Phoneless concert a beautiful chance to bask in moment

Outside the Scotiabank Arena in Toronto, digital billboards flashed fans their singular photo op for the night: “I took this photo before I saw Phoebe Bridgers: The Lost Tour 2026.”

It is, as it is for so many other people, my only documentation of a concert by one of my favourite artists. The American singer-songwriter — who I discovered at the Winnipeg Folk Festival in 2018 — has had a meteoric rise in the past few years, winning three Grammys in 2024 as one third of Boygenius, the indie-rock supergroup rounded out by Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, and opening for Taylor Swift on select dates of her titanic Eras Tour.

Now, Bridgers is touring in support of Lost Weekend, her third album and first since 2020’s Punisher. It’s a feat of a record, a richly textured meditation on loss and grief, written in the aftermath of the death of her dad, with whom she had a complicated relationship.

So she is in a position to not only play multiple sold-out arena shows, but also insist that those shows be phone-free.

Attendees were required to seal up their devices (including smartwatches and Meta glasses) in magnetically sealed fabric Yondr pouches, a process familiar to those who have seen a comedian in the last few years. Obviously, there were medical exceptions — as well as sites to access your devices on the concourse — but otherwise, we said goodbye to our phones for three blissful hours so we could get lost inside Phoebe Bridgers’s planetarium.

This decision was partly practical: the ethereal sets and light effects — loosely outer space-themed — would have been destroyed by light pollution. The otherworldly, silvery-green glow that blurs Bridgers’s face on the cover of Lost Weekend was replicated in the arena to great effect.

It might make you think of UFOs and aliens and radioactivity, but it’s also the midnight glow of a television left on in a den, or a Coke machine in a hospital waiting room. The light of liminal spaces where grief lives.

But going phone-free also allowed for such vulnerable songs to be received with the attention they deserve. People brought lighters to flick, which give such a prettier, softer light than harsh phone flashlights. The setting and the songs — aching, melancholy and devastating — made even a cavernous hockey arena feel intimate.

And in the break between opener and headliner: just the din of people actually talking to each other.

It was refreshing to have a concert experience that wasn’t entirely mediated by screens. When you watch a show through your phone and other people’s, you aren’t experiencing or necessarily even enjoying the concert. You’re merely at the concert.

And look: I’ve done it, you’ve done it, but you will never watch those concert videos again. And unless you are using a real camera, concerts are extremely hard to photograph and you’ll waste precious moments trying.

So what a gift this was, the opportunity to actually be where you were without distraction. To let the music really sink inside your bones and rearrange your insides, to let it rip out your heart and put it back again. To let the sweeping arrangements — fleshed out with a full string section, mandolin and more — wash over you, and to let Bridgers’s voice wrap itself around you.

And with everyone’s attention where it should be, it felt like a more shared experience, too. The song I Know the End features a primal scream: a raw throat-shredder that everyone in the room participated in, the catharsis palpable. It’s a concert moment I will remember forever.

That’s what people are concerned about, at least in part, with taking pictures and videos: remembering. I saw fans online fretting that they would forget the concert without the documentation, but that’s the thing about being there — really being there: you feel it as much as you see and hear it.

You are not offloading the work of capturing memories to a recording device; you are present. Your memories will be sharper and clearer because you actually lived inside of your experience.

And some people got creative. Afterwards, on Instagram, there was no shortage of notebook observations and sketchbook drawings from every date of the tour — beautiful works of art inspired by beautiful art.

Of course, some of the anxiety about documenting a concert is social cache; to have “proof” that you were part of a cultural moment that you can also post on your Instagram stories. Perhaps why there was such a premium on Phoebe Bridgers merch — I’ve never seen lines quite like the ones at this show, with people buying multiple items — or why, in some cases, people resorted to stealing, I’m not joking, the Yondr pouches.

But this is what concertgoing used to be like, before we all had recording devices in our pockets. You almost never had anything to show for it, except the ticket stub if you didn’t lose it, a T-shirt if you were flush, a flung guitar pick if you were lucky, and your memories if you didn’t imbibe too much.

So no, those of us who attended The Lost Tour don’t have much “proof,” save for our photos of the digital billboards outside. But we have something better: we can say that we were really, honestly, truly there.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com