Phoebe Bridgers: Photographer Gregory Crewdson on Her Tour Promo Picture

In early June this yr, Phoebe Bridgers introduced her first solo tour since 2023. The flyer featured {a photograph} of the 31-year-old singer-songwriter on a desolate small-town avenue, behind the wheel of a classic turquoise car. It’s twilight, the sky a cosmic cotton-candy sample of blue and pink, whereas a beam of sunshine shoots out from behind an outdated home with white clapboard siding and hunter-green shutters. Bridgers is only a small determine within the body, however her vitality is unmistakable. You virtually marvel if her signature skeleton go well with is within the trunk of the automotive.

The picture was taken by fine-art photographer Gregory Crewdson, whose eerie, gorgeous pictures of suburban life have drawn comparisons to David Lynch and Edward Hopper. He doesn’t do numerous editorial or business work, however he says he made an exception for the singer-songwriter with platinum-blond hair and a penchant for unhappiness. “I have to feel connected to the work,” Crewdson, 63, tells Rolling Stone on a Zoom name from his house in western Massachusetts. “There was an alliance there, with a sense of mystery and loneliness, and wanting to make connections about landscape and all that. It’s a coming together between Phoebe’s world and my world.”

Crewdson says he and Bridgers spoke a few potential collaboration just a few years in the past, then met up final summer season in Hudson, New York, to plan. They shot this picture over two days this March in close by Adams, Massachusetts. (“I didn’t want any leaves on the trees, to feel like winter going into spring,” he says.) Crewdson’s shoots are just like movie units, with roughly 50 crew members. Five cranes have been introduced in for lighting and tools, and the fireplace division sprayed down the road to offer it a mystical glow.  He says the manufacturing worth is supposed to intensify what’s already there. “There’s that perfect coming together of our artificial lights and the ambient light of the sun,” he says. “It’s like the one time when it all comes together.”

There’s additionally an analog component to the photograph. Crewdson factors out a telephone sales space within the background, becoming for Bridgers’ upcoming smartphone-free tour, and the xenon lamp emitting that beam of sunshine. “That’s an old-school light no one uses anymore,” he says. “It would be so easy to do that with AI or digital effects, but we made that.”

Fans are certain to go to the road in Adams the place the magic occurred, and Crewdson says he’s already seen tattoos of the picture. He provides that like many people, he was an enormous admirer of Bridgers’ final solo LP, 2020’s Punisher. “There’s something about that album that really captured my imagination, that felt particularly haunted and dreamlike,” he says. “And, of course, there’s this sadness that runs through all the songs. I very much related to that, because those are themes I deal with in my work. This sense of loneliness, but wanting to make a connection.”