The band recorded Masterpiece over a 12-day period at a friend’s family’s old lake house with producer Andrew Sarlo. They become as dynamic as tenacious as the old Dragnet episode that their band was named after. That chemistry was taken to the next level once the others joined and they formed Big Thief. It lifts the heaviness that I have to say.” “That adds a cool dynamic and depth to the band. “Musically, he comes from a background of playing a lot of blues and country-swing music and old-time jazz,” she says. On a musical level, she enjoys Meek’s diverse music background. He’s a very optimistic person, and I think we can balance each other out in a way.” I can get into these dark places sometimes and he’s good at not following me there. Just our ability to travel together, we have a special alchemy. “I feel that’s a gift in navigating the world anywhere. He has an ability to find magic pathways through harsh places,” she says. “There’s just this traveler’s spirit that he has that I admired when I met him. It became evident right away that Meek was someone that she wanted to work with. That led to them playing songs together and going on tour as a duo in a 1987 Conversion van. Lenker didn’t know anyone in the area, and he had been living in the city for awhile, so he offered to be her tour guide. The seeds for the band were planted several years ago when Lenker moved from Minnesota to New York and met Meek at a New York marketplace. She’s joined by members Buck Meek, James Krivchenia and Max Oleartchik. Of course, she’s not alone when it comes to Big Thief. When it does happen I don’t know how I would even describe it in words but that’s my favorite part.” When I’m sitting down and writing it’s all this sort of trance trying to get into this space where something could happen. “Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t, and when it does I think that’s the most out of body, is getting to that point. “I’m always trying to get there,” Lenker says. Most of the time when she’s writing, the most satisfying experience is when she finds or hears something that she couldn’t have thought with effort but just comes seemingly and unexplainably out of nowhere. Whatever way her lyrics arrive, it’s been part of winning formula as it’s helped gotten the band noticed around the country and earned them opening spots of late for artists like Nada Surf, M. “I would say it’s mostly questions and a few realizations.” “There are some realizations on the album but also a lot of questions,” she says. When asked if this meant that it was a realization about something in her life, Lenker said it’s “something preceding a realization.” “This record is a documentation of the thing that started to spill out once I came into an awareness of it.” “It’s something embedded in back of the subconscious even before birth or around the time of birth that is growing alongside me and spilling out at a certain point,” she says. She feels that sometimes her subconscious has a way of inexplicably exploding to the surface. I didn’t have anything with me to record it or write it down,” Lenker says. “I got my guitar and walked up to the top of hill and wrote the song and just sang it. It’s like a volcano that had built up so much pressure that it erupted.įor example, on the album’s title track she sings, “Old stars / Filling up my throat / You gave ‘em to me when I was born / Now they’re coming out.” She says she was at songwriting festival, and that “there was a lot of stuff happening with friends and family and teachers.” Lenker feels that much of the lyrical content on Big Thief’s debut album Masterpiece-which came out in late May on Saddle Creek Records-spilled out from her subconscious. For Adrianne Lenker of Brooklyn-based band Big Thief, that statement would likely ring true more times than not. Sometimes the most revealing lyrics for a song can come from deep within one’s subconscious.
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