Phoebe Bridgers Closes Out “Lost Weekend” With A Confession, Not A Resolution

“I Can’t Wait” is the album’s most shh loaded track, a duet built around a bridge that refuses to let its narrator off the hook.

Six years is a long time to wait on a Phoebe Bridgers solo album, and “I Can’t Wait” arrives buried deep in the tracklist that finally ends that wait, track fourteen of sixteen on Lost Weekend, her third full-length and first since 2020’s Punisher. The album landed August 14 through Dead Oceans, trailed by lead single “Lost Boys” and its Lance Oppenheim-directed video back in June, and followed almost immediately by a sold-out North American and European tour that kicks off September 15 in Indianapolis.

The song itself sits in a strange emotive pocket for a title that sounds so eager. Its narrator wants to be swept along and taken somewhere, but keeps admitting she’s stalled: sit in the backseat, turn the lights on like the credits are already roll on something that hasn’t happen yet. The chorus does the same trick twice, “I can’t wait, but I’m waiting,” “I’m not good, but I’m better,” pairing each claim against its own contradiction rather than letting either half win. It’s a writing move Bridgers has leaned on across her catalog, but rarely this plainly stated, almost as if the song is naming its own structure out loud.

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The credits read like a reunion of Bridgers’ regular convince: Conor Oberst on harmony vocals, Christian Lee Hutson and Harrison Whitford on guitar, Jack Antonoff handle guitar, drums, and bass, longtime string arranger Rob Moose, and Nickel Creek contributing acoustic guitar, violin, and mandolin. Alex G turns up on synthesizer. It’s the kind of credit sheet that reads less like session personnel and more like a list of people who’ve shaped Bridgers’ sound across a decade of records, boygenius among them, gather for one song near the back half of the album.

The genuine surprise is the bridge, where Cameron Winter of Geese steps in for a co-lead vocal. “Hyde Jekyll Hyde, finally together / you can change your mind but you can’t change mine,” the two trade back and forth, a brief structural swerve that briefly turns the song into a duet before Bridgers pulls the final verse back to herself alone, walking early in the morning while someone else sleeps, crying without being sure why.

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As stir cover, the album on release frame Lost Weekend as arriving at a moment when Bridgers has nothing left to prove, a superstar with an already sold-out arena tour behind a record that jure shh and more assured than the stakes around it would suggest, and “I Can’t Wait” is very much a product of that confidence: a song willing to sit in its own unresolved swole rather than write its way out of it. beat.com 

For more on weekend, see São Paulo Anitta Weekend: A Celebration of Music, Culture, and Connection.

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