My Album of the Year: Adrianne Lenker
Adrianne Lenker, both solo and with sher indie band Big Thief, has grown to be quite the songwriter and musician. Her melodies have a kind of wide-eyed exhaustion, as if she was resting inside her own lair, carefully looking out for any kind of danger. She tends to run around her main ideas, not to wear them out, but to see where she goes from there, maybe try to comprehend where they come from a bit better. As a musician, she’s splendid; a true guitar player who doesn’t pull out a lot of flair, but instead some more mellow tones and ideas, like looking amidst the woods for a companion. Her voice has a very subtle pulse to it, a bluebird singing to its children while trying to cuddle them, or the roots of a tree singing to the dirt that raised them. Naturally, her music, especially her solo output, looks towards and invokes nature, the ideal of something warm, natural, homegrown. She lives amongst the rest of us, but her mind seems to be somewhere else, somewhere that she can call her own, a place that she later tries to find in real life. A good chunk of her music is, indeed, about that conflict - about trying to fulfill that fantasy and encountering real life, told through somewhat abstract poetry where the metaphorical is taken very literally.
That all said, while both her solo albums and her Big Thief albums have been varying degrees of good. she’d never made a completely solid compilation of songs until now. She could sometimes feel a bit too wrapped up in her own head, or too focused on compositions that meandered a bit too much on compositions that didn’t get a chance to flourish the way they very easily could. But of course, this year, things changed. Recorded in the middle of isolation, fresh after the break-up of a long-term relationship, Adrianne Lenker shows what’s possibly the most vulnerable display of music of the year, and a pained, aching portrait of life after trauma, after being left behind. She’s the only performer on songs - not too surprising, given that this only features an acoustic guitar and some percussion work, but appropriate, given that the work she has to do within herself is very small scale. songs focuses on the little things, the minute moments, the ideals where no one else could fit them, to the point where maybe that’s the problem she needs to deal with all along. It’s a pained album, but not a hopeless one. It’s one where the grief never outweighs the fantasy.
The idea of losing the one you love is one that’s unacceptable here, and if there’s one main thread running through this album, it’s how, song after song, the lyricism becomes less imagery-based, less abstract, more direct, and more present. Then again, an album that begins with the cry, “Is it a crime to say I still need you?”, sung with the delicacy of the afraid and the rejected, is one that doesn’t avoid the heavy truths too much; it’s just nervous to say them out loud. Not to be confused, though, this is immensely lyrically rich, and Adrianne Lenker proves how confessional music can be universal in its meaning and intent. Staying with the opening track, “two reverse”, for a bit longer, it’s stunning as an opener; it sounds like a door being opened and you’re met with a sensitive soul looking down on her guitar, focusing on every note that comes out. She seeks in the woods something to make her understand the distancing that occurs with her lover, expressing it through the colors of rivers straying away; two rivers, two reverse.
That distancing is part of what makes her so afraid in the first place. She’s terrified of that feeling of being stabbed in the back, of being disregarded, that she holds on to whatever she can. That makes an issue like time, and its ever-present nature in how it bends us over, can play such a huge role in a song like “ingydar”, named after her great-aunt’s horse. A homage to that figure, as it “lies naked in the shed”, and how it will come back to nature over time. “Everything eats and is eaten, time is fed.” Memory is a very cruel mistress, and nature can play that cyclical game of hide and seek so well, you can lose track of what’s being lost in the shuffle. A similar idea is explored on “forwards beckon rebound” (already with that title, you can see something shifting), which explores the nearing and closeness of a relationship in between the insecurity and the fear of something more present and more mysterious. She transitions very well from the mundane to the grotesque (“Show me pictures that hang in your house/Pictures that hang in your mouth”), but fears the stabbing of “stars through her back”; even as she declares she’s not afraid anymore, even getting a courageous melody to support it, her voice says something else. And even the melody circles around itself too much to properly take a further step.
Because a big part of this album is carried by those melodies. A song that could be thought of as an interlude like “half return” becomes an album highlight; a dark lullaby that won’t allow anyone to come near it. The relationship is gone, and so is the rest of the world; “The house is white, and the lawn is dead”. Once again, the decay of nature. Her playing excels, too. Also true of the song before it, “heavy focus”: a warm, truthful tune that, instrumentally, sways around the room, but vocally, it meets a more dawning conclusion; a spin, then a return to… normalcy? Never too normal, anyway. The normal is never too considered when the romantic comes in; “Shakey like the first dance/Shakey like the first time our palms met in the clam sweat”. The little treats of love play their part in this story; they need to belong to the aching, because without them, what would there be to ache for?
“anything” is only the 3rd track on this album, but it feels like the centerpiece. It’s the one with the most defined running melody, the fullest one production wise, and the one whose wishes of intimacy sets the tone for most of the album. Those little details become monumental on this song. Allusions to drugs, friends with rides, fruit being eaten and clothes being hanged, family fights that are all too realistic, wounds that are hard to recover from… seems irrelevant, but that’s what she wants. “I don’t wanna be the owner of your fantasy/I just wanna be part of your family”, which leads to a pleading chorus, like grasping onto sand, hoping it won’t slip away from your fingers. A melody that seems like it’s been around before, and caresses that mean more than they intend on at first - she doesn’t want to kiss her lover’s lips, but instead, her eyes. It’s being caught into the wonder of love so heavily, you’ll do anything to portray that level of affection and care, no matter how ridiculous it sounds. Everything and everyone dissipates into the inexistent, so that she can lay in her lap while she’s crying. The need to be held beyond reproach or scare. The aching that already hurts when she’s around, so the hurting when she leaves is unspeakable. “Didn’t you believe in me?”, and she nearly breaks. So hurt she even invokes her name: “I was scared, Indigo, but I wanted to”. Imagine all that love being thrown to waste. Hard to comprehend, even when you’ve been there.
There’s a shift that occurs after track 7, “come”, the longest song on the album (probably the weakest one too), a somber piece, a plea to be killed as Adrienne’s voice mixes in with the dripping of the river seamlessly; a moment that seems bleak, as it’s the nearing of death, but actually looks towards it with grace and poignancy, almost romantically - if the final 2 strung out notes are a sign of anything, it’s the beauty that can be found in an announced and desired death. But once again, after it, there’s a shift. Adrianne, for the last 4 songs, sings more clearly, doesn’t let her voice get too lost in the instrumental, and, like it was established before, the songwriting becomes clearer and more direct. “zombie girl” contains a melody that could have been sung by folk Bob Dylan in the verses (“What a dream that was…”), only to be turned around once again by Adrianne’s distinct kind of melody making, both with her voice and her guitar. The song is direct dreaming and longing, the kind that occurs to all of us, as we allow that potential, idyllic world to take over the real one. And with such tenderness too: “I sworn I could’ve felt you there/And I almost could've kissed your hair/But the emptiness withdrew me/From any kind of wishful prayer”, that’s poetry at its finest, all too real too. After all, we scream towards the emptiness, but we think of it on our own terms, and we don’t get to have any sort of reckoning because of it. In this case, it haunts her so much it causes her to break (“What’s on your miiind… What’s on your mind…?”; wrenching).
Then again, she’s not all that innocent, and as another singer-songwriter said, you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes. She confronts herself and her desires on “not a lot, just forever”, where that notion of time comes back once again, now to question the notion of that ‘forever’. She acknowledges she can be what she fears and what she wants to stay away from, she can manipulate and be destructive. “I could be a good mother/And I wanna be your wife/So I hold you to my knife/And I steal your letter/Not a lot, just forever”. No thought here is contradictory, and she deals with that duality of hers in a way that she begs to be accepted by her partner. Poison can too come from her mouth, and she can’t live within that fantasy all the time - she knows this, but also wishes to fulfill those desires, without necessarily ignoring those destructive impulses underneath her. That’s the kind of nuance that it’s necessary to have no matter what - that gut feeling where your wolf identifies you as your enemy. Of course, though, she can show her best intentions and wishes on the lovely “dragon eyes”, a song that invites her to reflect upon what she has and the bond she’s created, what she wants to preserve. It presents the warmth within her love, how she can also bring that goodness for her partner. “I just want a place with you, I just want a place…”, she sings with a kind melody sung with appropriate kindness, maybe trying to find that ideal somewhere within that relationship.
Ending the album with “my angel” was a bold move, as it’s possibly the most ambiguous song of all. Almost 2 minutes of guitar fingerpicking, meandering through every chord until she suddenly finds a melody to sing to her lover, the one who will catch her and hold her… but the melody itself is somber, minor, brooding. It opens up with grace and flash (“my annnnn…”), but as it opens up, it presents its darker undertones, its stark implications, its sinister ulterior motives that it tried to hide (“....nnngel…”).It’s a fist opening and closing, over and over. It’s covered up with calm tones and bright lyrics about communion, closeness and purity (“Strange as she appears to be/Oldest friend invisibly/She brushes my hair with a physical hand/Lowers my body down to the land…”), yet it keeps coming back to that cursed melody, like it knew something we didn’t. And the way it ends too, so abrupt, like a cassette being turned off seemingly at random, cutting off that fantasy by the root. It makes the listener confront that silence, contemplate what they’re truly fantasizing about, ask themselves whether they should make it a reality. They’ve heard Adrianne muse about her own humanity, now it’s time for them to deal with theirs. Art can’t save you this time.
Rarely does there come a project with such good and kind intentions, that also manages to leave a pit in your stomach. Adrianne Lenker realized no question can be answered with a folk song, only desires and ideals that could possibly be met, but handle thoughts that may be too obscure for her to deal with in song. Maybe, that’s why it’s called songs. It presents these 11 tracks for what they are, and not what the listener wants them to be. It celebrates and denotes the limitations of music and the limitations of art, how something so seemingly pure can feel unresolved and underlined. It doesn’t avoid those questions either, but rather it bounces them back to the listener, who maybe was expecting the art to solve them itself. Nature is one of the main motifs of this album, and as such, it’s only natural that it shows nature’s teeth. It can be enlightening and encouraging, but never truly fulfilling. That depends on others, it depends on ourselves and the ones around us. This is the work of one of the best songwriters of the century, with that title cemented by this album. Musings that can’t be earned back so easily, but that are never bleak, or doomed, or most of all lost. Just stuck in the presence of the ‘what if’s. Isn’t that what music is made for, anyway?
The companion album to songs, consisting of 2 instrumental pieces. Music that’s quite up close, as you can hear all the cracks and the scarrings of the guitar being touched and played, and the breaths that are trying to remain hidden on behalf of Adrianne. All of it combined with the sound of the deep forests, as she becomes another figure that the forest tends to play with. The main piece, “music for indigo”, yet another homage to her former lover, doesn’t feature any real standout melody, but it does feature a lot of sweet harmonics that pass by the untroubled wood, like the lover laying in her lap as she plays along with some forgotten sense of harmony that she brings back to life with the strength of her adoration. It’s music that was assembled from different sessions, yet it sounds like one whole, being played all in one take - it feels that natural and handmade. It’s an invitation to let the music soak you in. “mostly chimes” is inferior, but that’s alright. It’s more serene, more contemplative, like ideas and thoughts that escape your head and you try to capture them. They may be more insignificant, but they’re still worthy of being heard. The playing with the wind chimes is hit or miss, but it does bring a moment of peace and quiet that’s still valuable. It makes you pay attention to every sound, to see where they will go next, even if the answer is ‘nowhere’, and they’re content with that. It’s music that will make you either gently fall into slumber, or stay up, following every note. What you do with that is, again, up to you.
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