By Maggie Kelly
Born in Indianapolis, 33-year-old Adrianne Lenker is the lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter for the three-man band Big Thief, but has also made a name for herself in her solo work. In a Pitchfork interview conducted in 2017, Adrianne Lenker tells her compelling—and at times unusual—story. Lenker was born into a religious cult, and although she only spent the first 4 years of her life apart of the church, the aftermath of “residual debris” meant she was not free from unsettlement. In the years that followed, Lenker’s family lived out of a van and in 14 different houses with various roommates.
Amongst all the unpredictability in her childhood, music remained a constant in her life. Lenker began playing guitar when she was 6 and has been singing as long as she can remember. The first song she wrote when she was 8 was about her culminating frustration of “the weight of everything on [her] shoulders”, which is a theme persistent in her work today. Lenker describes her early songwriting as taking an outside perspective on life, and she credits this approach to the philosophical discussions her and her father would have. Her father, who had a tremendous influence on Lenker’s early music career, taught her basic chords as she was learning guitar and encouraged her to create records that echoed a more refined style of music. While her father might have pushed artists like Michael Hedges, Lenker took more of a liking to artists such as Elliott Smith. Recalling when she was first introduced to Smith at 15, Lenker remembers thinking, “This is all I want to do. I don’t want to create these elaborate, pop-sounding productions.”
Lenker’s father acted essentially as her manager in her adolescent years, investing into her musical career by setting up sessions with professional musicians and helping Lenker record various albums. However, she soon realized through recording one of her first albums that the music making process had lost its magic, and didn’t align with her own emerging vision. This caused a rift between Lenker and her father when she decided to step back from her early music career and attend college. Eventually, at the Berklee College of Music, Lenker would rediscover her passion and direction for music, outside of just producing it for a project.
Big Thief originally began as a duo comprised of Lenker and Buck Meek. The pair originally met in Boston, but it wasn’t until Lenker moved to Brooklyn after graduation that the two would run into each other again and begin playing wherever they could for several years. Presently, the band includes both Lenker and Meek, as well as James Krivchenia, who joined the duo in 2015. Their breakout record, Masterpiece, put Big Thief on the map and their 2019 record, U.F.O.F, earned the band a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Music Album. Though labelled “alternative,” it is difficult to stick a genre on the band as their influences stem from vastly different corners of the music world and beyond.
Adrianne Lenker has brought the same degree of unapologetic vulnerability to her solo work, most notably songs and instrumentals released in 2020. Instrumentals focuses on Lenker’s unique arrangements while songs showcases her nearly chronic sincerity. As Stereogum’s Michael Tedder puts it after spending an afternoon with Lenker, “I am 80% certain she has never been sarcastic in her entire life. Maybe 85%.” There is a quality about both Lenker’s writing and voice that makes the listener feel as though she is speaking directly to you. Lenker’s most recent album, Bright Future, was entirely recorded on tape with no computer in sight and holds the same raw and intimate quality as her previous work. Lenker often uses imagery of nature and comments on the importance of its preservation in her music. This is seen most evidently in the cleverly named song “Donut Seam” where she sings, “Don’t it seem like a good time for swimming / Before all the water disappears?”
I had the privilege of attending Lenker’s show on November 15th this year at L’Olympia. As a relatively frequent concertgoer, the general experience is relatively similar no matter the artist. Yet, the hour and a half Lenker performed was different from any other show I’ve attended, and certainly a transformative experience. Despite Lenker’s calm and gentle demeanor, she commanded powerful control over the entire crowd. There were hardly any phones or loud sing-alongs, simply an audience entranced and intently listening to every note played, and every word sung. Lenker’s experimental acoustic sound causes many different tunings throughout the set, so there were several tuning breaks where Lenker would gently crack jokes into the mic to keep the crowd entertained. Lenker compared these few minute breaks to a long road trip we were on together, but I would argue the show’s experience compared more closely to all 2,000 of us sitting around a campfire together. Lenker has used music as an outlet to capture memories in one place, and November 15th will certainly be a date forever etched in both my memory and soul.