Photo Credit: Wes Ellis / Instagram: @atwes
Chase Center opened its doors in September 2019, bringing the Golden State Warriors back to San Francisco after decades of playing across the bay at Oakland’s Oracle Arena. The privately financed, approximately $1.4 billion project took seven years of planning and development to become a reality. It was an ambitious undertaking, and not without controversy. Concerns about traffic, parking, emergency access, and the impact of a major entertainment venue on the surrounding Mission Bay neighborhood accompanied the project from its earliest days.
Seven years later, Chase Center has become one of the Bay Area’s premier destinations for sports and entertainment. What was initially a somewhat divisive addition to the city has become a significant economic and cultural attraction, with restaurants, public gathering spaces, and a steady calendar of major sporting and musical events.
I’ve only attended one Warriors game at Chase Center. I went with a friend who’s a little bit of a baller, so I had the pleasure of experiencing some of the private bar areas and amenities. It was a pretty nice introduction. But beyond the VIP experience, there’s something genuinely impressive about the place. The crowds, the food, the bathrooms, the overall layout, and the ease of navigating a venue that accommodates thousands of people are all out of this world.
For Phoebe Bridgers and Alex G, I found myself seated courtside in one of those padded seats. When I looked up my seat online beforehand, I noticed that one of the reviews specifically mentioned the great sound. I remember scratching my head a little. Great sound? In a basketball arena?
By the end of the night, I had my answer. All I could think was, Oh my God, why is this the sound system in a basketball stadium? It was literally pristine.
The invitation to cover Phoebe Bridgers’ phone-free tour was an interesting proposition in itself. When our editor mentioned that Alex G would be opening, my answer was an automatic yes. I’ve seen him three times in the last three years, and at this point, I probably wouldn’t turn down an opportunity to see him. As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, I consider him one of the most influential artists of this decade.
The whole assignment was a little surprising, though, because I hadn’t yet approached Phoebe Bridgers as a critic. My listening habits are fairly obsessive. When I decide to take on an artist, I generally sit down with the catalog and work through it from beginning to end, often multiple times in a single day.
I’d actually had Phoebe’s catalog on my list for exactly that kind of deep dive. I wanted to give myself a full immersion into her sound, particularly in its current incarnation.
Until then, much of my awareness of Bridgers had come through the surrounding indie music conversation: the public discussions about allegations involving artists she had spoken out against, and her collaborative work in projects including Better Oblivion Community Center, with Conor Oberst, and boygenius, alongside Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus. I knew the names, I knew the conversations, but I hadn’t found my way into the music itself.
That changed while I was driving and listening to KALX Berkeley.
A song came on that made me pull the car over.
It’s increasingly difficult to get my attention these days. The algorithms drive me absolutely crazy, and I rarely rely on Spotify to introduce me to new music. College radio, local stations, and independent record stores remain my preferred ways of discovering something unfamiliar. I try to get to the record store as often as I can, and I still appreciate the experience of having a song find me rather than having an algorithm decide what I should hear next.
The song was Phoebe Bridgers’ “Kill Me.”
It begins with a slow, restrained introduction that immediately brought to mind the atmosphere of a ballad you might have found on Radiohead’s The Bends. Then something clever happens. Bridgers practically whispers her way into the song, and the arrangement begins to open up. There’s a playful quality tucked inside the melancholy, a tension between the delicacy of the vocal and the increasingly expansive instrumentation.
Layered, chiming guitars begin guiding the song upward and outward from that first intimate passage. Suddenly, the sound becomes encompassing. It’s as if you’ve walked into an escape room and the barred metal doors are dropping all around you. The walls are closing in, but the music keeps expanding.
There’s something almost like ’90s female-fronted progressive rock in its construction. The song builds, shifts, and then stops with a brilliant, unexpected halt.
Much like I did when I heard it.
When the DJ announced it was Phoebe Bridgers, I was ready to dig into the catalog. Within a month of hearing that song, the opportunity to cover her tour landed in my lap.
And here we are.
The stage arrangement was one of the first things I started trying to figure out when I got to my seat. I was seated pretty far to the right. If the main stage was the only stage and had been in its usual position, it would have been an excellent seat for both acts, but the setup for this show was anything but usual.
There was a small circular stage on roughly a quarter of the half of the court, off to my left. About fifty feet over was a fence, a five-foot walkway, and then another fence about fifty feet away, leading toward what looked like a half sphere or dome. The dome reminded me of the glass roof of a cosmopolitan building, with these faux iron squares across the top. It was opaque, cream colored, and had light shooting out of it.
I assumed Phoebe would be performing inside the dome, and Alex G would be playing on this tiny, makeshift punk stage off to the far left, near the seats normally considered less desirable. It was a funny arrangement, especially since even the VIP ticket holders wouldn’t necessarily be close to Alex’s stage. I wondered how the general admission fans would feel about that. It would be a little sad to have a whole crowd of people who came to see Alex G and not be able to get anywhere near him.
As the arena filled, Alex’s stage became packed within its little square. Meanwhile, Phoebe’s fans were holding onto the stage where she would perform later. There was about a thirty-foot gap between the crowds, with two or three rows of people reaching into the second quadrant and looking over the five-foot walkway. There must have been somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 people crowded around Alex’s stage.
I found it interesting. I knew Alex had a rabid fanbase, but I hadn’t really considered that the audiences might not overlap. Alex has been a major influence on Phoebe, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Phoebe’s fans know his music. I had imagined her audience might be a little more like a Lana Del Rey crowd, but it wasn’t quite that.
Alex came out and did what I respect him for doing: he played exactly what he wanted to play.
The set leaned heavily into his early emo material, with a lot from his first two records, along with some pieces from his latest record, Headlights. Over the last two years, the other times I’ve seen him, he’d been playing almost all of Headlights along with older hits. This time, opening for Phoebe, he went back there for the early fans and hopefully for himself.
I hadn’t checked the setlists beforehand, but I later read that he was switching things up every night on this run of opening sets and playing some really expansive versions of the songs. I love that. I have a lot of respect for bands that are willing to break their songs apart and reconstruct them onstage. When musicians have been playing together for a long time, a kind of groupthink develops. Sometimes the music just starts playing itself. It’s exciting when a band can take something they’ve played a thousand times and find a completely different way into it.
Some of the early work is short, ironic, and even a little corny. Alex was much younger when he wrote those songs, with less life experience, experimenting with himself and the friends he played with.
The jams turned into crunchy country, almost outlaw country at times. At times, Alex sounded like Chris Stapleton. I was blown away by that.
It wasn’t a short set, either. We got a full hour.
After Alex left the stage, there was a moment to grab a beer, use the bathroom, and scroll your phone. I think that was the moment everyone realized they’d locked their phones up on the way inside the building.
I was a little concerned about that process, but the friend I brought with me told me she’d done one show like this for a comedy club and that it was a quick entry. She was right about that. I was proud of Chase Center for that.
But watching a crowd of people between 18 and 35 navigate thirty minutes phone-free was kind of interesting. I think it sent everyone into a merch frenzy because the merch lines were longer than the bathroom lines. Maybe capitalism is the default with no phones. Hmmmm. What happens with no capitalism?
I’m not going to lie. I waited until the lines died down, but I did buy some merch from Alex G.
Once we all got back to our seats, Phoebe Bridgers took the stage.
I was a little struck by her simplicity, and the grandeur of the presentation at the same time. The dome had projected black and white velveteen looking curtains, and to the right of the stage was a hundred foot screen showing her face in black and white, with an old movie filter on it. It was a very effective aesthetic.
Sometimes when you go to a stadium show, a screen can be really distracting or take you away from the stage. But because of the black and white, it just added perfectly. The dome had a warm yellow light about it. It was moving up and down and craning back for certain songs. When it would come down over the band, it created a much more intimate space and encapsulated them. Sometimes it would back off and pull back, almost like a can that’s opening.
Phoebe’s band is so loud and so precise. There were a lot of people onstage, but it never felt like a Lumineers concert or an overly crowded amount of people, even though it could have. The musicianship was really on point. The way she layers music is incredibly unique.
Because I didn’t know much about her, I also didn’t know about her California background, growing up in Ukiah. I’ve spent a lot of time in that area, and I could see that in her. It helped me read her and understand her a little bit better.
She was very, very vulnerable onstage, speaking about her dead father and how this last album and tour have been about dealing with that. When you read about her work, it’s often written about in terms of the phone free tour, but the records themselves have been dealing with misogyny, women in dangerous situations, and some of the darkest places known to women.
The whole concert, unknowingly to me, felt like an exposure.
She has an amazing grasp on the room, but it’s done with a lot of grace. There’s more silence than speaking. I think Brandi Carlile has a little bit of that composure. Phoebe Bridgers encompasses a classic style, and there’s some kind of World War II grace to it. I don’t know exactly how to describe that, but it was something I felt watching her.
The music, though unfamiliar to me, kept my attention the entire show. I never felt tired. I never had the need to go to the bathroom, and none of my ADHD traits kicked in at all.
Would I go see her again? I don’t know the answer to that. I kind of feel complete. Maybe when I go back and listen to the records, it will motivate me in a different way. But it felt like I went to a classic movie and it went perfectly. It was one of those experiences that came together exactly as it was supposed to.
