Jamie was the kind of mom who encouraged Phoebe to earn spending money by busking at the Pasadena Farmers Market — a gig Phoebe says taught her to relax while performing because “no one gave a shit” when she was singing on the street. She took her to the Folk Music Center in Claremont so she could learn the banjo and pushed her to take any show she was offered, even if it was playing at someone’s backyard birthday party. She made playlists of Beatles demos on Phoebe’s iPod and took her to see live music at any chance she got. “My mom was almost too supportive,” Phoebe laughs. “I thought I was the shit before I was good at all.

While it appeared fine on the outside, things weren’t great in the Bridgers home. Though her parents’ marriage had started off well, Phoebe says, her father eventually became abusive, inflicting what she refers to as “textbook domestic violence.” Her parents didn’t divorce until Phoebe was 19, but looking back, she realizes why her mother was so willing to get in the car at a moment’s notice. “There was an element of having to escape the family dynamic,” she says. “I think that’s why she drove me to concerts and went out of her way. We were both kind of escaping.”

When puberty hit, so did Phoebe’s punk phase. So while she began to develop her own, quieter songs — “Georgia,” for example, is from this time, about an early boyfriend who “never lies or picks up his phone” — in 2012 she also joined a band called Sloppy Jane: “I played bass, horribly.” They performed around Los Angeles, gathering attention for wild performances where frontwoman Haley Dahl would often strip naked, ooze paint out her mouth, and throw herself into the crowd like a plastic doll. “Haley is still my best friend,“ Phoebe says, even though “Sloppy Jane is so different than my world.”

Sometimes they would finish their set with a Teletubbies cartoon looped on a small TV behind them on stage. All the girls would kneel down on the floor like yoga instructors and wait it out to see what the audience would do. “We were basically calling people out on their art rock shit,” Phoebe says. Once, she had an 8 a.m. recording session, or something of note — she can’t remember now — and eventually she had to go, sneaking off stage while lingering distortion rang out. That night, she got a text message from Robb Nansel, the founder of Saddle Creek Records: “Did I just see you on stage right now?”

