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Chris Willman
Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic
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Phoebe Bridgers fans may not be getting glimpses of her current arena tour, because of the prohibition on cameras and phones, but as far as performance footage goes, she’s given them something better — a three-song in-studio video, shot by her “Primetime” director Lance Oppenheim, that features some familiar guests.
The filmed performance, part of the “Sound Check at Cherry Lane Theatre” series, has Bridgers singing the closing theme she wrote for “Primetime,” “On Video,” followed by two choice picks from her “Lost Weekend” album, “Haunted” and “Lost Boys.” She’s joined for the last two numbers by Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, amounting to a Boygenius reunion.
It’s the first time Bridgers, Baker and Dacus have appeared together on camera in nearly three years, specifically since they did “Saturday Night Live” as a group in November 2023.
Bridgers and company shot this new footage with Oppenheim following her three sold-out nights at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. The location, Cherry Lane Theatre, is a venerable off-Broadway theater — said to be New York’s oldest — that is now owned and operated by A24, which put out “Primetime,” in which Bridgers has a supporting role, as well as having provided a theme.
“On Video” is the first of the three songs in the video, with Bridgers performing in dim lighting in front of a bank of televisions, accompanied only by Jay Gruska, one of the co-producers of the latest album, on keyboards. For “Haunted,” a much jauntier-sounding number with a pronounced country flavor, Bridgers is joined by Dacus, who wields a video camera of her own, and Baker, plus four acoustic musicians. The lineup gets stripped down to just the Boygenius trio for the finale, “Lost Boys,” which has a much softer arrangement than the spirited acoustic version, emphasizing the group harmonies. Baker and Dacus also sang backup on those two songs on the recent album.
Bridgers fans will well know that this is Oppenheim’s second time filming a version of “Lost Boys.” He also directed the official music video for the lead single from “Lost Weekend,” with some visual and thematic callbacks to his three-part 2024 HBO documentary, “Ren Faire.”
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