Big Thief is an alt-folk band from Brooklyn, but their spirit isn’t tied to that place. Usually, “Brooklyn band,” scares me off. It tends to signify expatriates from the heartland. Getting out when you’re young can keep you sharp. After all, there’s not much life to stay for—and expats from the heartland flock to culture hubs in a self-fulfilling prophecy. They’re closer to Education and Art—and get more articulate. But what they express, in turn, starts to seem removed from lower-middle lives. Too often it’s smug grousing about being the smartest kids in the room. I can’t blame anyone for fleeing the wasteland. Sometimes though in the music you hear changed loyalties.
It’s rare when artists manage to balance refinement and roots. Big Thief are like that.
Adrianna Lenker (frontwoman and songwriter) is the fulcrum. I’ve met workers, junkies, and the borderline insane who manage to shine with a kind of mystic fire. Perhaps they slough the pain off into unreachable parts of the soul. Gracing others with hope, they radiate that “high that gets you gunned down.” Adrianne Lenker is one of those everyday charismatics.
She grew up all around the Midwest. She spent her childhood in Indiana, Minnesota, and “howling through the edge of south Des Moines.” Her family slunk early from a cult-like Christian group. Lenker grew up into secularism. Like many ex-fundies, though, she hungered for a higher spiritualism. Pitfalls of abuse (religious, emotional, or sexual) suck a child down into almost unimaginable depths. Some get free—and know things may get deeper in all directions.
Lenker’s meditative songs revisit old haunts of trauma and joy. Sometimes she’s revisiting rooms—seeking the site of that primal violation. The memories are hard to grasp—and she’ll settle into the happy memories too. “Mythological Beauty,” from Big Thief’s second album Capacity, is exceedingly tender. “You have a mythological beauty/ You have the eyes of someone I’ve seen/ Outside of ordinary situations/ Even outside of dreams.” But this isn’t a hopelessly idealizing love song. Lenker’s “you” is her dear old mom. She imagines her mom in the flush of youth—and then cut down by karmic responsibility.
You cut the flesh of your left thumb
Using your boyfriend’s knife
Seventeen, you took his cum
And you gave birth to your first life
You gave Andrew to a family who you thought would love and take better care
I have an older brother I don’t know
He could be anywhere
Lenker transitions from that cosmic unknown to her own childhood. She sees her mom battered, beaten down with care, but essentially unbroken. “There is a child inside you who’s trying to raise a child in me.” She evokes run-down rooms in Niswah, Minnesota—that, for all their shabbiness, are filled with love. Little Adrianne gets hurt playing outside and, “blood gushing from her head,” her mom ministers to her. “I was just five and you were twenty-seven/ Praying ‘Please don’t let my baby die.’” Lenker perceives her place in a line of souls struggling to stay strong. She’s awed and humbled. She realizes she’s unworthy. And gifted with such underserved grace, she blesses in return. “If you want to leave/ You just have to say/ You’re all caught up inside/ But you know the way.”
“Hypnotic” is the go-to word that describes Big Thief’s sound. But it’s important to investigate that catch-all in context. Some bands like Beach House hypnotize unto a bougie, snooze-y slumber. Lenker’s art isn’t an opiate. Instead, it’s spiritually invigorating—lysergic even. I’m reminded of trips where ostensibly I was just drooling into eternity. Couch-set as I was, though, fractals and intimations of love had me spiritually stimulated. Lenker’s songs, though not really dabbling in psychedelia, work like that. She slows things down so she can raise them to a higher pitch.
Big Thief released their third album U.F.O.F.(riend) in May of this year. In it, “Cattails” finds Lenker train-bound to the Great Lakes from which she hails. She’s rushing to a friend in need.
Caroline, Caroline, I never could leave you to trouble
Hold the line, I will be there on the double
Guitarist Buck Meek’s banjo-like plucking drives the song with a barbaric yawp. In her modest way, Lenker is heading into the mystic, returning to seek and to save what’s been lost. Here, though, the song stops being about herself. “You don’t need to know why when you cry,” Lenker comforts. The song’s achingly bittersweet. But the rapturous release isn’t sad. Lenker’s heart breaks joyfully at the prospect of those left behind.
I will find you there
In your country flair
Middle of the river in your lawn chair
With your wrinkled hands and your silver hair
Her homebound mission probably hints at a health crisis. The narrative splinters, though, like the Midwest itself, where culture and ideology go to die. In their absence, you’re left to confront the pain and majesty of real life (and maybe, someday, real politics?). From the wrinkly oracle, Lenker gains a clue
In the empty space
Lies a saving grace
Those back home get cracked up. Lenker confronts her own fragile ego like so much shattered glass. She learns, though, to position herself in that brokenness and she discovers a fount of true, unsullied strength.
Lenker seeks love in the broken places. “Orange is the color of my love/ Fragile orange wind in the garden,” she sings later, in the song titled after the same hue. Its album’s sole acoustic number and one that burns hotter for the stripped-back accompaniment. That heat conjures up the orange-brown sand of southern deserts. She sings of fractured love found in the margins.
Fragile means that I can hear her flesh
Crying little rivers in her forearm
Fragile is that I can mourn her death
As our limbs are twisting in her bedroom
Her love plays out in tender and broken scenes no one will ever see or remember. She’s in some un-air conditioned room. Furtive gropes search for reassurance in the dark. Rising heat wafts the sweet dankness of sweat and other fluids. Madness rages near outside. It’s closing in even then to stamp out the moment. “Hound dogs crying at the stars above/ pigeons fall like snowflakes at the border.”
Lenker is breaking down walls. It may be a reach but she has me imagining some doomed interracial tryst down south. Lenker is exploring borderlands of the heart. She finds a war there—in feeling and fact. Her songs stretch enough to include real-world innocents cut down like doves.
What or who is doing the killing? Lenker hasn’t been afraid to lock on evil’s changing faces. 2017’s “Watering” is a spiritual, traumatized anatomy of rape:
He cut off my oxygen
And my eyes were watering
As he tore into my skin
Like a lion
She recalls how her “blood was dripping like a lamb.” On “lion” and “lamb,” minor key shifts to a major chord. The effect is eerie, almost horrifying. But Lenker is upholding her own dignity—not equivocating in her abuser’s defense. Unlike the character in 2016’s despicable flic Elle, she’s not seeking escape via some rape-cum-rapprochement fantasy. She’s doing her homework via a matter-of-fact approach. She’s peeling back layers of amnesia and self-blaming. Society and the psyche press one to repress the abuser’s face, for the sake of happiness. Lenker refuses, searching deep, connecting the dots, so that next time—
Big Thief just announced a new album, Two Hands, only three months after U.F.O.F. The band’s in an incredibly creative phase. They’re emerging strong from a shared struggle. 2016 felt like meaning’s collapse. For many it seemed the Great Abuser got raised to the highest seat of power. The less your heart broke, the more it shrank. Red state folks are at the bleeding edge of that choice. Sensitives like Lenker have fought to breathe in like struggles long before politics made them universal. Gleaming “snowflakes” like her were among the first to regain their breath.
Lenker’s voice comes out roaring on “Not”—Big Thief’s first single from their forthcoming album. Lenker and the band shift from U.F.O.F.’s shattered alt-folk. They go full Crazy Horse. Hard rock guitars swirl in brackish murk. Lenker’s lilting voice bursts out trembling and cracked. She’s all Old Testament negativity— thundering mightily about what an unnamed “It” is not:
It’s not the energy reeling
Nor the lines in your face
Nor the clouds on the ceiling
Nor the clouds in space
It’s not the formless being
Nor the cry in the air
Nor the boy I’m seeing
With her long black hair
With everything it’s not, Lenker sounds like she’s driving towards what It really is. “It’s not the crowd not winning/ It’s not the planet not spinning.” The song evokes a dying world. She’s a lone voice crying outside the gates of Babylon. And the view keeps narrowing down.
It’s not the room
xxxNot beginning
Lenker sounds trapped by something out of the past. But she fights back hard. A little room’s wrested into view. The room’s familiar. As kids we were led here so long ago, while watchful eyes were turned. Something happened there—our childhood ended. Years and peers have told us the shame is ours alone. That it was our fault, or that nothing really happened. But Lenker knows—she’s put in the work. She doesn’t wallow, but goes full j’accuse. In the terror, Lenker forces a face to materialize screeching out of the void. Howling obscenities, it’s there long enough for us to steady our hand. We center the crosshair between its eyes, ready the trigger, and—
It’s too late. Lenker is spent, and the specter dissolves. Big Thief spends another three minutes in extended musical outro, trying to rev the energy back up. It’s thrilling—but can’t recapture the vibe. We’re left still without justice, without satisfaction. We’re saner though for getting a glimpse of “it.”
It’s risky to rave about an album before its release. Big Thief aren’t always compelling—they’ve had their dull moments across their three albums to date. But Lenker et al. seem poised to birth something great—a way of sounding/being that’s both traumatized and fierce, fragile and strong, terror-striking and compassionate. Lenker sometimes seems possessed—as if she might be a witch, or some aural Joan of Arc come to awaken the repressed. Who are they? Losers, the broken, those struggling on the outskirts of the abusers’ world. Come October 13th, I’ll be listening for another flash of her spirit. Hear it with me, and maybe you’ll feel it too.