woof

i am responding to this ask in the spirit of love and brotherhood, as it first i felt like i was being asked to justify why i feel the way i feel about these respective albums and upon taking a day and night's worth of self-reflection & deep breaths i am now prepared to respond in an even-mannered way. your vibe seems much more curious than malicious, anon, so i am choosing to take this ask in good faith!! but also just to be clear............. not every melodramatic or hyperbolic thing i say in the tags on my blog is like, me making the world's most definitive statement on something, yanno?? anyway, let's get into it.

the first thing i'm going to say is that it does feel weird, to me, to pit these two albums/artists against one another in general. i don't think "never the twain shall meet" because i think all art exists in conversation with all other art, and i think a lot of music listeners (like myself!!!! and yourself!!!!) contain multitudes and can listen to many vibes and genres and artists at once and appreciate them all for what they are. that being said, i do think ari and phoebe exist in pretty separate and distinct spaces and are not talking to each other ALL that much right now. saying "petal is better" or "lost weekend is better" feels a bit like saying mamma mia is a better movie than jaws. like on a subjective level maybe someone might like one or the other more, and there are certain things each movie definitely does better than the other, but those are two (in my opinion) equally good movies that are very very different from one another and live in very different worlds. even if they both contain simply STUNNING visuals of the ocean and take place on an island. i know i said something along the lines of "lost weekend is the best leo season release so far" at some point which i guess on some level inherently means i think it's a better album than petal?? i guess?? because i was pitting it against the collective and petal is a part of that collective?? but i was not trying to do a direct 1:1 and say LOST WEEKEND IS BETTER THAN PETAL, and i think "lost weekend is the best album of the season" and "lost weekend is better than petal" are actually two separate and distinct statements that are not the same thing. even if i recognize petal as part of that collective. like, even if i say "mamma mia is the greatest movie of all time," mamma mia and jaws are slots 1 and 2 in my letterboxd top 4, ykwim??

the second thing i'm going to say is. okay and i mean this in the NICEST and GENTLEST possible way, i swear i am not trying to be a bitch!!!! but for someone who has been listening to phoebe since 2015, to say, "Phoebe just made me cry, as per usual," makes me feel as though you are engaging with her work on a pretty shallow level. sorry sorry sorry, I TRULY don't mean to be a bitch!! but like.... did you really not think she was doing ANYTHING new or interesting with her musicianship in lost weekend?? or that she hasn't grown as an artist at all in the SIX YEARS it took her to put this record together?? it really offers NOTHING new to you apart from its ability to jerk a few tears?? and moreover, while there are, yes, definitely a number of songs on lost weekend that reduced me to snot-covered hiccuping tears on first listen, i also found it to be an album that was bursting at the seams with love and joy as well. were you not having a blast with songs like bobby or haunted?? lost boys?? never going back?? liberty tree?? i tend to get a little annoyed at people who reduce her body of work to "depressed sadgirl music to cry to" because i find it to be insultingly reductive to a body of work that actually, to me, seems very interested in cataloguing the depth and breadth of human emotion—good AND bad—in all its messy complication!! and to be honest with you, i'm actually aware that phoebe herself feels the same way. she has said as much. everyone STOP relegating her to the sadgirl corner!!!! her work is just as suffused with love and joy and fun and humor as it is with grief and sorrow and heartbreak and i truly do not understand people who seem to see only the one side of it and not the other. maybe it's because her sad songs can go SO sad but i find by the same token that her joyful songs are very joyful?? and so much of her music incorporates both feelings at once?? so??

i think it's easiest to spot inventiveness and originality in spaces and genres we are more familiar with. so if you are someone who listens to mostly mainstream pop, it is probably easier to identify where ari "reinvented some shit" versus where phoebe did, and maybe because i tend to listen to more indie-leaning material than mainstream pop, phoebe's album feels more inventive and fresh to me than anything else to hit my spotify in the past four weeks or so. this difference in reception we are having to these two albums might just come down to what genres we live in most of the time and our most frequent listening habits. but i found phoebe's album to be a kind of genre-defying project that really played around with blending a lot of cinematic and atmospheric sounds with folk and rock and some pop in a way that doesn't sit neatly in just one camp. did nothing about that feel mind-blowing or reinventive at all?? it did to me!! it also felt very distinctly like an ALBUM to me rather than just a collection of songs, in that listening to the whole thing from front to back felt like being told a story and taken on a real journey in a way that, to be honest, ariana's album didn't do for me in quite the same way. petal has a fantastic flow to it, and all the songs are great, but i didn't get the same distinct sense of a larger narrative arc happening within the album itself, or of the album taking my hand and guiding me in a specific direction from song to song. additionally, phoebe's lyrics are kind of unmatched by almost anybody else currently writing songs, bar maybe her fellow boys genius. she has as much talent as a wordsmith as she does as a musician. again, it feels very odd to be comparing ariana and phoebe, but if we're talking strictly about lyricism here, i think it would be genuinely silly to argue ariana grande is doing something more creative or interesting or groundbreaking than phoebe bridgers. there is a reason phoebe was named on the new york times list of 100 greatest living songwriters is all i'm saying.

i actually didn't immediately reach for sufjan as a direct comparison to lost weekend, although i also don't think it's wrong to see his influence on this project, and i think it's an apt one to point out!! but i think this playlist gives a good sense for like.... just how much phoebe was doing with this record. my sense with petal was that it was a very boundary-pushing project for ari herself as an artist, and just as in conversation with the music happening around it/that came before it as lost weekend. but like.... these two albums come from very different lineages and are talking to and about very different things?? so i come back to the why are we pitting these specific two albums against each other question, again????

then there is the subjectivity of it all. maybe the album that spoke to me the most out of all leo season's top-shelf album drops so far is the one largely about grieving your father, since my dad has cancer and a lot of it hit me very close to home in a way that albums about the complicated nature of fame and attention (charli, ariana) or navigating situationships (yana) did not. so i'll admit there was a more personal connection to the phoebe album there as well, since a lot of the experiences she's detailing feel a lot closer to me than the situations in—since we're talking specifically about petal for some reason—ariana's album. that part is fully subjective and i'm aware of that, but it still informs my take on which album i think is best. because i can relate to a lot of what phoebe is talking about, i can sort of.... connect with it more?? and feel more directly seen and spoken to?? versus an experience where i can, like, imagine what it must be like, and have empathy for it, but do not feel directly close to, since i am not, have never been, and probably never will be an a-lister anywhere but at an amc

ultimately, i think both phoebe and ariana are immensely talented artists and consummate professionals who are currently at the top of their game and doing some of the best work of their careers right now. both of these albums are undeniable accomplishments, and both are form-pushing, boundary-pushing additions to their respective canons. they just live in separate canons lol. i have no idea if these two women listen to each other's music at all, but i have to imagine that if they do, they'd both feel that way as well?? and respect and be impressed by one another's artistry and musicianship?? so in conclusion: why are we pitting two queens against each other??????? is there not room in your heart for more than one 30something woman with beautiful brown eyes and the voice of an angel??