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Folk-rock singer-songwriter Adrianne Lenker has spent her life reaching beyond words towards the truth of the present moment. By Kye Halford.
Stealing the show: Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker
“It is rare to feel truly seen by a stranger,” Adrianne Lenker wrote in a note printed on the back of a Sharon Van Etten record. Lenker was 22 and nervous when she first emailed Van Etten – whose second album, Epic, had captured Lenker’s teenage heart – seeking guidance on how to navigate New York and “the music industry’s mysterious maze”. She didn’t expect a reply.
Her folk-rock band Big Thief were still in their infancy, dropping burnt CDs of their first album, Masterpiece, to record labels across the city. Their music was yet to mean anything to anyone. But Van Etten responded by inviting Lenker to her Brooklyn apartment, where she spoke like a sister to the young musician over French press coffee, telling her to trust her own instincts and intuition.
That single act of generosity overwhelmed Lenker – the path forward was now a little clearer. “I remember leaving her apartment and making it half a block away before I spilled onto a stoop to catch my breath and cry.”
Many strangers have travelled to see Lenker perform in the 12 years since that afternoon in Brooklyn. Audiences at both her solo shows and those with Big Thief have swollen from enough to fill “15 bucks in the tip jar” to packing theatres such as London’s Hammersmith Apollo, where I first saw them play in 2019. Their crowds are a broad church: an unlikely mix of ages and subcultures drawn by a raw, deeply affecting collection of songs that get under the skin. Alongside her Big Thief bandmates – guitarist Buck Meek, drummer James Krivchenia and, until his recent departure from the group, Max Oleartchik on bass guitar – music has opened communities to Lenker across the world.
“It tends to do that in places where it would otherwise feel difficult to find your way,” Lenker tells me over a Zoom call, with Krivchenia also on the line. “I feel like music is such a connective thing. It really opens people ... it’s inherently a bunch of artists being vulnerable, and you expose yourself and so you’re easy to spot, and other people are easy to spot, and you gravitate towards each other.”
Krivchenia, bearded and possessing the calm energy of a meditation instructor, is Zooming from his New York apartment. Lenker is more cryptic with her whereabouts – somewhere close to New York City but far enough away to be eating, as we speak, a bowl of beetroot grown in the garden. Dark hair partially obscures her face. The gold tooth she now wears, after losing the original in a bike accident, is barely visible in the low-lit living room.
There remains an ease and mutual understanding between Lenker and Krivchenia that can come only from years spent together. They build seamlessly on each other’s answers, with jokes – such as those about a mysterious zoom-in effect on Lenker’s camera, which gives her answers a dramatic visual flair – peppering the conversation. In a live setting, they play with a shared intuition that makes them separate parts of the same organism.
Krivchenia was recently reminded of Big Thief’s chemistry when watching Alice Rohrwacher’s film, La Chimera. “It felt very grounded in this deep craft of storytelling … but within that, these characters were so raw and surprising and strange, and they were playing,” he says. “It had this feeling of safety and fun even when dangerous things were happening in the movie. You felt very taken care of.”
Lenker agrees that a devotion to the craft has always been the bedrock for Big Thief. “Everyone had this attitude of ‘I’ll drop everything for this and just do this infinitely’, regardless of money and recognition, and I didn’t feel like there was a fuse or a timeline,” she says. “I never had the feeling of ‘Oh, we better start getting some traction in the next year or James won’t want to play drums anymore.’ We were just scraping by, but we all equally have so much passion, and I think that’s what connects us is that we’re all artists … We have no choice and we would do this no matter what.”
The pair speaks with a disarming sincerity. Artists – especially artists in indie-rock bands from New York – rarely express romantic notions about art without cloaking their vulnerabilities in metaphor and irony. A cowboy hat like the one Lenker has grown accustomed to wearing, as her songs lean more heavily into the country genre, would on most of her contemporaries be matched with a heavy dose of cynicism and a pair of Y2K sunglasses. But Big Thief’s words never descend into affectation. Perhaps they would if they weren’t true to the spirit in which they live their lives – and if that sincerity hadn’t shaped such a powerful body of work.
I still remember the first time I heard Big Thief – on a bus to Bristol, travelling through the January rain. I was 19, alone and forever cold in a foreign country. Lenker’s voice arrived in a whisper, as if it came from somewhere within the grey mist outside the window: “You have a mythological beauty / you have the eye of someone I have seen …”
“Mythological Beauty”, written about her mother, draws from an accident in Lenker’s childhood when a railroad spike fell from a treehouse and landed on her head, nearly killing her. I wasn’t ready to make sense of the lyrics: Lenker’s voice cut me before my intellect could make sense of anything. For the chorus it modulates into a delicate falsetto: “You’re all caught up inside, but you know the way”. Then, a sudden shriek – “You held me in the backseat with a dishrag / soaking up blood with your eye” – Lenker’s delivery wavers at the edge of control, fragile but carrying a quiet violence. “I was just five and you were 27 / prayin’ don’t let my baby die.”
Lenker was born into a religious cult in Indianapolis, to young parents on their own search for meaning and connection. As the cult revealed its darker truths, Lenker spent her first years watching her parents extricate themselves from its grip, eventually shedding religion altogether – a gradual process Lenker has described as emerging from a “cloud of judgement and control”.
Home became a transient concept: living in a van as the family drifted through the Midwest, often staying with other outsider characters along the way. They eventually bought a house in the Minneapolis suburbs where, at night, Lenker would watch her father fall into trances playing the guitar. He eventually taught her how to play, what he knew of songwriting and channelling inspiration before it disappears. Even then, Lenker was drawn to the meditative quality of songwriting. It not only became a coping mechanism but, as she puts it, her main form of survival.
Ghosts of Lenker’s past drift through her songs. Her lyrics are often fragmented yet detailed, riddled with sensory triggers: “mango in your mouth, juice drippin’ / shoulder of your shirtsleeve slippin’ ” paired with “dog’s white teeth slice right into my fist / Drive to the ER and they put me on risk.” The sequencing of her lines often reminds me of Charlotte Wells’s film Aftersun – seemingly random in their narrative threads, a collage of vivid memories that culminate in something more devastating than the sum of its parts.
Despite the deeply personal grounding in Lenker’s songs, Big Thief has grown more adventurous in their process and expansive in their sound – bold enough to release a genre-sprawling, 80-minute album such as 2022’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You. Forest animals with instruments sitting around a campfire are sketched on the album cover, a nod to the open, communal spirit of the group’s later output and their general earthy vibe.
That openness was key for the recording of their new album, Double Infinity. The three bandmates rode on their bikes through frozen streets from Brooklyn to Manhattan to record at Power Station studio on 53rd Street, where they invited an array of musicians – including ambient pioneer Laraaji – to play on their new songs. They had no idea if their assembled cast would gel, and gave little direction. The new voices bring a lightness to the recordings that’s miles away from the group’s early work.
“We really needed energetically to lift out of some heaviness and just kind of burst open the gates and have this open door feeling where we don’t need to be stuck in any type of definition of what Big Thief is, or any type of box at all,” Lenker says. “People are so powerful, and different people have all these different gifts and ways of seeing. And when you open yourself up, you’re surrendering control as well. Letting go of that control can feel very risky, but it can lead to such a gift … There’s just something really liberating about letting go of that feeling of ownership and control of our songs and letting it be like a river of music that we can all tap into.”
The song “Happy With You” is a high-water mark of the album, composed almost entirely with a single lyric, the song title repeated until it takes the form of a mantra. “It’s like, Lucinda [Williams] levels of distilling… it’s just about how you say it,” says Krivchenia. “Taking away to make room for meaning… it’s so cool.”
Watching Big Thief perform an early version of the song at Melbourne’s Forum several years ago, I was struck by its power as an emotional odyssey in which Lenker shifted across the spectrum from joy to frustration. “A billion things are going through me when I play that song,” Lenker says. “It’s always different, depending on how I’m relating to it at the time.”
The song’s other line, “Why do I need to explain myself?”, cuts to a theme Lenker has wrestled with throughout her entire career, particularly throughout Double Infinity – the inadequacies of language to capture the energy she’s trying to communicate. It’s a limitation she uses to her own advantage, as two of the album’s best songs, “Incomprehensible” and “Words”, confront the dilemma head-on.
“I always feel like I get a little closer to being able to articulate the inarticulatable,” she says. “But it’s all getting at the same song … You’re never going to touch it, but you’ll keep getting closer, or more articulate. Every time you make choices, you have to let go of every other thing that it could be. And that’s the interesting thing about writing – every time you make a choice, you have to cut away 10 other things that you were maybe going to put there. So much is chiselled away and dies ... but then those things might be the scraps of what might end up on some other sculpture in the future.”
Lenker carries a quiet intention in everything she does – including how she speaks. She isn’t afraid of silence and there are moments during our conversation where I wonder if I’ve spoken out of turn. I soon realise that she’s simply waiting for the right words to arrive, turning her thoughts over with childlike curiosity. She is dedicated to expressing whatever feels true in the present moment, especially when it comes to her craft.
“Pick any point in space and measure from that one point. Say it’s your grandma’s house... how does your relationship with that space change?” she muses. “Because you’re never going to be in the same exact position. Sometimes you might be in that house. You might be on the porch. You might be a block away. You might be a city away, and then you’re a country away. And then you come back and you’re standing in the spot where it once stood, once it’s been knocked down.
“You’re always in relationship to that thing that means something to you, but you’re also always in a different space. And so I feel like that with songs sometimes. Everything in between the moment of writing it and the moment I die, it’ll mean something different, even when it still retains some of the same things too. Every single day, you’re different.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 23, 2025 as "American beauty".
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