HER SATANIC MAJESTY REQUESTS
PHOEBE BRIDGERS is flicking through the pages of the latest issue of Pagan Dawn, the in-house quarterly of the British Pagan Foundation. “My favourite thing about it is that it says ‘DIY Funerals’ on the cover, but I read the piece and it was slightly disappointing,” she comments dryly. Bridgers picked up her copy of this esteemed publication on a recent trip from Los Angeles to London (complete with the requisite two weeks quarantine) at one of her favourite places – Treadwell’s, the specialist occult bookstore. “I have tons of weird shit over here that I got there,” she says of the shop, which, if you’re ever in the market for esoteric literature and bundles of ritualistic sage, can be found down an unassuming Bloomsbury backstreet.
Uncut meets the 26-year-old singer-songwriter, producer and budding witch via video call from the wood-panelled office and guitar storage space in the Echo Park apartment she’s lived in for the past two years. Rifling around behind her laptop, a smiling Bridgers begins to wave other purchases from the store in front of her computer, including a hefty tome on this history of Welsh witches. Further rustling around among the tarot cards and incense leads Bridgers to grab what looks like a giant spell book. Holding it in front of her camera she opens it to reveal a hidden storage compartment containing the detritus of a touring musician – muddled lanyards, wristbands and backstage passes. It’s a collection, she notes, that hasn’t been topped up for a while.
2020 has been a strange year for everyone, but it’s been perhaps even stranger forarrived in June, confirming her place at the centre of a cluster of millennial songwriters, pitched somewhere between Laurel Canyon classicism and indie folk. Though written and recorded over the previous year and a half, songs about the end of the world and anxiety proved remarkably prescient. Bridgers was now not just a great singer-songwriter, but a soothsayer too.
