In an industry known for its ruthless search for the next big thing, Adrianne Lenker is in it for the long haul. The 32-year-old American musician speaks as though she is in the early stages of a marathon: she is a “craftsperson”, who wrote her first song aged eight, recorded her debut album at 13, and is now in the process of figuring things out. “I still consider myself a beginner,” she says. “I have so many years left to work on writing songs and work on my instrument, and the more refined I get, the more skilled I get.” Certain songs are described as “sturdy”: “I’ll probably be singing this when I’m 60, you know?”
But the pace she is going at is closer to a sprint. Lenker is the lead singer, primary songwriter and guitarist of acclaimed folk rock band Big Thief; their fifth album, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, was a sprawling 20-track release described by the Observer as “wonderful… their most varied and expansive record to date”. She is about to release her fifth solo album, Bright Future, after 2020’s double offering Songs and Instrumentals. In addition, there have been compilations and several EPs put out with her ex-husband and current bandmate Buck Meek (more on which later).
Big Thief are masters of slow-burn impact: it may take a few listens for the melodies to fully unfurl, but once they do they feel as though they have been part of your internal landscape for ever. Along with critical accolades and five Grammy nominations, they have attracted a devoted following thanks to their sophisticated Americana, pairing Lenker’s nimble, affecting vocals with muscular swells of guitar and distortion. On the extraordinary Not, a Barack Obama song of the year in 2019, Lenker describes something with a list of what it is not – “the lines on your face”, “the starkness of slate” – building intensity through repetition until the song reaches a spine-tingling high. The fact that it is not even among the band’s 10 most popular songs on Spotify speaks to the breadth and quality of their output.
Talking to Lenker is in many ways similar to listening to her music: poetic, exploratory, leading up to the occasional moment that feels revelatory. She is dialling in from western Massachusetts, though the location is temporary; since leaving New York almost a decade ago to go on tour, she has been on the move. She apologises for keeping her Zoom video off: “I have an abrasion on my cornea – a cut on my eye. So it makes it painful to look at light sources, like the screen.” It feels fitting for a conversation about her new album, which was recorded in a forest-hidden studio, away from modern technology (previous records were made in cabins in the woods, the Texas desert and the Colorado Rockies). The album’s co-producer and engineer Phil Weinrobe has stated that: “Adrianne and I never once looked at a computer screen while making this record.”
Disconnecting from technology was crucial for the process. “The energy of a cell phone or a computer does something to the energy field,” says Lenker. “It can be this thing that almost latches on to your eyeballs and sucks you in and takes part of your soul or something.” The album’s recording process was fully analogue: recorded on tape, mixed on an analogue console and cut directly on to the acetate used to make records. Everyone recorded together, not wearing headphones; they left not having listened back to a single take, trusting that Weinrobe had captured everything.
The result is a wistful album that feels achingly intimate, the addition of strings and piano to vocals and guitar bringing a new intricacy to the arrangements. It opens with the sound of shuffling, a violin being tuned, muted laughter, before giving way to Real House, a devastating song about childhood memories and loss of innocence. Sadness As a Gift is a gorgeous, Dylanesque dissection of a relationship that didn’t go as planned; No Machine is a delicate love song full of anxious yearning. The title Bright Future comes from a song that didn’t make it on to the album, but it still felt right. “We have a lot of limitations in our language where we associate words with binaries: it’s easy to associate brightness with pure positivity. But light can be blinding – explosions are bright.”
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Born in 1991 in Indiana and raised in Minnesota, Lenker had a peripatetic childhood that meandered among Christian cults of varying degrees of intensity. “We’d pray under blankets and the Bible couldn’t touch the ground. A lot of things were sinful,” she recalls. Her parents had her when they were 21; when she was four they escaped the first cult, lived in a van for several years, then with some Amish women, then were called back to religion. “They got out of that main cult, but then were in other ones until I was nine or 10. Then they went away from all religion and spirituality to this other extreme. Because of the chaos, my parents’ searching, I maintained my own relationship with it all.” (These days, she sees spirituality as “a huge part of me, but it’s not religion based, it’s more my own connection to – you could call it God, you could call it a higher power”.)
Lenker was a serious child who would “stare a lot – I would just stare at people to an uncomfortable degree”. She loved “running in the woods and making friends with the boys and wrestling and playing football and building forts”; she would collect scraps of metal and had dreams of becoming an inventor. “I was really interested in magical things that could transport me to another realm,” she says. “Maybe it was because of some of the pain I was experiencing as a kid.”
Music was a way to escape: inspired by her dad, who wrote songs through the night, she picked up the guitar, though instead of learning other people’s music she taught herself how to play by writing her own. “I came to songwriting out of necessity – I needed somewhere that I could pour all my feelings where it was safe. I really latched on to it.” Her parents divorced when she was 12; after a downward spiral in her mid-teens in which she discovered drugs and alcohol, she stepped away from it all. “I was hurting myself in that way, but then I found some good friends who were all about raw foods and health.” After years of being home-schooled, she got a full scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she formed her first band.
When we speak, she has just finished teaching a four-week online songwriting workshop (“I hadn’t been that nervous since maybe the first time I got on stage”). It’s the first time she has had to break down her creative process, and a central part of it, she discovered, is ensuring that your source of inspiration remains unhindered: “The thing I talked about in class was checking your basics: if you’re feeling numb or cut off, you need to recognise that something is blocking you and then identify what that thing is. For me, it often comes down to sleeping regularly, eating nourishing meals, regular exercise, reading before bed rather than looking at a screen. There are so many opportunities to fall into autopilot – it can happen so insidiously.”
At the other extreme, there is the risk of emotional overexertion, something that is especially difficult to manage on tour. Lenker is a powerhouse performer, giving herself fully to the experience (our critic Kitty Empire describes her guitar solos as “full of frustration and suffering, angry and ecstatic at the same time”). Just before the pandemic, after six years of almost nonstop touring, Lenker ended up in hospital: “I hit a wall – I had just been going in survival mode.” Giving an open, vulnerable live performance night after night can be draining, though she found that shutting off emotionally resulted in worse shows; she is still learning how to find the balance. “I am getting better at it. What helps me to protect myself is knowing that we’re actually all gathering around the music, as if it is a fireplace. And even me, as one of the people playing the music, I’m also just there to warm myself by that fire.”
Relations within Big Thief are another priority. Unofficial group therapy is something the band have done from the start: “If we need to, we’ll miss soundcheck and just sit under a tree and talk for four hours, because we can’t play music together unless we feel connected. We therapise one another.” This was especially important during Lenker’s divorce from Meek, the band’s guitarist, in 2018. “It was crucial. I don’t think we would have made it out as a band had we not been able to really go there. Buck and I were in love, got married, then separated and divorced, all while touring. Which was crazy.” Apart from a time during the separation when Meek did not join the others on tour, they worked through it together. “I think it’s a testament to our love. There’s real, actual love between us, that has stretched so wide that we were able to somehow emerge as better friends. And it hasn’t been swept under the rug, it’s not tense. Whatever we were completely broke down all the way, then rebuilt itself out of the ash.”
Another complicated subject the band will have to talk through is the current situation in Israel and Gaza. In 2022, Big Thief cancelled two planned concerts in Tel Aviv, bassist Max Oleartchik’s home town, after a backlash from fans. “We oppose the illegal occupation and the systematic oppression of the Palestinian people,” they wrote in a statement at the time. It is not a subject Lenker is ready to comment on at present: “That’s something I would prefer not to… just because we’re in it, you know? I don’t have a way of speaking on it yet.” Last week she posted on Instagram, calling for a permanent and immediate ceasefire, announcing a new collection of songs where 100% of proceeds will go towards the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, adding: “I can’t express how sad and angry I am about this ongoing violence towards Palestinians. The killing must stop.”
Songs and Instrumentals grieved the end of her relationship with musician Indigo Sparke (one track is titled Music for Indigo). On Bright Future, the weight of heteronormative expectations hangs in the air. “If I were him, would you be my family too?” she wonders on Fool; “I wanted to be your woman, I wanted to be your man,” she sings on Vampire Empire, the original version of the Big Thief song. “Nobody escapes the dysfunction of the structures that have been created,” she says. “Nobody gets out of that. People who are oppressed suffer the most, but the oppressors are also not whole as humans. There are all these great pushes for breaking out of the binary of gender roles. What I’ve always known is that I don’t want a relationship that looks like anything I could ever imagine.”
She is sceptical of claims, in the wake of the female-dominated Grammys, that the music industry has become more inclusive of women. “Women’s empowerment is the smallest end of the thumbnail of the whole body of humanity – it’s a very fresh new thing. Dissolving those mechanisms at the root takes time. If women win the Grammys, that’s a victory,” she says, choosing her words carefully. “But I have this issue with the way we award achievement. You have to basically break your back and make the most money and be the most popular to get the trophy.” She stresses that her issue is not with the winners, whom she respects, but with the system. “There are so many people who pour themselves into their craft and into their work, who work two jobs and have been putting out records for decades, people who are legends.”
Who would she give a Grammy to, if she could?
“Tucker Zimmerman,” she replies, with no hesitation. “He has some of the most beautifully written songs of all time – he has John Prine-level writing. He had a lot of manual labour jobs and he’s one of the most compassionate, sweet, warm humans. He’s in his 80s, and has just recorded an album of new songs.”
You get the sense that this is the kind of trajectory Lenker is on, the reason why she is prioritising steadiness and longevity over rock’n’roll indulgence. When she was younger, she used to think that artists had to be tortured to create great music. “I remember wondering if that was how you had to be. But I’ve found that there is no shortage of pain in life as a human, no matter who you are. You don’t have to go looking for it. Every person we ever love, we lose. We have to let go of everything, all along the way, until the very end, when you even let go of yourself and your body.” Thinking back to the excesses of the past, she doesn’t understand how people got up the next day to go on stage. “I wouldn’t be able to function enough to be able to perceive the things around me.”
It all goes back to keeping yourself open to the world. “There’s enough to write about and wonder about and feel for ever: endless pain and suffering, but also incredible amounts of beauty and joy.”
Bright Future will be released by 4AD on 22 March. Adrianne Lenker is touring the UK and Ireland 19-29 April
