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…