{"id":164491,"date":"2026-08-12T00:43:15","date_gmt":"2026-08-12T00:43:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/164491\/"},"modified":"2026-08-12T00:43:15","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T00:43:15","slug":"phoebe-bridgers-goes-supernova-with-a-planetarium-gambit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/164491\/","title":{"rendered":"Phoebe Bridgers goes supernova with a planetarium gambit"},"content":{"rendered":"

Get the best of Vancouver in your inbox, every Tuesday and Thursday.\u00a0Sign up for our free newsletter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What does H.R. MacMillan have in common with Jane & John Justin, Philip & Patricia Frost, and Christa McAuliffe? They are all the namesakes of planetaria where Phoebe Bridgers debuted her third album this week with a pair of custom shows.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It’s certainly a bit of an unusual move from the 31-year-old rockstar. Sure, laser shows and night sky events look cool. But when was the last time you heard of a musician on an indie label (Dead Oceans) surprise-dropping one to 44 planetaria across North America, Europe, and Down Under simultaneously? The Vancouver experience, it’s worth noting, is the only one in Canada\u2014West Coast, best coast!<\/p>\n

Think of all the people Bridgers had to persuade. There’s the record label, which typically doesn’t want an album getting into the public’s ears anywhere before release date. There are the creatives, the teams that make\u2014in this case\u2014immersive laser shows and night-sky dome presentations. (In this case, that’s Laser Fantasy and Babak Tafreshi respectively.) There are the planetaria themselves, who are probably more used to screening laser shows for sure-fire hits like Queen or Daft Punk rather than indie darlings. And then there are the fans: will people turn out for such a retro proposition?\u00a0<\/p>\n

That last one is hardly a question. Of course they will.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Phoebe Bridgers shot to fame with her sophomore record, Punisher, released back in 2020, and then stamped her name in the record books with the mega-success of supergroup boygenius. The ambition of the planetarium experience is possible precisely because of the rabid affection that Bridgers fans have for the platinum blond, husky-voiced guitar-poet. Her time away from the spotlight has only strengthened her fame, as evidenced by the size of venues: she’s gone from playing the Orpheum to headlining the PNE Amphitheatre (now the Freedom Mobile Arch) with boygenius, to now selling out Rogers Arena on her upcoming fall jaunt. (The worst seats are reselling for $220 on Ticketmaster.)<\/p>\n

Whether it was actually a gamble or a carefully calculated marketing move, it’s clearly paid off for Bridgers (and no doubt the Spotify partnership helped, too). So, I went along to the first sad girl takeover of the H.R. MacMillan\u2014the laser show, held at 5:30 p.m. on a sunny Monday\u2014to see what, exactly, was going on. Much like Bridgers’ live shows, it was a no-phone experience, meaning everyone had to lock their devices into fabric chastity cages and promise not to electronically jack it for the duration.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bridgers’ voice\u2014sonorous, casual, seemingly unscripted\u2014introduced the event by noting that she used to love going to laser shows with her “stoner parents”. She especially loved the Grateful Dead experience. And then the album began\u2026 with, unexpectedly, heavy vocoder, and a single laser line tracking the soundwaves of her distorted words.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Things quickly spiralled out from there, both sonically and visually. Lost Weekend charts the twin emotions of love and death: Bridgers’ father (memorably pondered in “Kyoto”) died in early 2023, around the time she broke up with actor Paul Mescal and instead started dating musical comedian Bo Burnham. (If you’ve been wondering what Burnham’s been up to since releasing Inside, the answer seems to be having a good time and helping co-write some of the tracks on this record.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

The two themes dance around each other, jumping between bitter ballads and euphoric ditties. Songs burst into life, then fade into static, only to re-appear later as codas and callbacks. One of the few notes I took in my comically oversized notebook\u2014scribbled in the dark with pink pencil\u2014was that it reminded me of 500 Days of Summer or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: a non-linear, swirling expression of how our own perceptions of events can change them, and one that would no doubt be improved by hitting the weed vape first.<\/p>\n

The lasers swapped between abstract and figurative images, portraying aircraft and birds alongside hypnotic swirls and blinks. One early track had rapidly flashing lights, like fireworks falling out of the sky that threatened even the non-photosensitive with headaches. The visuals had a dreamy quality, morphing into each other, and crackling into nothing as the sound direction embraced sudden silences, shifts, and droning ambience.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It’s Elliot Smith, and Americana, and campfires, and a feature from someone who sure sounded like Geese’s Cameron Winters but is apparently named “Son-John Johnson” (which we believe the way that “John Jay Smith” who appeared on The Simpsons was definitely not Michael Jackson).\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was a strange, intimate, tender hour of entertainment\u2014and an early glimpse at what might be Bridgers’ best album.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So, why did Phoebe Bridgers take over the planetarium? Because she’s a star.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

H.R. MacMillan Space Centre hosts three showings of the Lost Weekend Laser Experience on August 11, and three showings of the Lost Weekend Visual Experience on August 12.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Get the best of Vancouver in your inbox, every Tuesday and Thursday.\u00a0Sign up for our free newsletter. What…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":164492,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[415,17,412,413,418,407,414,420,416,423,226,389,419,422,421,417,95],"class_list":["post-164491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-vancouver","tag-arts","tag-canada","tag-city","tag-culture","tag-dining","tag-entertainment","tag-events","tag-fashion","tag-film","tag-food","tag-lifestyle","tag-music","tag-nightlife","tag-restaurants","tag-shopping","tag-tv","tag-vancouver"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164491\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/164492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}