if I Was Picking You Up from the Airport."

I'm Phoebe Bridgers and this is the playlist of my life.

[laid-back music]

[CD spins]

♪ Wake up, wake up ♪

♪ On a Saturday night ♪ - You guys know this song?

Okay, good.

Hilary Duff, where do I begin?

That record was one of the first records that I ever had

on CD that my godfather got for me for my birthday.

Any karaoke, anytime, Hillary Duff is a hit.

I like when, in the background, everybody goes,

"Wake up, wake up."

- [Hilary] Wake up, wake up.

- I don't know who did that, but it's great.

It's a great touch.

I secretly listen to pop.

No, I'm gonna take that back.

It is no secret that I listen to pop music,

but I am kind of a bimbo about it.

I feel like everybody knows more about pop music than me.

I absolutely still listen to Hilary Duff.

I was just talking about this with Claro.

Yeah, voice of a generation.

[CD spins]

♪ I'm high and I'm feeling anxious ♪

♪ Inside of the CV ♪

MUNA just has this way of not sacrificing words

for a pop banger and I feel like that sometimes

is my issue with pop music is I can only really listen

like eight times and then I, like, stop finding meaning

in it or something.

And yeah, they're pop hits. Every song is a hit.

People think that I wrote my verse that I sing in that song

but Katie wrote it cosplaying me, basically.

She was like, "If Phoebe were to write a verse,

it would be about being stoned in CVS."

♪ I kinda feeling anxious ♪

♪ Inside of the CVS ♪

I actually cannot smoke weed at all

without having a full blown panic attack.

MUNA are genius with their music videos

and Allie, the director, just had this vision.

I don't usually start with a really strong video idea,

so it was fun to show up and I had just seen

"But I'm a Cheerleader" for, like, the fifth time

in my life 'cause I was showing it to some friends.

It was a great day.

It's the first time in my life I've ever worn pink,

so that was cool.

Caleb, Caleb is friends with those guys and friends with me.

If I was going to straight therapy,

I'd want him to be my coach.

[CD spins]

♪ 'Cause I've got a soft spot ♪

- So this song is on the playlist

'cause it's the first thing my label ever put out

and I was just taking a walk

and someone sent me Claud's music

and it was, like, just a cool experience being, like,

"Is Claud signed?" and then getting a no back.

I was like, "Great, let's do it."

I'm really drawn to people who are, like,

the god of their art.

I think Mitski said that, like, "I'm the god of my art."

Like when there's no trick and it's them.

But what I'm really drawn to about Claud is, like,

if they're playing an acoustic guitar on a voice memo,

it sounds like a Claud song.

[CD spins]

♪ That's how it starts ♪

- I put LCD on my playlist because I saw them in Spain

in the middle of, like, a very grueling tour

with, no pun intended, all my friends on the tour

and we just, we had like great spots.

They start playing, it's all analog synthesizers,

which is so awesome.

I don't know, and you can tell that they all like each other

and that they're having a blast on stage

and so it's like refreshing to see people farther

down their career when you're on like a grueling tour

and seeing bunch of people who are friends

and it was just like the most fun show ever.

I've been on tour with bands who, like,

keep separate dressing rooms from each other.

Space is important and sometimes I wake up feeling shy,

but I wanna want to hang out with everybody.

[CD spins]

♪ Should have said something ♪

♪ Something, something ♪

♪ Couldn't find something to say ♪

- I had been recommended Julien's record

by like every other person that I talked to

and it was kind of pissing me off 'cause I felt like it was,

like, a lot of people being like, "Queer, white girl music.

You're gonna love it."

So I like had very much resisted listening to it

and then of course I heard it and was like very flattered

by that comparison then.

"Something" is the first song I heard, so yeah,

it was the first one that I was like, "Oh damn."

Julien's lyrics are insane.

She made that entire record in like a day.

Then we ended up doing a whole tour together.

I watched the show every night

'cause I was so affected by it.

I just fell in love.

Julien took me on a leg of the tour for that album

and took Lucy on the other half of that tour for that album.

We decided to like join forces and do a tour

at the end of 2018.

I feel like that tour was like the best time of my life.

It is true that I force people to wear uniforms,

but I love a uniform.

I get stressed out if I have to choose

what I'm gonna wear on stage every night.

I can't even really dress myself,

like I wear a uniform every day.

I wish we had several sets of the same uniform,

but actually we just have a really disgusting suit jacket

that smells like B.O. from 30 days ago

that we put on every night.

[CD spins]

♪ Can't break the habit of going down ♪

- We recorded on the same day as a song for Julien's record

this song and another song for Lucy on their record.

It was just, like, such a special day and we had connected

after months apart.

This was like a group vocal and we had a bunch

of Lucy's friends and like Mitski

and my guitar player, Harry.

A great, a great studio day.

Days where there are like a ton of people around the studio

can be kind of stressful

but if everybody knows what they're doing, it's the best.

So I try to keep it pretty small, but if I do have,

like, a choir or group vocal or something,

it's just kind of a more fun environment.

And Lucy has this way of like laying out all the facts

and letting you figure out how you feel.

I imagine Lucy as a little kid, like, thinking

about all this stuff, which is hilarious

and I love the grabbing asses line because of course I do.

♪ In 10 years, grabbing asses ♪

- It's just, yeah, a beautiful way to sing grabbing asses.

[CD spins]

♪ Here comes a regular ♪

- My friend Harrison and I, when we first met,

we listened to a lot of The Replacements.

They have a great song called "I Hate Music",

which I love also.

I hope to make recordings like they did someday,

like you can just tell that it's live

and they are like, it almost sounds

like they're gonna fall apart at any time, which I love.

And then I saw Conor Oberst do it solo on a tour

when I first met him and it was striking and awesome.

Replacements to me are like a very, like,

a band that's like notorious for partying really hard,

so I like this other lens of what it's actually like

to need to drink every day.

Yeah, it's just, it's just a [bleep] up song. [laughs]

[CD spins]

♪ I drew pictures of you ♪

♪ Before I met you ♪

♪ Just a fragment of my mind ♪

- This song is a great song to fall in love to, I think.

I like when people who typically write really sad songs

break out of it and write a pure love song.

I hope to make a recording like this.

I think I'm like really drawn to stuff that's this simple.

Also, there's a guitar that comes in right

at the end that I love that too.

Once all the lyrics are over, a guitar part comes in,

and that's really cool to me.

♪ Just to keep you safe ♪

[guitar strums]

- But I love a song with, like, one element

and another element and that's it.

[CD spins]

♪ Like it when you talk down ♪

♪ And when you speak ♪

- I feel like once a year I hear an album that makes me feel

like I did when I was in high school where you, like,

listen to that album every day, like as a piece of music.

This album is just amazing and it just feels like a,

recording can be weird sometimes

because if someone's really good at something,

sometimes it can actually be masked in recording

because it's clear that it's multi-tracked

or that, like, you did a million vocals or whatever.

And then there are certain bands and artists

who have a way of recording live that you can feel,

like the whole record feels really live and cool,

even though there's doubled vocals and it's not all live.

But Gillian Welch does that really well,

Replacements do that really well,

and Dijon does that really well.

I listen to a lot of my old music, like, again,

stuff that I heard when I was a teenager

that'll always make me feel the same way.

And then I have to like give myself a break

from that stuff when you stop being able to feel it.

So when a new record comes out that I fall in love with,

it's such a relief.

I'm Phoebe and this was the playlist of my life.

Thanks for checking it out.

[laid-back music]