“The Governor’s Waltz” is the fourth track off American singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers’s album “Lost Weekend”. The song recounts the end of a relationship and is structured over a waltz-time rhythm that lends it an illusion of elegance, verging on theatricality.
The location is based on anything actual. Bridgers was dating actor Paul Mescal when she performed at New York’s Governor’s Ball Festival in 2021, and the opening lyric places her right there: “I was the belle of the Governor’s Ball, hiding in the bathroom like Shelley Duvall.” That image of hiding in her own moment of visibility sets the tone for everything that follows.
The song works because of the honesty in its depiction of a miserable couple pretending to be together. “I’m next to you, you’re next to nothing,” Bridgers sings, admitting she’s checked out already, but still there, partly because her lover doesn’t want to go. The form of the waltz evokes that theatrical sense, as if one were viewing a memory so often produced and rehearsed that the line between what is genuine and what is acted has disappeared.
The closing lines to the song have attracted the greatest attention. “And she can pretend to be me, because she took my place in my bed on that stage, I have not lost any sleep,” Bridgers sings, a lyric many fans relate to the bedsheets with rocket-themed designs she made famous in 2017, later utilized on Gracie Abrams’ own tour staging. Bridgers has said the song is less a message and more about her own personal struggle to figure out who she is independent of a relationship.
The last phrase twists the whole song around, “Being myself wasn’t easy, do it for me,” flipping years of asking a partner to perform back onto whoever’s next.
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