The day before we meet, Phoebe Bridgers left her therapist's office only to discover that her car, a red Toyota Prius, had been hit by a bus.

“I saw a note on my car and was like, I got a ticket,” she recalls. “And then I was like, Wait­—nope, I did not.” She took it in stride, more amused than resigned.

“It's drivable, so whatever.”

If a bus slamming into your car while you were in therapy feels like a heavy-handed signal from the universe, it would also be a perfect line in a Phoebe Bridgers song. The singer-songwriter, 25, first made waves with her 2017 album, Stranger in the Alps, a collection of confessional and melancholic folk-rock tracks textured with the mundanities of day-to-day life. Her debut landed her on best-of lists and the late-night TV circuit; John Mayer tweeted out her song “Funeral,” writing that it signaled the “arrival of a giant.” She followed up Stranger with two collaborative projects: boygenius, the supergroup she formed with similarly openhearted musicians Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, and Better Oblivion Community Center, a duo act with sad-boy legend Conor Oberst. Oberst told me he was “floored” when he first heard Bridgers's music, describing her voice as “an old friend you didn't know you had.”

Bridgers can feel like the avatar for a micro-generation that chronically divulges its feelings, discusses being sad and horny like it's small talk about the weather, and is extremely, debilitatingly online. For instance, she is an avid fan of the internet-culture podcast Reply All and is especially active on Twitter, where she posts wry missives like “hey there delilah are you mad at me” and “if eating ass is wrong I don't want to be right.”

“We got this in Stockholm, at this store called Monki. It’s a really cheap store. Bought a bunch of socks and this. I was like, ‘Man, that was an impulse buy. Didn’t try it on.’ ” Dress, by Monki / Turtleneck, by Brandy Melville

When I first encounter Bridgers in the kitchen of her collaborator and close friend Marshall Vore, her middle-parted platinum hair and soaring cheekbones make her look like an apparition from beyond the veil who can tell me exactly when I'm going to die. She speaks in a rapid spill of words that's tempered by the dudes and rads of her native-Californian lilt. While her music reveals aspects of her personal life in the most crushing manner possible, she discloses them with far more buoyancy during conversation. “I hate the idea of a wedding so fucking much,” Bridgers says. “Understandable with a dysfunctional family. But I also think it's badass when women are like, Yeah, well, my third husband is… I think it's kind of romantic, and it means you do what feels right. I'm marrying everybody I fall in love with. Prenups up the wazoo, but…” This dissonance between Bridgers's devastating songs—which include lyrics like I hope you kiss my rotten head and pull the plug—and her goofy in-person exuberance is so striking that I ask her to tell me which feels more like her true self.