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Phoebe Bridgers' 'Punisher' Is An Album For The Moment

Phoebe Bridgers
Frank Ockenfels
/
Courtesy of the artist
Phoebe Bridgers

A few months into the pandemic, in mid-June, Phoebe Bridgers released her second full-length solo album, Punisher. Almost immediately, social media lit up with people talking about how they connected to it: from someone wanting to spend an entire appointment playing it for their therapist to another person skipping a movie with their roommate in order to take an aimless walk and listen. Punisherhad quickly become an album for the moment, one that could make a person feel less alone in a time of self-isolation.

In this session, Phoebe Bridgers joins me to talk about how she has been dealing with that isolation and how making this album was not an isolated experience at all. Punisher was produced by Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska, who worked with her on her 2017 debut solo album, Stranger in the Alps; she was also joined by her Better Oblivion Community Center bandmate Conor Oberst, who helped write and sing on a few of the songs, but at it's core, Punisher is Phoebe's vision. We begin with her live performance of "Garden Song." Listen in the audio player above.

Copyright 2021 XPN. To see more, visit XPN.

Raina Douris, an award-winning radio personality from Toronto, Ontario, comes to World Cafe from the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), where she was host and writer for the daily live, national morning program Mornings on CBC Music. She was also involved with Canada's highest music honors: hosting the Polaris Music Prize Gala from 2017 to 2019, as well as serving on the jury for both that award and the Juno Awards. Douris has also served as guest host and interviewer for various CBC Music and CBC Radio programs, and red carpet host and interviewer for the Juno Awards and Canadian Country Music Association Awards, as well as a panelist for such renowned CBC programs as Metro Morning, q and CBC News.
World Cafe senior producer Kimberly Junod has been a part of the World Cafe team since 2001, when she started as the show's first line producer. In 2011 Kimberly launched (and continues to helm) World Cafe's Sense of Place series that includes social media, broadcast and video elements to take listeners across the U.S. and abroad with an intimate look at local music scenes. She was thrilled to be part of the team that received the 2006 ASCAP Deems Taylor Radio Broadcast Award for excellence in music programming. In the time she has spent at World Cafe, Kimberly has produced and edited thousands of interviews and recorded several hundred bands for the program, as well as supervised the show's production staff. She has also taught sound to young women (at Girl's Rock Philly) and adults (as an "Ask an Engineer" at WYNC's Werk It! Women's Podcast Festival).