Bo Burnham Co-Wrote Seven Songs in the Lost Weekend Credits

The full Lost Weekend credits went public alongside Phoebe Bridgers' third album this week, and the name doing the most work in them isn't a musician by trade. It's Bo Burnham — the comedian, filmmaker and Bridgers' partner — who turns up as a co-writer on seven of the record's 16 songs, plus a singer on several more.

Lost Weekend came out August 14 on Dead Oceans. It runs 52 minutes and 26 seconds, closes with a reprise of the title track, and lands six years after Punisher, the 2020 album that made Bridgers a headliner. Critics have already piled on: Metacritic has it at 92 out of 100 from 14 reviews, and Pitchfork gave it an 8.4.

Credits usually get skimmed. This one shouldn't be. Read it straight through and the album stops looking like a singer-songwriter record and starts looking like a group project — five producers, a classical composer handling vocal arrangements, a bluegrass trio, and a sample lifted from a piece of academic computer music made before Bridgers was born.

Why the Lost Weekend credits are worth reading

Streaming apps are terrible at this. Before release, the only reliable credit page anywhere was for the lead single "Lost Boys," which came out June 25 with Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus on backing vocals — Bridgers' boygenius bandmates. Everything else was guesswork until the label put the real document out. If you want to know who wrote what, the liner notes remain the only honest source.

Who actually plays on this record

The production block alone has five names, which is unusual for an artist whose whole reputation rests on intimacy. The rest of the list is deeper still.

Five producers, from Tony Berg to Alex G

Bridgers produced alongside Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska, both of whom worked on Punisher and her 2017 debut Stranger in the Alps. Jack Antonoff joins them, and Alexander Giannascoli — Alex G to most listeners — is credited with additional production. That's four distinct sonic instincts sharing one tracklist, which explains why reviewers keep describing the album as restless rather than uniform.

Bo Burnham's seven co-writes

Burnham's seven credits make him the single most frequent collaborator on the album. He sings on "Bobby," which multiple critics have read as being about the relationship itself, and appears on other tracks too. He is not a hired gun brought in for a hook; he's a structural presence, and the credit list is the first hard evidence of how far that goes.

The regulars: Hutson, Vore and Caroline Shaw

Christian Lee Hutson and Marshall Vore, both longtime Bridgers co-writers, contributed to multiple songs again. The genuine outlier is Caroline Shaw, the Pulitzer-winning composer, who handled vocal arrangements across the record. Maya Hawke sings on "Haunted" and "Never Going Back!" Reported guest performers also include Blake Mills, Jon Brion, Conor Oberst, American Football's Mike Kinsella and Nickel Creek.

A Massachusetts mall and a 1970s computer

Two details reward anyone who reads to the bottom of the page. "Liberty Tree" takes its name from Liberty Tree Mall in Danvers, Massachusetts, near where Burnham grew up — a suburban strip-mall reference sitting in the middle of an album about grief.

The title track is stranger. It contains elements of Damien Jurado's "The Last Great Washington State," and it samples "Notjustmoreidlechatter," a computer-music composition by Paul Lansky. Lansky is the Princeton composer Radiohead raided for "Idioteque," which used a different piece of his entirely. Two decades on, a mainstream artist is quietly doing it again.

How this compares with Punisher

Punisher was largely Bridgers, Berg and Gruska in a closed loop. The new record keeps that core and stacks a much wider cast on top of it, which is the opposite of what usually happens when an indie artist gets big — the standard move is to shrink the room, not fill it. Sixteen tracks is also long by her standards, and the credits show why she needed the help.

What to watch for next

The Lost Tour runs September through December, playing arenas with a phone-free policy and Alex G and former Black Country, New Road frontman Isaac Wood opening. Expect the co-writers to surface on stage. If you're buying physical, the 2xLP includes a limited glow-in-the-dark green splatter pressing, and the printed insert will carry the same credits — worth more than the streaming metadata, which still won't tell you who wrote "Bobby." Read the sleeve, then play it again.