By Anthony Carew
"Music is this connecting force," says Big Thief songwriter Adrianne Lenker. "All the boundaries and defining lines that people hold, they all dissipate when you're in a room playing music. The state lines, the city lines, the country lines; none of that matters.
"It becomes strange that we have all this separateness, when all of us are the same."
Big Thief is headed to Australia for the second time in 2017 next month.Credit: Brain Drain
Having spent most of the past two years on the road – touring behind Big Thief albums Masterpiece (2016) and Capacity (2017) – Lenker is finding wisdom in the feeling of transience. On the phone from Little Rock in Arkansas, all the travel has her in a contemplative, philosophical mood.
"Music is the thing that makes me feel the most connected to myself, the most alive," she says. "I feel like I'm constantly trying to get closer to this intangible realm.
"The stuff that isn't material, the stuff beyond those things we can see and perceive, that doesn't fit into our neat associations and compartments … Though I never find answers in my songs, I'm reaching to get closer, closer to something that I don't actually know what it is."
Lenker first started writing songs at age six, releasing first solo album Stages of the Sun as a 14-year-old. Songwriting is intuitive to her; she compares the writing process with "a sculptor looking at a piece of stone, and trying to see what is within… it's like the song is already there, I'm not coming up with it".
Her songs are all rooted in real experiences, and deliver a litany of people: tracks called Lorraine, Paul, Randy, Haley and Mary; lyrical references to "Benny", "Eliza", "Evelyn", and "Matthew". The compositions are candid but, in conversation, Lenker is guarded.
"I feel that even describing how I seek out this mysterious intangibleness [in songs] is difficult to verbalise," she says.
Making Masterpiece and Capacity – the two albums recorded just seven months apart – Big Thief came into the recordings open to anything. "We went in and felt it out, responding to the songs, to the space we were in, to the way we were feeling," Lenker says.
"I didn't have any expectations making these records. None of us had expectations. We just had the goal of simply being able to continue to make music, make records, play shows. Whether we were booking our own shows and barely filling our gas tank, or flying overseas and playing festivals, we'd be doing it either way."
Big Thief are flying out to Australia for a second visit in 2017; excited to return after their first tour, in February, found them spending as much time on beaches as on stage. Lenker loved the experience. "It feels good to meet people, to play shows in new places, to build things that way, face-to-face, rather than just over the internet."
Big Thief play Howler in Melbourne on December 8 and December 10; Oxford Art Factory in Sydney on December 12; and at Meredith Music Festival.