As she prepares to release a second album, the Californian indie rocker reflects on provocative lyrics, recent collaborations and what she now thinks of Ryan Adams

You are a talented young musician whose career has taken off in the past couple of years. Artists you greatly admire want to collaborate with you, declaring themselves “floored” by your music, and excitable comparisons are made to the work of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. Now you’re touring the world, jetting off to faraway places that you could only dream about while growing up in west-coast suburbia. But when you get there – to Japan, say – you find yourself strangely unmoved by your surroundings. Worse, you end up longing for the everyday comforts you’ve left behind. You would rather skip the visit to the temple or the ride on the bullet train with your bandmates and sneak home.

This is the predicament in which Phoebe Bridgers finds herself on her new album, Punisher, a collection of beautifully wrought songs that cast a razor-sharp eye on the absurdities of modern life. In Bridgers’s lyrical universe, dreams that appear beguiling from a distance are liable to fall flat in the space of a chorus. “I wanted to see the world,” she sings rousingly on Kyoto. “Then I flew over the ocean/ And I changed my mind.”