I’ve been trying to sleep for a number of hours now. I closed my eyes, pulled the blanket over my head, and tried to make myself comfortable in the excruciatingly small seat on the plane. The person in front of me suddenly moves their chair back, crushing my stupidly long legs. This seems to coincide with a baby being set off, screeching and wailing above the monotonous rattle of metal and plastic. My eyes can barely stay open, but my mind can’t switch off. I’m reminded of Spike Milligan poem A Baby Sardine as our tin full of people takes my partner and I across the world to our new home. It has been months of packing, unpacking, moving, clearing, throwing out, saying goodbye, repacking, crying, hugging, holding, and finally flying back to Australia. There hasn’t been a moments rest.
The crying increases in volume. I pull the blanket off my head and reach for my headphones, sliding them over my unwashed hair that feels strangely flat and oily. I flick through my music library on my phone for a few minutes before pressing play. The quiet murmur of a rehearsal begins and the soft drums and delicate guitar drift me away. Change, she sings, like the wind, like water, like skin. I float on by and I’m finally at peace.
Big Thief (or should I just place all their music under the banner of Adrianne Lenker and friends?) are a band that kicked through the door to a new world. Their music isn’t particularly overwhelming - at least not when it comes to volume - and I don’t know whether to describe their sound as particularly revelatory, seeming to be an amalgamation of Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and Elliott Smith, while sounding nothing like any of them. Their music is a hidden jewel, where everything that each member brings to the table helps create something that pulls at your soul, sings to your mind, and elevates the small moments of life itself to instances of profound interconnectivity, whether that be between the members of the band, the band and the audience, or the audience with the outside world.
This might all sound like pompous generalisations, the kind of platitudes that you would use to describe something as the ‘greatest’ or the ‘best’ of it’s kind, but I don’t know how else to describe the feeling of Big Thief when they are working as this cohesive organism. James Krivchenia’s drums swivel and shuffle around the rhythm of Lenker’s rhythm guitar, building upon rather than playing a straightforward beat. This live energy is further moulded by Max Oleartchik’s slinking bass lines that slide around like a rattlesnake in the desert; they are always there with the quiet potential to unleash at a moments notice. This is most beautifully accomplished on songs like ‘Simulation Swarm’, where the song twirls along, propelled by the gliding bass line and drums.
Over the top of each song, Buck Meek’s guitar seems to murmur around the band, whispering to itself gentle lines that feed the songs with his distinctive quiet crunching tone. His country inflections, like those of ‘Change’, punctuate the simple chord progressions and laid back rhythm while heightening the emotional nuance of every song.
The centre of this revolving world is of course Adrianne Lenker, the band’s main singer-songwriter and the gravitational pull that draws all of these disparate elements together. You could tear away every element of Big Thief until it is the bare skeleton of Lenker and her voice, as on ‘Mary’ and ‘Orange’, and you are left with the purest distillation of what makes Big Thief so special. Lenker feels as though she is sitting beside you, humming a beautiful lullaby straight to you, as if every song is reaching out, grabbing you by your shirtsleeve, only to draw you in and kiss you out of love and a desire to keep you close. I’d describe Lenker as a close friend, only that I have never met her. I’d say anybody who lives a little while with Lenker’s music feels the same.
The train rumbles on. I watch the green and blue fields of the British countryside spin and careen onwards outside the window; open and still. My first introduction to the band was when their album U.F.O.F. came out. I was travelling across Europe and I had been sent many songs by Big Thief by a close friend of mine (I would say I listened to them, but I didn’t, if you read this, I’m sorry). It wasn’t until U.F.O.F. came out did I start to take notice. However, I wouldn’t describe it as taking notice per-say. I would listen to the album religiously whenever I was in transit, not out of a need to soundtrack movement, or to drive me forwards, but because it made me feel grounded. I don’t think there is a song on that album that I could attach a name to. I would listen to the album all the way through, then put it back on and listen again until the songs blended into the trees that lined the railway track. Like the wind, it would float alongside me until there was simply Lenker’s voice and lyrics colliding with the world. She sings:
Driving through the night Rings of crystal, crystal light Every gulp of the warm suburb air Betsy's auburn, auburn hair Drive into New York with me How she keeps me calm Street lights, boys and poison palms Drive into New York with me Big lights in the city
Lyrics so simple, but she murmurs them in this baritone voice that sends me drifting off to where the music becomes the dream.
When Lenker released her solo record songs/instrumentals at the peak of the pandemic, I had recently parted with my partner because she could no longer stay in Australia due to misc visa politics. She had moved to the other side of the world, back home with her family. To say it was hard would be playing it down. It was a tearing away from feeling settled, feeling at home. When we were apart, the closest I felt to her was listen to songs. I would sit quietly reading along to the lyric sheet of the record, playing the album repeatedly, pulling me ever closer, through the Earth, hands intertwined with my partner, listening:
Through your eyes I see A smile you bring to me To your joy, I tether Not a lot, just forever Intertwined, sewn together Like the rock bears the weather Not a lot, just forever
To see Big Thief play live is like nothing else I have experienced. It is a family affair. It is the collective ‘us’, rather than the ‘audience’ and the ‘band’. We experience the show as a single whole. Their most recent album had just come out, with possibly one of the silliest title of any modern record, Dragon New Warm Mountain, I Believe In You, or as a friend of mine once drunkenly declared it as: New Mountain Warm Hotdog, Bring Me Back My Dragon (you know who you are). The album had been more than simply on repeat for me, it has been my most played album for over two years now. I can’t escape it. It is a modern White Album, the kind of monolith that sprawls whilst refines every intrinsic element of the band’s sound. Live however, the album, along with everything else by the band is born anew, like new hidden rooms opening in songs that feel like they have been lived in for years.
The band surround Lenker, like a campfire where Lenker is the roaring flames that the band contain and feed to help raise her and hold her from crumbling away. Buck Meek, Lenker’s ex-husband, watches her with a smile that could break a heart. He plays along to the emotions as they build in Lenker, reaching a peak with the bands masterpiece, ‘Not’. As the song careens to its climax, everything is unleashed and extended until the pain and noise is ringed out of every inch of Lenker. She tears herself apart on stage, pulling from every moment, every life experience, every single part of herself. That’s what Big Thief achieve. They draw you in, hold you close, then dry you of every tear and emotion that you have left. The music becomes an act of survival. I don’t know how she stops herself from being destroyed under the sheer weight of it all. I feel like collapsing. I would crumble away to nothing. I have become washed clean.
I wake on the plane. We have landed. ‘Wake Me Up To Drive’ is ringing in my headphones. I have arrived back in Australia, semi permanently, with my partner by my side. I am no longer reaching out through the earth to feel sewn together. Once again Lenker and Big Thief have made change not just bearable, but beautiful.
!!!! Devoured this.