Thursday evening at Lincoln Hall was fueled by the “combined power of bummer jams.”
Phoebe Bridgers of Los Angeles and Julien Baker of Nashville apparently met at an emo night in some undetermined town years ago and the two hit it off (I know emo night is probably a night composed of emo bands but I’d like to think that it also involves painting each others’ finger nails black and giving everyone swooping bang haircuts). Bridgers, who took to the stage first, described the singer-songwriters’ meeting, prompted by the shirt she was wearing which she purchased at emo night that had “write or die” embroidered on it.
Bridgers started things off with her melancholy tracks, backed by her guitar and a sometimes harmonizing drummer. The connection to Baker is obvious – Bridgers’ music is as unabashedly raw and personal as Bakers’ own tracks. She worked with Ryan Adam’s on the Pax-Am label to release Killer, an emotionally haunting work that played well in Lincoln Hall’s intimate atmosphere. She ended her set with an Elliott Smith cover.
Baker was up next, bringing her own set of melancholia. Working through “Everybody Does,” “Blacktop,” and others off her 2015 debut, she joked with the audience, “Okay thanks for sitting through that with me guys. The feel good ones are up next. That’s a joke. There are no feel good ones.” She pulled Bridgers up for another quick Smith cover, at which point everyone in Lincoln Hall just dissolved into a gooey mess of sadness. Quite a clean up job for the venue. She wrapped up the night with a quick encore and then sent the audience sobbing off into the night.