In late August, the singer, songwriter, and guitarist Adrianne Lenker stood beside a creek in upstate New York, watching the water move. The day before, Lenker, who is twenty-nine, had packed up the Brooklyn apartment she’d been sharing with two roommates. She was preparing to haul a vintage camping trailer across the country to Topanga Canyon, on the west side of Los Angeles, where her band, Big Thief, was planning to meet up. For the next couple of months, at least, the trailer would be home.
Moving can be disorienting—all that sorting and boxing and tossing out forces a kind of self-reckoning—and for Lenker the experience was only intensified by the ongoing anxiety of the coronavirus pandemic, which made imagining any sort of future feel optimistic, if not naïve. The exhaustion and sorrow of the spring had left everyone feeling precarious. The sun refracted against the surface of the creek until the water turned black. Our conversation drifted toward the Zen idea of impermanence. “Is it too early for this?” Lenker joked. “Nice to meet you—let’s talk about death.”
Lenker had spent the past few weeks recording with Big Thief at a home studio in the Catskill Mountains, run by the musicians Sam Owens and Hannah Cohen. The rest of the band—the guitarist Buck Meek, the bassist Max Oleartchik, and the drummer James Krivchenia—had since left, but Lenker stuck around to renovate the trailer. She had just ordered a twin mattress, a portable woodstove, and new linens.
This month, Lenker will release two solo albums: “Songs,” a collection of tender, harmonically complex folk tunes, and “Instrumentals,” which is composed of a pair of slowly unfolding guitar pieces. She made the records simultaneously, at a remote cabin in New England, in the early, panicked days of both the pandemic and a breakup. Lenker is a quick and instinctive writer, and even under normal circumstances her songs are raw and unfussy—it can feel as if they were dug up whole, like a carrot from the garden. She sometimes speaks about writing as a kind of conjuring. “She gives a lot of significance to that moment where she’s holding the guitar,” Oleartchik told me. “I never really think of her, like, fucking around and playing riffs or something. It’s always this instrument of witchcraft. It’s always holy. She writes music from this place that’s very intuitive and fearless, and she has confidence that there’s some kind of spirit or force that she can listen to.”
Before Lenker vacated her apartment in New York, she had to paint over an illustration that her ex-girlfriend had drawn on the bedroom wall. Lenker took some solace from the idea that the image wouldn’t be erased, exactly—it remained, even if she couldn’t see it anymore. Lenker has been in romantic relationships with men and with women, and doesn’t feel any particular obligation to outline her sexuality in precise terms, though she is comfortable being called queer. “The fact that there’s still people against that kind of stuff makes the words necessary,” she told me. “But hopefully we move into a place where it’s, like, You’re what? Why are you saying what you are?”
The wounds from the breakup were still pretty tender. “There’s a fullness that happens when someone is focussed on you,” Lenker said. “For me, if I’m being fully looked at and paid attention to and seen, I’m filled up by that.” She continued, “Now there isn’t anyone to text; there are no love messages coming through. I feel so empty. There’s a song on the new record, ‘Zombie Girl,’ and the refrain is ‘Emptiness / Tell me about your nature.’ That’s a real question. I want to understand—what is this feeling of emptiness? Is that me? Am I just hollow and empty? Or is emptiness actually something beautiful?”
As we talked, Lenker teared up. I hadn’t yet had to idly watch someone cry from six feet away. As she wiped her cheeks, I crammed my hands in my pockets and mumbled something about how the worst and saddest thing about heartbreak is that it always ends.
Big Thief formed in Brooklyn in 2015, and quickly became one of the most acclaimed new bands of recent years, in part because of Lenker’s emotional transparency, and in part because of how her voice, which is delicate and craggy, complements the group’s bold use of dissonance and volume. In 2019, Big Thief was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album, but its work is more commonly described as folk rock, a characterization that, although accurate—the band is as indebted to visionary singer-songwriters such as Judee Sill and Vashti Bunyan as it is to Sonic Youth and Neil Young—feels too tame. Big Thief’s best songs begin quietly, and expand until it seems as though a major artery were about to burst. The results can be strange and thrilling. “Adrianne has that disorienting quality all real-deal types have, where she comes at her songs so sideways that it subverts the form,” Jeff Tweedy, the front man for Wilco, told me. “Sometimes you would swear it’s a mistake or misunderstanding of her own song—‘Why’d she start singing there?’—but it’s not, it’s a precise angle that only she seems to possess.”
The band grew out of a partnership between Lenker and Meek. They met at a show in Boston, where they had both been undergraduates, and then ran into each other at a bodega on the day Lenker moved to Brooklyn. “I was moving into a warehouse in Bushwick with ten other artists,” Lenker said. “I’m pretty sure it was illegal—there were beams separating the rooms, no windows, a cement floor.” She and Meek soon began performing as a duo.
“When we first started playing, we would just sit together,” Meek told me. “She had these really wild fingerpicking patterns that she had developed, and she would tune the guitar to so many different open tunings. I had this very syncopated, rhythmic structure—hers was much more liquid. And, somehow, these different rhythmic landscapes created something.”
Lenker got a job as a back waiter at a restaurant on the Upper West Side. “Five days a week, at one in the morning, I was biking all the way to Bushwick from Seventy-second and Columbus,” she recalled. “I was saving up for guitar amps, saving up for a guitar, saving up for a van.”
Meek and Lenker burned CDs of their music, wrapped them in paper bags, and wrote the track listings by hand. “Buck and I played coffee shops and back-yard barbecues and dive bars and birthday parties and shows for nobody for a couple of years,” Lenker said. In time, they fell in love, and, when she was twenty-four and Meek was twenty-eight, they got married.
There is footage of them busking in Washington Square Park in 2014, playing an early version of “Paul,” which eventually appeared on Big Thief’s début album, “Masterpiece.” The audience—a middle-aged man in billowing khakis and sunglasses, a tall guy talking on his cell phone—is gently uninterested in a New York City sort of way. Lenker and Meek share a microphone. “Paul” is a song about having a hard time loving another person. “I realized there was no one who could kiss away my shit,” Lenker sings, her voice resigned. Yet the desire to be fixed—to find relief through love—remains. “I’ve been burning for you, baby, since the moment I left,” she admits. The chorus is a mesmeric rush:
In the Catskills, between recording sessions, Lenker and her bandmates sometimes hiked into the woods to work on a tepeelike structure they had taken to calling a fort. There was no trail, and getting to it required climbing up the face of a small mountain, mostly by grabbing the trunks of saplings—a strategy any reasonable outdoorsperson would describe as inadvisable—and scrambling to find holds in large rocks. One afternoon, Lenker and I made our way there to sit on a boulder and talk. She darted uphill gracefully.
Lenker was born in Indianapolis in 1991, and brought up mostly in and around Minnesota. She has a younger sister, Zoë, and a younger brother, Noah. When Lenker was five, she was hit on the head by a railroad spike that fell out of a tree house in her family’s front yard. “Mythological Beauty,” a song from Big Thief’s second record, “Capacity,” is addressed to her terrified mother:
Lenker’s parents married young, and joined a fringe religious sect before Lenker was born. She remembers the group as having “born-again-Christian, kind of cult vibes—a closed community. We lived in an apartment complex where the surrounding people were part of the same thing. There were a lot of rules. Honestly, I remember there being a lot of shame. My sister’s name was evil, because it wasn’t in the Bible. Certain shapes were evil, too, like the star. When we prayed, the Bible couldn’t touch the floor, and we prayed under blankets.” Her mother recalled that sometimes the group provided a chaperon if the family travelled out of state. (Lenker’s father disputes some of these details.)
Her parents left the sect when she was four, and for a short while they lived out of a van. “We were still quite religious until I was about eight or nine,” Lenker said. “Then I watched my parents take a dramatic turn and discard all religion.” She found the shift bewildering. “I just remember feeling, like, I’m not going to go along for this ride.” (Her father has since reconnected with his faith, and describes his time away from it as hedonistic.)
Lenker has spent much of her adulthood trying to unpack the experience, and is now quick to recognize troubling rhythms from her youth when they reëmerge in her adult relationships. “I sometimes equate intimacy with turbulence, which is familiar,” she said. “The journey that I’m currently on is just: how do I transmute some of these patterns of violence?”
Her ideas of home are constantly changing. “I don’t really think of Minnesota when I think of home,” she said. “I think of it as part of who I am. The thing that I come back to is that it’s my loved ones, and Earth. I feel really at home here, in this spot in the forest,” she said, looking around. “And it doesn’t feel like it’s anyone’s.”
Eventually, we climbed back down the mountain. Owens and Cohen had built a stone dam in the stream that snakes across their property, creating a little basin for swimming. The stream runs into the Esopus Creek, a sixty-five-mile tributary of the Hudson River which winds through the eastern Catskills and fills the Ashokan Reservoir. We walked barefoot over mossy bluestone. The water was clear and bracing. Lenker disrobed and dunked, letting out an ecstatic yelp.
While Lenker and the rest of Big Thief were working, they developed a habit of leaping into the water between takes. There’s something curative about a frigid plunge, the way it forces the old air from your lungs. “You come out screaming,” Oleartchik said. In 1702, Sir John Floyer published a treatise on the benefits of cold bathing, a practice that was then still mostly unknown to the English. “Cold baths act much on the Spirits, and preserve them from Evaporation, and render them Strong and Vigorous,” he wrote. It’s comforting to think that, even in our bleakest moments, there might still be a way to protect our Spirits from dissipating entirely.
As far back as Lenker can remember, she has liked to sing. Her voice is soft but substantial, and contains an airy tremble that sometimes resembles birdsong. On occasion, she lets it stretch and fracture. On “Not,” a deep and tumultuous song from Big Thief’s fourth album, “Two Hands,” Lenker sounds nearly feral: “Not the room / Not beginning / Not the crowd / Not winning,” she grunts. When the band performs the song in concert, she might start to scream.
Lenker began playing guitar when she was six, and discovered an affinity for the instrument. Her father started giving her lessons. “He’d be, like, Whoa—how do you already know that?” she said. “I was just eating it up.”
When Lenker was thirteen, her parents divorced. She dropped out of school and moved in with her father in Minneapolis. He was intent on managing—and, to a degree, monetizing—her nascent music career. “I think he wanted me to be famous, wanted me to be the best, wanted me to win that shit,” she said. Lenker did not share his exact ambitions. She made some recordings but felt disconnected from them. “The very first music I listened to, and then continued to listen to throughout that whole time, was by Pat Metheny and Michael Hedges—these guitar guys my dad loved,” she said. When she was fifteen, a boyfriend introduced her to Elliott Smith, whose tense and immediate folk songs provided a counterpoint to the more polished music her father had encouraged. “I was, like, Oh, my God, this is so good,” she recalled. “This is all I want to do. I don’t want to create these elaborate, pop-sounding productions.”
At sixteen, Lenker cut her hair short and briefly ran away from home. She got her G.E.D., and enrolled in a five-week summer program at the Berklee College of Music, in Boston. Toward the end of the summer, she made an appointment with Damien Bracken, the dean of admissions. “I went into his office and I said, ‘I don’t know any of this music theory, any of this stuff that is on your curriculum, but can I play you a song?’ ” She performed an original piece called “Far from Where I Started.” With the dean’s support, she applied for and received a full scholarship to Berklee, offered by the blues guitarist Susan Tedeschi. “I’ll never forget the image of, like, twenty-five boys shredding on guitars in the hallway, preparing for their auditions and exams,” she said. “I felt self-conscious that I didn’t know those things.” Lenker was still figuring out how to do ordinary chores, such as buying laundry detergent. “I hadn’t gone to high school. I left Minnesota, I left home, I was on my own,” she recalled. “I was seventeen.”
Despite the intensity of her training, virtuosity doesn’t resonate for Lenker as much as vulnerability does; she has always been more interested in making emotional connections. The pop singer Carly Rae Jepsen told me that she has been able to find enormous comfort in the way that Lenker sings about her life. “I came across ‘Paul’ while I was in Italy for a solo adventure trip,” Jepsen said. “The lyrics spoke to me like a journal entry would. She’s brilliantly confessional.”
In addition to the recordings that Lenker made as a teen-ager, her work with Meek, and the four records she has done with Big Thief, she has also released two solo albums: “Hours Were the Birds,” in 2014, and “Abysskiss,” in 2018. Lenker is curious about the mechanics of creative work—the spring from which songs appear—but finds that the process itself is more visceral and perceptive. “How does a song come into being at all? How does it form and organize itself into the pattern?” she said. “I never think, Oh, I want to make something that sounds like this. It’s just reaching for elements. I see the visual of translucent ribbons flowing in a riverlike way—they’re multicolored. And maybe there’s one specific color that I want to braid in, and they’re all flowing by, and maybe it’ll go by for a while with nothing of that color, and then, ‘Ah, there.’ ”
When I asked Meek to describe Lenker’s songwriting, he paused for forty-five seconds to gather his thoughts. “It’s as if she removes her conscious mind from the room,” he said finally. “She’ll hold her guitar, and she’ll start to speak in abstractions, or speak in complete nonsense—just sounds and shapes. Then she emerges from that space, and slowly the words start to form into syllables, and into the English language, and become a story, or a character, or a reflection of her own experience. But it has this really clear element of . . .” He thought about it. “Grace.”
One evening in early September, Lenker and I sat on opposite sides of Owens and Cohen’s kitchen table, snacking on figs and cheese. It was raining, and Lenker lit some candles. Her sister, Zoë, who was visiting for the week, was reading in a bedroom upstairs. Lenker showed me the room where she was staying, and the notebook where she had written most of the lyrics for “Songs.” There was a watercolor of a small cabin and a yellow sky propped up against a mirror, and a photograph of her grandmother by her bedside. Recently, she had acquired an electric pencil sharpener, which she demonstrated: “Isn’t that satisfying?” She picked up the acoustic Martin guitar she plays on the new albums. “I’ve had this since I was fourteen,” she said, strumming a chord.
Big Thief was on tour in Europe when COVID-19 cases began to spike there. Minutes before the band was to take the stage in Copenhagen, the Danish government announced a ban on gatherings of more than a hundred people. The venue was already full. “We went out in the street and played some acoustic stuff, just four or five songs. Then we all had to make a snap decision about where we were going,” Lenker said.
“Suddenly, we’re all in this lobby of this hotel that’s basically empty, and the dude at reception is wearing black gloves, and there’s no more music,” Oleartchik recalled wistfully.
Lenker flew back to New York City and then headed north, to a cabin in the foothills of the Berkshires, in western Massachusetts. She was entranced by the sound of the space, which she described as “like the inside of an acoustic guitar.” She asked Philip Weinrobe, an engineer and the owner of Rivington 66, a recording studio on the Lower East Side, to help her make an album there. He agreed, and Lenker headed back to the city. “She left at, like, 5 A.M. to come pick me up in Brooklyn,” Weinrobe recalled. “The whole thing was structured around the space, which was very small, with exposed wooden beams. We could hear the bugs, we could hear the wind in the trees. The idea was to really lean super hard into that physical atmosphere, and to create a record that tried to mimic it. As soon as I got there, everything started to shift: my sense of time, my sense of self, the way I breathed the air.” He added, “There’s no plumbing in the cabin. You poop in a bucket.”
They used a binaural microphone to capture the sound of the room. “You really feel like you’re sitting in front of Adrianne singing,” Weinrobe said. “You can hear the birds go by, and you hear the squeak of the fingerboard, and the sound bouncing off the walls.”
Lenker’s lyrics often allude to nature, and she toggles between straightforward narratives and more imagistic lines. Her language reminds me, at times, of Joanna Newsom or Louise Erdrich—it’s mystical yet highly grounded in the physical world. On “Ingydar,” a new track, she sings:
Weinrobe’s grandmother died while they were recording, which meant that he and Lenker were both suffering a loss. “I wrote nine of those songs once we started the session,” Lenker said. “We would record them the same day that I wrote them. I was surprised at how much I was writing, because I was in so much pain. I was not in the part of the pain where I was just reflecting on it.” She added, “I feel as if my psyche was putting as many things together as I could from my relationship, as many beautiful things as I could, to preserve it into eternity.” One of the instrumental pieces, “Music for Indigo,” was originally written as a kind of offering—something for her former partner to listen to as she fell asleep at night.
Two years ago, in California, Lenker bought a used Toyota Land Cruiser with a multitone paint job and a manual transmission. She drove it back East and began fixing it up, sanding down the exterior and refinishing it in a bright, hopeful blue. (The first time I met Lenker, she was in the midst of expertly backing the truck down a winding driveway and across a narrow wood-plank bridge.) With some help from an uncle, she outfitted the back of the truck with a foldable sleeping pad, a cooler, and wooden drawers for tools, clothes, and supplies. It has enormous tires—“It can go up any kind of mountain road,” she said proudly—and a beaded medallion hanging from the rearview mirror. It would pull her trailer across the country.
Lenker and Meek divorced in 2018. They are now what Lenker describes as “deep friends.” They didn’t hide their marriage and its dissolution from the press, exactly, but they also didn’t speak about it publicly. “I feel like it made us stronger and closer,” Lenker said, of the breakup. “I feel like we sing together better now, and we write together more. A lot of our love is funnelled into the music, which is maybe the form it was always meant to have.”
Krivchenia joined the band shortly after Meek and Lenker got engaged. “I was suddenly plopped into observing the intimacy, the beauty, and the shortcomings of a relationship, 24/7,” he said. “It’s been amazing to see it evolve.” He added, “They broke up, and it was a whole huge year of a specific kind of stress for them, and for the band. We did some tours without Buck, when they just needed to not be together for a while.” Though less dramatic fissures have undone other bands, playing together seemed only to accelerate the healing process. “Adrianne is always writing about whatever’s going on in her life, and so when they were getting divorced she was writing about it,” Krivchenia said. “Buck was processing that in real time, onstage. Some nights I’d look over and be, like, ‘Oof, that’s a rough one to hear, man.’ But he was really supportive of it.”
After their separation, Meek moved to California and wrote a record, “Two Saviors,” which he will release in January. It’s got more twang and air than Big Thief’s albums—Meek is from Texas, and his solo work is infused with the pathos and mischief of Townes Van Zandt and Waylon Jennings. “I played a huge amount of shows on my own, learned to surf. And she did her own thing,” he said. “When we finally did come back together, we jumped right into a tour. The music felt more important than us. It felt like something we had to serve and set aside our fears for.”
Meek had been visiting his partner in the Netherlands, where the government had lifted coronavirus travel restrictions for people in committed relationships. A couple of weeks after we first spoke, he sent me a voice memo. “I think we sacrificed it all for the music,” he said, of his marriage to Lenker. “It was a vessel for our love and friendship. And then our love and friendship became a vessel for the music.” It was too hard, in the end, to nurture a new marriage and also be in a band. “We didn’t actually have a home for maybe four or five years,” he said. “There was no privacy whatsoever, because we were always on tour. There was a complete lack of personal time or space. And part of us knew this—we were aware that it was taking a toll on our relationship.”
In conversation, I found Lenker attentive and kind, and there were moments during our time together when the emotional maturity of the Big Thief universe—how patient and evolved the intra-band negotiations are; how careful the members are to preëmptively diffuse volatile situations; how they have even adopted the phrase “everything is optional” to avoid compromising their integrity—felt almost intimidating. Anyone who has survived an experience via the careful suppression or compartmentalization of emotion is likely to find Big Thief’s system of communication astounding. “If you don’t talk, you know, you’re gonna get to Kansas and you’re still gonna have feelings from Baltimore,” Oleartchik told me. The end result of all that talking, he said, was the sentimental (yet still radical) discovery that “it’s actually acceptable to be who you are to your friends.”
Kyle Jaster and Misha Handschumacher live down the road from the studio, on Atticus Farm, where they grow flowers and organic vegetables, and tend to a passel of free-range heritage pigs. They offered to let Lenker park her trailer in their driveway while she worked on it, and before long they became part of the renovation team. When I arrived there one afternoon, Jaster’s brother, Wyatt, was measuring and installing new plywood subfloors. The trailer was small, aluminum, and from 1966. The interior was painted cherry red, but Lenker had just picked out a new color, a mellow cream called Honeyed White. We began priming and repainting the cabinets, drawers, and trim. “I’m curious how this trip is going to feel,” Lenker said. “I’m excited about the freedom, but I haven’t really felt full of relief. I’ve found it almost burdensome: I don’t know where home is. I don’t know who I belong with.”
When it grew too dark to paint, we retreated to a fire pit in the back yard. Jaster and Handschumacher prepared supper—okra and carrots grilled over the fire, chicken legs, blackberries, homemade ice cream—as their two dogs sprinted in figure eights around our lawn chairs. At dusk, a large owl swooped along the tree line. Owens and Cohen came by with beer. At some point, Lenker ended up with a Cuban cigar. “This was my fantasy when I was a kid,” she said, taking a tentative puff and laughing. “I wore knee-length jean shorts, plaid shirts, and a backward baseball cap, and all I wanted to do was eat beef jerky, drive a tractor, and smoke cigars.” An outdoor speaker played Michael Hurley, Arthur Russell, Moondog, Lucinda Williams, Bill Callahan. Lenker talked about moving to Vermont this fall—maybe building a little cabin in a corner of some land that her sister was buying there.
I left shortly after midnight. On the drive home, I rolled the windows down and let my hair blow around. I played “Dragon Eyes,” the penultimate track on “Songs.” It’s musically spare, with acoustic guitar and just a bit of brushed percussion. The final verse implores:
A few weeks later, I returned to the farm to toast the renovation of the trailer. It was a brisk mid-September evening, and leaves were starting to accumulate in corners. Jaster and Handschumacher set out platters of gumbo, corn bread, and succotash on a long picnic table in the back yard. We kept our coats on as we ate. After supper, Lenker stood in the door of the trailer, holding up a glass of bourbon, and offered sincere thanks to everyone who had helped her fix it up. The interior was complete—new hardwood floors, linen curtains hung on silver wire, a small dining table made from a maple tree on the farm. Lenker showed me the blue enamel coffee mug she’d placed in the cupboard (“Unbreakable!”), the books she’d lined up on a small shelf near her bed, the single cast-iron casserole dish she could use to cook in the woodstove. She still needed to buy a tire jack and some roadside flares, just in case. She was leaving in two days.
In “Letters on Cézanne,” Rilke describes autumn as “containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.” Lenker writes often about time and loss—how to cling to what we need and let go of everything else. For her, songwriting is a way of externalizing specific experiences or memories and pinning them in place, like a butterfly under glass. “I like my songs to be reminders of certain things that I don’t want to forget,” she told me. Once they’re captured, then in a sense she is free. ♦
