Lost Weekend

Thirty years of obsessive listening to Elliott Smith has left me primed to hear him everywhere. A fingerpicked figure in a minor key is usually all it takes.

The song ”The Governor’s Waltz” has apparently made headlines in some places due to lines that can be read as being about her ex Paul Mescal and his current partner Gracie Abrams. But I am Smith-pilled, so instead my ears are drawn to how Bridgers (or perhaps Christian Lee Hutson) plays an inverted tremolo fingerpicking pattern Smith used on “New Disaster”. Most reviews mention Smith on that track anyway, though they tend to mean the broader feeling of it. The song that actually sounds like him to me is “Lost Boys”: a hook that sticks in your head, richer instrumentation, and the XO and Figure 8 trick of hiding the worst thoughts inside the brightest arrangements.

The comparison stops being useful at the first person. Despite reputation as a confessional miserabilist, Smith wrote stories in first person that weren’t always his. The “I” was a role at least as often as it was a confession. Bridgers seems to reserve the first person for things that happened to her. Lost Weekend opens at her father’s funeral with a couplet that’s startling before you’ve worked out what it’s describing (“Crying in a suit and tie / But you should see the other guy”), and he shadows most of the tracks that follow, including an appearance via voice message.

What she has instead of personae is production. That funeral arrives through a vocoder, her voice processed to the point of anonymity; the closing reprise returns to her father with the effect stripped off and nothing left between her and you. Smith used a character; Bridgers uses a machine, then switches it off.

The score-settling works less well. Everywhere else the first person reports what actually happened to her; those lines are the one place it’s playing to a gallery.

The back half is a scrapbook of interludes, instrumentals and vignettes. It ought to be a mess but the sequencing works for me in this context: grief doesn’t always arrive in four-minute songs with hook-laden choruses.

I’ll go on hearing Smith in her. That’s absolutely my problem rather than hers, and this is the first of her records where the resemblance stopped being the most interesting aspect.