JACKSON, Miss.—Madeline Cox was sipping coffee on her couch in her midtown Jackson, Mississippi, apartment, enjoying a slow Thursday morning off work last week when her Lemuria Books coworker, Sarah, texted her. “MADELINE,” she wrote in all caps, accompanied by a photo of a poster advertising a pop-up Phoebe Bridgers concert at Duling Hall that night.
Bridgers, an indie artist from California, has built a nationwide fanbase, both as a solo artist and as a member of indie rock group Boygenius. She’s picked up four Grammys along the way, and she even opened up for multiple shows of Taylor Swift’s record-breaking Eras Tour in 2023. But nobody expected her to put on a show in Jackson that day.
“That was kind of crazy to me because I’d heard that she was doing this tour where she was having random pop-ups, and I kind of joked with one of my coworkers. We were like, ‘Oh, she won’t come to Jackson’ because, like, nobody ever comes to Jackson,” Cox told the Mississippi Free Press on May 18.
Cox, who is 23 and had been a fan of Bridgers’ since middle school, rushed out of her apartment just after 11 a.m. on May 14 and drove five minutes to the concert venue, where she waited outside in the hot sun for about an hour in a long line of more than 500 people that stretched outside of the venue and down the street by Trustmark Bank.
When she made it to the front of the line around 12:05 p.m., a member of Bridgers’ team placed a neon-green wristband featuring the number 244 printed on it alongside Bridgers’ name and some of the artist’s branding designs on Cox’s right arm. Duling Hall capped the attendance count for the concert at 400 people both because of fire-safety issues and because most of the attendees would be sitting on the floor, which takes up more room than standing. Only people with wristbands would be able to buy a ticket when the venue’s doors opened for the show at 6 p.m. that night, which meant that Cox had guaranteed her entry.
Awestruck, she returned to her apartment to clean and to get herself ready for the show. She dressed in a simple low-cut black tank top, black jean shorts, flip flops and tied her hair in a ponytail because she knew Duling Hall would be warm with all of the people filling the small venue. After backtracking once to retrieve her credit card, Cox arrived at Duling Hall around 6 p.m. that evening, locked her phone in her car, waited in line and bought her ticket. She walked into the venue and sat on the floor as she was instructed.
An Intimate, Electronic-less Experience
Earlier that day, members of Bridgers’ team told attendees the rules of the show as fans waited to secure wristbands. They could not bring phones, smartwatches, smart glasses, cameras, pens, paper or recording equipment of any kind to the show because Bridgers wanted it to be an intimate experience for local fans. Attendees could either leave their electronics at home or in their car or secure them in a locked pouch that had a key only security members could unlock after the show.
“Everyone there was so present. It was so nice to go to a music venue and not have any phones out,” Cox said. “… Everybody’s just sitting there and focusing on her 100%. Nobody’s recording, nobody’s trying to get the perfect picture. Everybody’s just enjoying the music, listening to the music, taking it in. It was a really special moment.”
During the show itself, Bridgers sat on a couch on stage and performed a few of her older songs, including Graceland Too, Motion Sickness and Scott Street, before introducing some new, unreleased music to her fans and ending the show with more songs from previous albums. She only had two other people on stage with her—a guitarist and a pianist who also played a drum with his hands—as she sang acoustically for about two hours. The artist’s dog, a black pug named Maxine, also graced the audience with her presence.
Bridgers’ new music was “all so good,” Cox said. “It sounded very similar to her older stuff, but in a whole new way, too. It was really awesome. And just getting to hear those songs live, too, that I honestly never thought that I would hear live was really special.”
Cox recalled Bridgers saying that a reason she enjoys the intimacy of playing pop-up shows is that the limited advertising means only local fans will be in attendance.
After the show, Bridgers signed autographs and talked to every person who approached her, including Cox, who hugged Bridgers and got the artist to sign her chest because that had always been on Cox’s “bucket list.” Concertgoers could not bring markers, pencils, pens or paper into the show, so they either had to get their body autographed or buy merchandise for Bridgers to sign with her Sharpie. Bridgers even had custom posters and shirts that had “Duling Hall” and the date of the concert inscribed on them.
“It was just one of those moments where you would never expect something like that to happen, and I think I’ve just gotten used to stuff not happening in Jackson or knowing that certain artists will not come to Jackson either because we don’t have the venue space for it or they don’t think they’d have the fan base to be able to actually fill a venue,” Cox said.
“And so, knowing that she kind of took a chance on us and was supporting local vendors and a local venue with Duling Hall and just knowing that she was giving the fans who were in Mississippi, who were in Jackson, a chance to be able to actually see her music, it was really special,” she continued. “And I hope other bigger artists will see the impact that that makes on the people of Mississippi and will actually start wanting to come here and give us the experience that they give to so many other states.”
Intentionally Surprising Local Fans
A few weeks before the show, Duling Hall box office manager Haley McWhorter got some vague information from Bridgers’ team advising the venue to keep May 14 open because the artist “might be coming.” Earlier in the week ahead of the show, Bridgers’ team confirmed that she would be playing Duling Hall and told the venue’s staff not to advertise it anywhere until the artist’s team put up the first poster.
Keeping the secret from everyone McWhorter knew other than her coworkers was, she said, “the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my entire life because everybody’s online and my friends were like online, and there was a lot of rumors about where she was going to go before she came came here because she was in Memphis, Tennessee, the day before. So, they’re like, ‘Is she going to come?’ And I had to lie to their face, like, ‘No, why would she come to Jackson?’”
On the morning of the show, members of Bridgers’ team and the Duling Hall staff divided up in pairs to pin posters in strategic areas around Jackson, including record stores, coffee shops, restaurants and boutiques, from about 9 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. Duling Hall typically only has four in-office workers, so the staff had to call in six friends and family members to assist the team with putting up the analog advertising. Within an hour of the first poster going up, McWhorter saw that Jacksonians had posted about the concert online, which she said she expected.
Bridgers’ team told McWhorter that the artist wanted to keep the advertising limited to posters in strategic areas in Jackson so that only local people would be at the show.
“A lot of people talk down on Jackson, and they don’t think that we have a lot going on here. And for someone of her size to look at Jackson and view it as like a place that she could go and share her music, yeah, it was cool,” McWhorter told the Mississippi Free Press on May 19. “And I hope maybe her friends take some notes and want to come here, too.”
In a world where online ticket sales have become the norm, she said she enjoyed seeing the line of hopeful concert attendees stretch around the venue in the Fondren neighborhood because people walking and driving by would notice the crowd and wonder what was going on at Duling Hall. The box office manager said the experience made her consider moving the ticket box outside when the weather is nice for future events.
McWhorter added that Duling Hall staff received positive feedback from attendees, saying they wish the venue would host more artists like Bridgers in the future. She said she hopes to book up-and-coming artists with similar music to Bridgers.
“I think it’s a cool way for artists to play more low-key shows with newer music. They find things out. Yeah, I think it’s a cool thing to do all the way around, like, keep it off the internet, small local shows for people only in the area—it’s really nice,” McWhorter said.
Since appearing in Jackson, Phoebe Bridgers has continued her tour of surprise shows that use analog advertising, having performed in Mobile, Alabama; Macon, Georgia; and Greenville, South Carolina.
For more information on Phoebe Bridgers, visit phoebebridgersmerch.com. Listen to her music on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or other streaming apps. Duling Hall regularly has publicly scheduled performers coming to the Jackson venue. View the full calendar and buy tickets online at dulinghall.com.
