All the Easter Eggs We Found on Phoebe Bridgers’ ‘Lost Weekend’

Phoebe Bridgers loves to nod to her heroes. Her lyrics, like those of many of her biggest musical influences, are dense texts, full of winking allusions and subtle references to records, bands, and albums that have shaped her own songwriting. Sometimes, Bridgers uses music as a small narrative detail (see the Lemmy and Smiths shoutouts in “Smoke Signals”), and sometimes she just writes an entire verse about music (see the famous Lennon and Clapton-referencing “Moon Song”). Other times, she’ll make a reference that’s barely noticeable until it’s pointed out (the line about someone being “bored” in the “Motion Sickness” bridge has been interpreted as a dig at the chorus of Ryan Adams’ “Outbound Train”).

But Bridgers’ stunning new album, Lost Weekend , has seemingly even more allusions to albums and songs in her record collection than ever. Here are a few likely call-outs that caught our attention.

“An angel in the snow/Accident prone,” Bridgers sings in the first verse of “Still Standing.” Bridgers has talked at length about her love for New Moon , the posthumous 2007 compilation of Elliott Smith songs. This is, after all, the same person who once inscribed lyrics from an early version of “Miss Misery” (found, yes, on New Moon ) on the Figure 8 memorial wall in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake neighborhood. Is it a coincidence that the phrase “angel in the snow” also happens to be the title of the opening track on New Moon ? Almost certainly not.

Damien Jurado is a prolific and criminally under-acknowledged singer-songwriter from the Pacific Northwest. He’s also the only artist whose work was interpolated and incorporated so heavily into Bridgers’ new album that he received a co-writing credit, on both “Lost Weekend” and “Lost Weekend (Reprise).” The melody of those tracks are based on “Last Great Washington State,” a beautiful, six-minute gem buried on Jurado’s 2018 album The Horizon Just Laughed . Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

Is it a stretch to assume the chorus of Bridgers’ new song “I Can’t Wait” (“I can’t wait, but I’m waiting”) is some sort of nod to the Replacements’ mid-Eighties masterpiece “Can’t Hardly Wait”? Possibly, but the fact that Bridgers has previously played around with the same exact song in a different chorus would certainly seem to increase the likelihood: “I can’t hardly wait for someone to replace ,” she sang on “Chesapeake,” from her 2018 collaborative album with Conor Oberst as Better Oblivion Community Center . On tour for that album, Bridgers and Oberst made the influence clear when they actually covered the Replacements tune, but that’s not even the only Replacements song she’s performed live.

This one’s pretty simple.