030/ Free Treasure: Adrianne Lenker's week of gems
I guess if you’re not a Big Thief / Adrianne Lenker fan, skip this one. Or forward it to your friend who loves them the most.
Adrianne Lenker’s new solo LP Bright Future is here, so this week we’ve seen a bunch of promo stuff popping up online. Some of it expected, some surprises. I decided to gather the new stuff together in one place, gems style. I know this is a bit daft, there’s a million jaw-dropping Lenker and Big Thief clips all over the pootube and she’s not exactly a secret treat anymore. But here we go anyway...
1
On Monday, Adrianne posted videos of two songs “live from Greenwich Village”, played in a duo format with Nick Hakim on piano. The songs are earlier singles from Bright Future, ‘Ruined’ and ‘Sadness As A Gift’. It’s a tiny crowd in a small room and beautifully engineered, clearly made for the video, rather than just capturing a gig. I hope more tracks from this session show up.
2
The fourth single ‘Free Treasure’ also appeared on Monday. It’s hard to believe this is the fourth track, such a bewilderingly great pure love song, for me probably the best of the bunch. Plus, we’ve long heard early live iterations of this at Big Thief shows. This is the lyric video.
There’s a guy on the nape of my neck and he hangs out there all day
He quantifies my every thought and tells me not to play
Then he tells me what to play
So Bright Future was recorded, mixed and mastered on entirely analogue gear, with no computers or software involved at all. If you get the 12” vinyl format and listen through a conventional hifi system, the audio signal will never have been the ones and zeros at any stage in the process. This is ridiculously rare in modern pop music and I cannot wait to hear how the album sounds on vinyl.
It also means that, unlike 99% of music, listening to these tracks online via links, is a wholly different thing to when we first get to put the LP record on (for me, tomorrow). Audio experts may opine that if you’re listening to a 24bit digital master through decent equipment, there’s effectively no difference. And so often with vinyl releases, that’s true, since even if they were recorded onto old fashioned tape, they’ve then been chunnelled through digital at some stage of the process. But… my heart is telling me there is going to be a perceivable difference. We shall see. Or rather, hear.
3
Then Tuesday night’s gorgeous duo performance of ‘Free Treasure’ on Jimmy Kimmel’s Tonight Show. Something a little bit A.A. Milne-ish about (at least) the first verse.
4
Just as the big promo push for Bright Future was about to take off, Adrianne threw a massive curveball and released — exclusively to her Bandcamp page — an entirely separate six track download-only EP of other songs. This is called I Won’t Let Go Of Your Hand and it’s a fundraiser: she pledged all proceeds to Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. These songs are technically demos, though the notion of a ‘demo’ to an extent goes out of the window with Lenker’s work, particularly on Bright Future, as she constantly attempts in recording to capture ‘the moment’ in time and space as truthfully as possible. So these songs, committed to tape as soon as she wrote them, mistakes and atmosphere and all, just feel like more of Adrianne’s truth. They’re not filler either, there are outstanding tracks in this collection. Opener ‘The Music’, the title track, and ‘Fans Lungs Ankles’ are all breathtaking work: songs that feel immediately canon. Songs that feel like they couldn’t not have existed forever somewhere inside you. ‘Fans Lungs Ankles’ has delicate mistakes and almost falls apart at the end. At one point Lenker says quietly “oops” and then does this intake of breath before she starts the next line that is more perfect than any production trick. When you’re as talented as this, the truth is just better.
Listening to these, knowing they’re not even on Bright Future, is like when you found out decades ago that Springsteen wrote ‘Because The Night’ and gave it away to Patti Smith, along with a bunch of other belting classics, rather than including them on Darkness On The Edge Of Town.
Though they’re a real band, where he’s a solo artist with a great backing band, I think Big Thief have become to me today what Springsteen was for most of my life.
5
Okay, some early audience-shot footage. Another version of ‘Free Treasure’, this from Monday night’s concert at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn (“my first show in eight months”). Same duo format (the gig as a whole was a trio) and the chorus becomes a very gentle audience singalong. Same performance from a different angle.
It’s worth following up other videos from the same person, you can find quite a few songs from Monday night in Brooklyn, different angles. We get the first sense of what Adrianne’s solo reworking (actually partial reverting to earlier versions) of ‘Vampire Empire’ sounds like. The “I’m a fish and she’s my gills” line is back (after being lost from the Big Thief studio single version) but I’m sad to report Adrianne isn’t resurrecting the full line “for the last time in a row”, though when she sings the abbreviated “for the last time” someone in the audience carries on and sings the full version, which is cute.
and 6
Okay a little bonus, since it’s been all sublime solo quietness: here’s a bruising Big Thief burn through ‘Not’ from a festival in 2022, where Adrianne forgets the words at the start, has to reset her brain, and gives it an intense burn, before the song devolves into an even more cathartic than usual outro. Clearly a lot going on. It’s not the “best” version of that masterpiece of a song by any means (still the Bunker Session for me) but devastating stuff.
All artists who decide to chase truth, placing that before other concerns, elevate us. They take far more of a risk all the time, but that’s part of the adventure. Those who try are greater than those who don’t. But very, very few who try, do so with such complete gifts as Adrianne Lenker brings to the process.
What a feast, thank you!