THE MUSIC OF ADRIANNE LENKER
Bookish
THE MUSIC OF ADRIANNE LENKER
“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,” writes Amanda Petrusich, profiling the singer Adrianne Lenker, of Big Thief fame, for the New Yorker. Lenker’s steady, soft vocals coast in between her acoustic guitar, like a car, drifting, diffused in smoke from the friction. There is an unwavering quality to her voice that allows listeners not to forget themselves, but to lean against its soft strength as it leads them through the lyrically dense landscapes of her modern folk songs. “Dug up whole,” indeed. The songs from her 2018 album, aptly titled abysskiss, gently announce the full-fledged presence of the singer and her sentiments, as though sharing the room with listeners. Lenker’s voice is particularly literary, in the same way the voices of Devendra Banhart or Fiona Apple may be, in the same way Karen Dalton and Jeff Buckley are: insular, private, contemplative, meandering, but never lost. Voices of gentle profundity.
Lenker’s melodies are embodied, solid, and sure of themselves—lullabies for adults, for those who go for long solitary walks, who sit for hours in their favorite chairs, who look up from their books and stare at nothing for too long, who need the stunning, grounding feeling sometimes, the reassurance that there are other people in the world, each living their own private life, even enjoying their solitude. People who live as though softly sinking into a minor key, the way Lenker does in the title track “abyss kiss.” Dealing with themes of coming of age, as well as into love and wilderness as a woman, tenderness is not performed, but acknowledged as inherent in growing up and continuing on. Through stories of a quietly precarious childhood, new love, and needy heartbreak, Lenker proceeds to live her life through the records she works on. With her band’s 2016 debut Masterpiece, Lenker penned lyrics about the private disasters of middle America on par with any Jeffrey Eugenides or Ben Lerner. The song “Velvet Ring'' recounts a couple so desperately in love and living from hand to mouth (“Shoved in the kitchen of a city tomb / The light would flicker like a violent womb / The night was thicker than a smoky fume / Liza waited in the room”). “Real Love” depicts impressions of a physically abusive relationship (“Having a bad week? / Let me touch your cheek / I will always love you”), similar to their breakout single “Paul.” Lenker states in her New Yorker profile that her objective now is to find a way to “transmute some of these patterns of violence.” In Big Thief’s sophomore album, similar themes echo with the role of the mother highlighted in “Mythological Beauty” (“You have a mythological beauty / You have the eye of someone I have seen … There is a child inside you / Who’s trying to raise a child in me”).
These themes have followed Lenker through her solo projects. They take a back seat, however, to her charting the development of her personhood—a consciousness built on the backs of summers lost in the woods, listening to water flow through a creek, with the keen ears of a little girl for whom the least appealing thing in the world is to be a little girl, getting to know the “self” as it bounces off of everything and everyone else, and first heartbreak. Rapid, folksy, eerily jaunty—the songs from abysskiss set a tone for Lenker, one that exists only to explore her own evolution. The lyrics of her riddle-like song “Symbol” (“Fly make flea, make haste, make taste, eight makes infinity / Times I’ve tried to make breaks, embrace for the enemy”), Lenker explained as a string of similes about her experience of “home.” In “What Can You Say,” Lenker expertly traces what it means to be loved for the first time, and how one must acclimate to the sense of separate personhood—as an entity outside all early formative units (“There’s a star that’s glowing in your eyelash / And the wet light moaning as we rehash / Oh, my darling / What can you say to remind me / How to be loved by you?”). It is in these precise extractions from all-too-human sensory chaos that Lenker justifies claims to her literary merit. Carly Rae Jepsen once accurately called Lenker “confessional.”
In “Dragon Eyes,” a track from her latest album songs (2020), Lenker sounds eerily like Karen Dalton. She croons in this album to her lost love, having written it as a way of “putting as many things together as I could from my relationship, as many beautiful things . . . to preserve it into eternity.” Lenker’s pain and adoration have been distilled and crystalized precisely, and yet, because it is her, the sounds are hazy, refracted through nature and sunlight, a collaborative effort to “preserve it into eternity” between herself and the world around her. And us, of course, the audience to the perpetual afternoon of her art.
Written by So Textual
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