The summer before my sophomore year of college, having just turned 19, I listened to Phoebe Bridgers for the first time. I wish I could say I’ve been a fan since the beginning of her career, but I haven’t. I discovered her late, and the first song I listened to wasn’t even any of her solo music. It was a song off her EP with Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus titled boygenius. I was riding in my car, with the windows rolled down, hot and thick Texas humidity around me, when I heard Bridgers and Dacus sing, “when you cut a hole into my skull / do you hate what you see? / like I do.” For the entire car ride home, I played the song over and over again, never letting the song finish before I restarted it. On each listen, I waited for the line to come: Do you hate what you see, like I do?

Those words stuck with me, and I became obsessed. I started playing “Souvenir” on every walk I took, I played it before I fell asleep, I put it on every playlist imaginable. Then I listened to Stranger in the Alps, and then the rest of boygenius. I couldn’t stop. Quickly, Bridgers became my top artist even though it had just been a few months.

I can’t quite remember when Bridgers rose in popularity. All I know is suddenly, she was everywhere. Her songs were on every pre-made sad indie playlist, just waiting to become someone else’s new obsession. Her Twitter, @_fake_nudes_, flooded my timeline with viral tweets, and I couldn’t stop talking about her. Maybe it was her unique melodies that drew me to her, the devastatingly beautiful lyrics, or both. But, she did something to me. I had become a punisher, someone who could not and would not shut up about a certain blonde who always wore a skeleton onesie.

Over the course of her career as an artist, Bridgers developed a fanbase of people like me. We cling onto her words and experiences, but only because they mirror our own. Her witty personality and ability to not take herself too seriously makes her approachable. Coupling that with her clever lyrics and raw honesty, we get a unique artist in a genre that is oftentimes oversaturated with insincerity.

“I feel like as a lyricist, she’s really honest with herself and I think that allows for her music to hit me harder than other artists,” says Olivia Wolff, a junior Acting BFA major. “One of my favorite songs is Kyoto. It has a really fun, upbeat orchestration but it’s about her really sad relationship with her father. I just love how she’s able to find the joy in the sadness and the sadness in the joy. She writes from a really raw place and has a lot of similar experiences and thinks about life in the same way I do, and I think that’s why I really connected to her.”

On the title track of her latest album, Punisher, which she released this summer, Bridgers writes about the complicated relationship between an artist and a fan. She shows how an all-consuming fixation masked by admiration can become toxic and still be written off as love. I listened to this song in my childhood bedroom after months of deep isolation and extreme loneliness. I heard her sing, “What if I told you / I feel like I know you / but we’ve never met? / It’s for the best.” These lyrics, theorized to be about Elliot Smith, resonated with me. I too felt like I knew her, even if she didn’t know me. Am I the type of person she’s talking about, I’d often ask myself. Do I take it too far? Realistically, I know my love for her isn’t toxic but it’s new. I’ve never had this kind of relationship with an artist before—one that is seemingly unimportant to her, yet so incredibly necessary to me.

On my 20th birthday, almost a year after I listened to Bridgers for the first time, I bought Punisher on vinyl, even though I don’t own a record player or plan on owning one anytime soon. However, I realized I needed a physical representation of it. I needed to be able to hold it in my hands and put it on display for everyone to see. Because this album, and Phoebe Bridgers herself, had become so much more than a top artist on my Spotify profile. She is and forever will be, a source of joy, heartache, comfort, and pure catharsis in my life.

Phoebe F*cking Bridgers