The news of Phoebe Bridgers’ first solo tour in three years, which she announced in early June 2026, has us recalling a story she shared in 2020. Speaking with Guitar World, Bridgers admitted to having her own Spinal Tap moment. That is, a bizarre gardening accident.
Notably, the interview touched on her fondness for open tunings. This means the open, or unfretted, strings on a guitar are tuned to a specific chord. It’s a tuning technique often found in country, blues, folk, and rock music. Bridgers noted that she possibly started doing that while learning specific songs. But it became necessary after her bizarre gardening accident.
“I actually f***ed up my finger like a year and a half ago, and it stopped me from playing E and F, which was in so many of my songs,” she revealed at the time. “I was cutting stems on flowers, and the knife flipped and just hacked right on my knuckle.”
She continued, “Since then, it’s been really stiff, and it hurts like s***. I hope that one day it heals. But that’s been making me be more experimental with chords [and tunings].”
Phoebe Bridgers on the ‘Weird Way’ She Plays Guitar
Beyond having to learn alternate techniques to play around her injury, Phoebe Bridgers admitted that she already played guitar kind of weirdly. She explained that, initially, it made her out to be a folk artist. But since then, she’d experimented with technique and texture, which helped when she had to adapt to her messed-up knuckle.
“I play guitar in a weird way,” she began. “When I met Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska, who produced both my records, I was basically a folk artist. It was sounding a little basic. Now I think of the writing process as going into the studio to f*** up the thing that I just wrote.”
She added that this process turned into experimenting on instruments and with techniques she’d never used before. “So [similarly] I try to trick myself to write a song in an open tuning and not even worry about what the chords look like and focus on the melody instead,” she continued. “I’ve learned so much about my favorite gear that way, as well as my favorite chords and tones.”
As far as that favorite gear goes, Bridgers noted that producer Tony Berg put her onto baritone guitars because “I was tuning the bottom string of my guitars down to C open,” she explained. “It was like, ‘Oh. Well, this is the only thing I play now!’”
The post How a Gardening Accident Changed This Indie Icon’s Guitar Technique (And No, This Isn’t a Spinal Tap Reference) appeared first on VICE.
