Six years passed between Phoebe Bridgers’ second and third solo albums, but it was hardly time off. Between 2020’s Punisher — her major breakthrough, which yielded her a best new artist Grammy nomination — and 2026’s Lost Weekend, the singer-songwriter, with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, dropped The Record, their Grammy-winning debut album as boygenius; toured as a solo artist, with boygenius and as an opener on nearly a dozen Eras Tour dates with Taylor Swift; launched Saddest Factory Records as an imprint of her label, Dead Oceans (which ultimately absorbed Saddest Factory in June); and filmed her acting debut in Lance Oppenheim’s recently released Primetime. Amid all those professional milestones, Bridgers also ended a high-profile relationship with actor Paul Mescal; lost her father, Tony Bridgers; and started dating comedian Bo Burnham.
That deep well of experiences informed the songs that would become Lost Weekend. While some ideas on the album date back as far as 2022, Bridgers began writing and recording for the project in earnest in 2024. Though her first two albums were mostly made with producers Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, Calif., Bridgers added to her recording locations this time around — visiting Electric Lady Studios in New York and Tamarind in Los Angeles — and her production team, bringing on perennial Grammy favorite Jack Antonoff for the first time, with additional work from Alex G. With more musicians in tow as well, Bridgers stretched her predominantly rock sound to new melodic territory, from ambient electronic to driving country.
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Bridgers first shared the new material in May at a club in New Mexico, kicking off a series of phone-free, secret pop-up shows at smaller venues across the country that culminated with Madison Square Garden in New York on June 4. Upon announcing Lost Weekend’s August arrival later that month, she logged back-to-back appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in July, playing new single “Lost Boys” each time, first with a rock band of children and the next night an acoustic rendition with veteran musicians. Bridgers capped off the unorthodox rollout by hosting worldwide release-week listening parties at planetariums.
The critically acclaimed album (which reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200) has made Bridgers, who took home four Grammys in 2024 — more than anyone else that year — one of indie-rock’s front-runners for the 2027 ceremony. With nine of her collaborators, Bridgers explains how the emotional, unusual and expansive world of Lost Weekend came together.
Tony Berg, producer: Initially, you might look at her career and go, “Gee, six years between solo albums and 10 or 11 years to produce three solo albums.” It was a long time because there was a lot of material, and Phoebe, if she senses something can be better, doesn’t have a problem coming to us and saying, “I want to start this over.”
Ethan Gruska, producer: After Punisher, there was boygenius, and after that, I very clearly remember Phoebe going, “I’m going to take some time off,” and a year or two into her lost weekend, her time off, time away, I was starting to get glimpses from her that she was writing.
Christian Lee Hutson, songwriter: My memory is, right after Punisher came out, some of the first ideas for the record came, but not in any grand, fully realized way.
Gruska: Phoebe kind of started by saying, “I want to really bring in new musicians and new people to inspire us and surprise us.” She wanted an injection of freshness that’s hard to provide when you’re so entrenched in a flow.
Phoebe Bridgers: I knew I wanted to work with Tony and Ethan again — you know, “if it ain’t broke” and so on and so forth. Tony and Ethan are my family. But I knew I wanted to change the sound of this one and that fresh blood would help.
Gruska: Alex [G] kind of was brought into the mix before Jack [Antonoff], and I was thrilled about that because I’m such a huge fan of Alex. Alex and Phoebe and Christian were writing and making sketches of stuff.
Marshall Vore, songwriter-drummer: We went to Philadelphia to see Alex for four or five days or something and we went into a studio — Christian, Bo [Burnham], me and Alex and Phoebe — to make songs.
Bridgers: I have wanted to work with Alex for over a decade. Went to Philly with Alex and Christian to work. One of the times, he played me a discarded idea that turned into “Lost Boys.” He’s the most creative person I’ve ever met. And definitely the funniest.
Berg: As funny as I think all the people in the room were, he’s funnier. His take on the world is unusual. I would describe it as quixotic. He is just an unusual person with a real musical gift, and it comes from a field that is neither left, right nor center. It is a different field altogether.
Gruska: Generally, we would bring in musicians for their expertise on a particular instrument or style. But with Alex, we were like, “We just want you to play anything on everything.” The ending of “Liberty Tree,” when it goes into this very strange, dissociated “ooh”-ing melody, the whole palette at the end was Alex in 40 minutes on a Mellotron.
Bridgers: Then when the L.A. fires happened [in January 2025], I was evacuated from my house for three weeks, so I went to New York. Lee [Foster, studio manager] at Electric Lady gave me a writing room and one day Jack [Antonoff] crashed.
Hutson: He’s the ghost of Electric Lady. Anytime you’re there, you’ll expect a haunting — Jack to wander down the stairs, find you in some cavernous basement studio and bless you with his presence for a moment.
Bridgers: I certainly wasn’t looking for more producers, but I had been mostly looking at my phone and not writing. He brought me a little drum machine, and that was it. He appears to those who need him most.
Jack Antonoff, producer: I kind of live upstairs at Electric Lady and I think she was in the middle room or something. But it was truly one of those stories that reminds me of stories I heard from like the ’70s, where two people were in the same studio not working together, kind of run into each other, get talking, start playing a few things here and there.
Gruska: I remember Phoebe playing me something that Jack had put together from the voice memo that ended up being the first “Lost Weekend” song, because there’s three iterations of it on the record.
Vore: The way I remember [“Lost Weekend”] was that she was sort of having writer’s block, and she found that melody from Damien Jurado [from his “The Last Great Washington State”]. She was like, “I love this melody so much. I’m going to write to it just to try to get lyrics out.”
Gruska: It went from that voice memo to this outro because Phoebe had showed Jack [composer] Paul Lansky. Jack sampled it [Lansky’s “Notjustmoreidlechatter”], and I was just hearing from Phoebe that Jack was a wizard and took it and sampled it and created what was the framework and kind of the basis and really like a majority of that outro. The kind of flurry of that outro and I just remember hearing it, and I remember seeing her excitement about it.
Antonoff: I think it was, well, what if it is the voice note? And then what if it goes from the most nonsonic thing possible, just like a little voice note on the phone, to the most sonic exploration possible of this sample and this chaos and all this stuff? I felt like what Phoebe was articulating, it’s where she was at from the writing of this, and all the grief and all the joy and all the terror mixed together. There was just something really interesting about going from zero to 1,000 without any warning. It’s simple enough to gently make something sound this way or that way. But in my experience, it’s when you really just say f–k it and take a big swing with people that you actually build a different kind of trust.
Gruska: From there, Jack was just slowly introduced in the process. To be able to enter into a group of people that have been working together for nine years the way that he did, and to share his expertise and also bring a level of comfort and personability and friendship was just so impressive.
Vore: There had been a decade of precedent, and he was a completely different energy, which was really necessary. It needed to be fun again. I found him to be so kind and just made you feel like you were 15 in your garage again.
Hutson: I think that Jack’s gift as a producer and as a person is that he’s a really good listener. He’s very selfless and listens to what you want and is not afraid to try things, even if they don’t work.
Antonoff: I don’t know if I’m a good listener or anything like that, but my philosophy on why I do this doesn’t come from hearing solely my ideas come to life. My ego and spirit come from realizing a vision. That’s the whole job. There’s so many twisting alleyways within that, but it’s like, that’s it. When the real fun times happen is when you have that clear direction, and everyone’s sort of flying a plane together.
Bridgers: There’s a reason he’s the guy. He really knows what is great about everyone he works with and gave me so much confidence to experiment. The best example of his brain is “Kill Me.” He made the whole album 30% stranger.
Gruska: It went from an insular group to a very large group of people and musicians, and it was beautiful. Chris Thile, Caroline Shaw, unbelievable talents that would just come in and throw this amazing paint and then we all got to collage it together.
Chris Thile, Nickel Creek: We had three days together [at Sound City in November 2025]. The freaking “Lost Weekend” situation was so fun when that happened. I play this funny instrument [mandolin] that’s only used for seasoning unless it’s in a bluegrass context. I’ll try every now and then [to] take a big swing, and almost always it’ll get voted off the island. “Oh, we were thinking a little bit more like that R.E.M mandolin thing, ‘Losing My Religion’ at the end.” Mandolin’s most fundamental moment in the history books. Whereas this situation was just like, “Hey, try some s–t on the outro of this,” and so I’m like, “I mean, I could go like this,” and they were like, “Yeah, do that!” And there it is at the end of the title track, that outro.
Caroline Shaw, vocal arranger: I met up with her at her apartment in New York [on March 23, 2025]. I’ve been in rooms with big stars and lots of producers around, and sometimes it feels like there are lots of sharks, like, producers getting their stuff on and I sense the artist being a little overwhelmed by that. So I just remember telling her, “You stay in control of what you want.” It was nice to be in a room of … I would say they’re more like whales.
Bridgers: We were all working together in the end, but I really enjoyed hopping around from place to place, with fresh ears every time. The nice thing about so many producers was that it was like having a reverse band. Lots of input, but ultimately, I make the final call.
Hutson: [Phoebe] is extremely focused and has a lot of what I think all of my favorite writers have: enough doubt to make sure that you try really hard to get it right.
Thile: This is a fearless record. There’s a couple of illustrious producers, and she is in there, hands-on and exploding with ideas.
Greg Leisz, pedal steel guitar: The thing that I noticed the most was that there was a lot of respect for her ideas. She was really driving the enthusiasm for the event as it was going on. She would be walking around listening. She wasn’t passive at all.
Shaw: I remember her really wanting to not be always singing small, but to sing out big and resonant and not just put the echo on later, but like, “Let’s do it real,” as much as she can do. “I want to do this as real as we can.”
Antonoff: When we first started, the big conversation, which became a huge conversation on the whole album, was obscuring [the] organic-synthetic [divide], playing with all of it until it just is its own Lost Weekend thing and not something you can even identify anymore. That’s the whole point, productionwise, of the album and the thing we put such a microscope on, of obscuring those two things.
Gruska: I knew that it had to feel different and not like Punisher 2.0. With every artist and with every project, you live in the shadow of the thing you just did until you don’t. I think the subject matter was so nude that [it had to be] surrounded by tones and sounds [that] had to have the kind of roughness and rawness that the songs had.
Bridgers: The first and last song was “As Above.” It was a kind of Pavement-sounding indie rock idea I was playing at sound checks on tour in 2022. Something about walking around Saint Petersburg [Russia] because I was reading [Elif Batuman’s] Either/Or. It stayed pretty aimless for a while. Then it was about abortion/my dad’s death making me consider having a kid someday for the first time. When Christian and I were trying to crack the end and wrote, “You won’t have to believe in magic, leave it to me and I’ll make it happen,” we both cried.
Hutson: “As Above” took a long journey. I think that one was the most frustrating because we kept coming back to it and being like, “Oh, you again.” (Laughs.) Even that was kind of fun though, like a crazy crossword that you’ve been working on for a long time. I think the fastest one was “Haunted.”
Vore: I remember being a big champion of that song because I love country music and bluegrass music and Irish music. I remember her being pretty reluctant about it, like, “Is it just kind of like, cheugy?” And I was like, “This is so good.” But I also earnestly listen to Megan Moroney.
Antonoff: [We spent a] ton of time at Sound City. I think all studios look like the inside of the person whose studio it is, and there’s no doubt in my mind that Sound City is a living map of Tony. Tony would pull out some child tape recorder that someone sent him from Indonesia, and it didn’t work, but it exploded, and as it exploded, the whole thing’s like a Rube Goldberg machine. Tape shoots out and knocks into something that falls into something else and then hits a harpsichord, and someone gets an idea. There’s a slapstick nature to that place where there’s just stuff, and all the stuff is informing this great desire to just try things.
Bridgers: The freakiest night by far was one with Jon Brion. He brought a U-Haul full of priceless instruments to Sound City at 9 p.m., gave Tony a Guatemalan marimba, played a synthesizer that looks like Battleship — that sounded so good we opened the album with it — ripped a guitar solo and left at about 5 a.m.
Gruska: The general throughline of everybody that worked on the record is that there’s a lot of extremely f–king funny people. It’s a lot of work, but it’s also a lot of hanging and shooting the s–t and laughing. Sometimes on sessions, you’re nose to the grindstone, but if we’re working and there’s several hours of hanging out, it does actually make the hours of work, which end up being less, more productive.
Antonoff: The process was full of wonderful surprises. That’s when you know you’ve reached something, when you’re split down the middle: half completely comfortable and familiar with something and half completely shocked by it.
Berg: It was only in the home stretch that it was clear to me that Phoebe felt the need for all 16 songs to be on the album. I thought initially it might be more concise, but she had a broader story to tell and more things that she wanted to deal with.
Leisz: It’s an artist’s record. It’s somebody that is really focusing on their art without, I think, a whole lot of trying to make something commercial. It’s adventurous.
Bridgers: It’s all my ideas. I’m very lucky to not have to do anything I don’t want to do, so I don’t show up resentfully anywhere anymore. I was fixated on the idea of LARPing [live-action role-playing] in general for this album because of my old skeleton suit. I was thinking about people whose lives revolve around dressing up. Because I dress up as myself. It was [director and Primetime co-producer] Ari Aster’s idea to do the ren faire thing with Lance [Oppenheim, who co-directed the “Lost Boys” music video]; he wanted to see slo-mo LARPers beating each other up. I’ve known Lance since I was a teenager and trust him with my life.
Lance Oppenheim, director: I met Phoebe back in 2014. She was basically the same then as she is now: so chill, so funny, so sharp. We had such a great time working together [on Primetime], and I kept thinking during production how much I wanted to work with her again. I was so happy when she thought of me for “Lost Boys.” Phoebe knew she wanted something LARP-adjacent and to be the leader of a vagabond troupe living off the grid. She also wanted to work with Skyler Gisondo again — they share a lot of screen time in Primetime. We shot the video over two days in Atlanta [in April].
Leisz: I was in Europe on vacation when she did The Tonight Show. They called me to play [on “Lost Boys”], but I was on vacation. So I was curious because I didn’t play on the song [on the album], and there wasn’t any reason for me to be on it that I could see. And then I watched it, and the first thing I saw was all these kids. And then I became aware that she did a version with old people, and I realized that she wanted me to come and play in that band. (Laughs.)
Shaw: I did one of those planetarium listening sessions in Portland [Ore.]. I hadn’t heard [the album]. I think it’s really beautiful.
Gruska: If we’re talking about growth, it was another cut above for me. Like, “Wow, we’re really going for something,” and it comes through when I listen back. I feel the team all just going, “No, let’s not stop until it’s weird and perfect.”
Hutson: This is what happens when people who really, really, really love each other come together to serve something that is greater than themselves. I think it’s a feat of what love and friendship and taking care and listening actually looks like and what it can do. You can end up with this beautiful piece of art that is very healing for everyone that worked on it.
Bridgers: Having the album in the world is wild. It was very intense to write and very acutely painful to release. I’ll never get over how profound it is to have people sing the songs I wrote about my dad back to me. I wish he could have seen it.
This story appears in the Oct. 3, 2026, issue of Billboard.
