American singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers builds to a climax on “As Above,” track fifteen from her album “Lost Weekend,” just before the closing reprise.
The song holds its tension for most of its runtime, letting quiet dread accumulate before releasing it all at once. Bridgers sings, “Now I don’t want to live forever, but I don’t wanna die,” a line pulled almost word for word from Black Sabbath’s “Live Forever.” That reference tracks with her long-documented love of the band; she wore a Black Sabbath shirt at her Madison Square Garden preview show, and she has said she tuned her guitars low early in her career to chase Tony Iommi’s sound.
That tension breaks in the song’s climax, where Bridgers yells, “You won’t have to believe in magic, leave it to me, and I’ll make it happen!” The sudden volume shift catches listeners off guard given how controlled her delivery usually stays. Critics have described the moment as a brief sonic tornado that sweeps up everything the song has built before setting back down peacefully.
Musically, “As Above” also carries a recurring melodic thread that runs through the album’s back half. The same “Graceland Too” motif that shapes “Liberty Tree” and the instrumental “Lost Parade” surfaces again in this song’s bridge, tying the record’s closing stretch together even as each song tells a different piece of the story.
Sitting one track before “Lost Weekend (Reprise)” closes the album, “As Above” reads like the last full release of tension before Bridgers lets everything settle – what did that final yell mean to you on first listen?
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