ‘Motion Sickness’, ‘Kyoto’ or the raging ‘I Know The End’, Bridgers proves she has a tight grip on the whole range of human experience and feeling and always seems to have the words for it.
Whether it’s a breakup, a strained family relationship or a final statement to an older abuser, the songwriter navigates big topics with a sharp lyrical pen and a tight eye. Existing within her own artistic world of metaphors and images, there is some indescribable quality to her work that captivated the world. Managing to break into the mainstream despite being anything but dull or easy listening is a testament to the power of emotions shared.
And all that power can be traced back to one song. Before her debut, before Boygenius, before her ever-growing fame, Phoebe Bridgers seemed to bottle up every drop of the potential she continues to prove she has in one track. It was so powerful that when producer Tony Berg heard it, he offered to make Bridgers’ debut album for free as he was desperate to be a part of the legacy he never doubted she would create.
All this, and she wrote it when she was 16. ‘Waiting Room’ is astounding, sitting in Bridgers’ discography like a bomb of talent that was always bound to blow. As the first track the world ever heard from the artist, it truly is her origin story.
“I have, like, a really old song called “Waiting Room,” where – yeah, I wrote it when I was, like, 16. And people find it every once in a while and tag me in it or whatever,” Bridgers told NPR in 2020. “And I think I’m just – one, it’s super sincere, and I meant everything. But it’s so emotionally raw, and I’m so pining for someone,“ she added, admitting she doesn’t love the track so much anymore, “And I think the fact that I’m complaining so much in the song is, especially in retrospect, like, dude, you’re fine.”
But her own view feels clouded by self-doubt. ‘Waiting Room’ feels anything but whiney or complaining. Instead, the track feels like the blueprint for the artist we’d come to know. Especially when it comes to Bridgers’ songs of love and loss, this early cut already holds the kind of poetic approach she’d continue to follow.
“If you were a waiting room, I would never see a doctor / I would sit there with my first-aid kit and bleed,” Bridgers sings in the opening verse. Treating it like another throwaway line, this central metaphor is a devastating liner on utter, reckless devotion. She makes it sound so simple and nonchalant as if that’s not an incredibly rich and heart-wrenching image. As a pattern that continues throughout her work, she always makes the darkest thoughts sound so pure.
Throughout the six-minute long track, she deals gut punch after gut punch in an opus on unrequited love. “Wanna make you fall in love as hard as my poor parents’ teenage daughter / She’ll be the best you ever had if you let her,” she sings at one point, like two open hands offering up adoration. Sweet on the surface and emotionally crushing just below, it speaks highly of a teenager able to capture such feelings with pinpoint precision.
Even as the climax rolls in and one line is repeated repeatedly, Bridgers imbues it with her rich meaning. “Know it’s for the better” is chanted over and over as the instrumental roars to life. But as the words and phrases begin to blur, the meaning twists with it. The line serves as a kind of self-hypnosis as Bridgers begs herself to disconnect from this love, to accept that this is the right thing and to try and act like she believes any of that. The way that “know” can be heard as “no, it’s for the better” begins to sound like a begging argument between two sides of the feeling: compassion and cruelty, delusion and devastation. As a true mantra for anyone who’s suffered the fate of unrequited, destined-to-never-be type love, it says so much in so little.
Even if Bridgers doesn’t love ‘Waiting Room’, and even if instrumentally and lyrically it isn’t her most mature or intricate composition, the track needs to be held up as perhaps the most vital part of her discography. It is a door to everything that was to come, both literally as it connected her with her producer and metaphorically as it seems to hold all the feeling, phrasing and magic she’d grasp tighter in future. A shining moment that captures all of her potential, ‘Waiting Room’ is proof that Phoebe Bridgers was always going to be something special, and even at 16, that talent was already there.
