Going Deep With Adrianne Lenker

This past spring, as the world folded in on itself, the singer-songwriter Adrianne Lenker decamped to the pine forests of western Massachusetts, trading an international tour with her band, Big Thief, for the solitude of a one-room cabin. She wasn’t looking to produce a new body of work so much as to take some time for herself: She’d been in constant motion since 2014, locked into a cycle of recording, touring, and promoting her music, never spending too long in any one place. She’d also been through a breakup. For the relentlessly productive Lenker, the woods were a refuge.

Of course, she found herself writing songs anyway. “It's rare for me to sit in a room with my guitar and feel like I can't stop playing, because it just sounds so good,” she admits. It helped, too, that the seclusion wasn’t total—her sister, Zoë, was living next door with her partner at the time. Lenker soon invited the audio engineer Phil Weinrobe out to help her record, and together they began work on what would become two new solo albums: songs and instrumentals.

Lenker has always written about the relationship between humans and their environments, and on U.F.O.F. and Two Hands, the albums that helped put Big Thief on the map last year, that relationship took on a reverent, explicitly naturalistic quality. But with songs and instrumentals, she’s traded moments of allusion and delicate metaphor for something more direct. Using a binaural microphone to capture the sounds of the forest, she and Weinrobe managed to preserve everything from the creak of the cabin to the wash of rain hitting the forest floor. “Any nature sounds that you hear on the entire thing were just the sounds from within the cabin that happened to be going on at the time,” said Lenker.

It would be a cliché—the remote cabin a creative medium, the singer a heartbroken spirit-channeler—if the music didn’t so thoroughly resist it. Songs is folky and earnest, a richly detailed collection populated by wrens and ravens, pine and red oak. And though songs is aesthetically gentle, the lyrics are shadowed by a violence that mutates throughout the album. Lenker spoke with GQ over the phone from Topanga Canyon, where the members of Big Thief are back under one roof. Our conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

You recorded in a cabin near the Berkshires—can you talk a little about how the space informed the sound of these two albums?

I was very fortunate that there was this cabin that was empty next to where my sister was living. It was this very heavy shift from being in all these city centers, and constantly touring and playing shows, to being out in the woods and having no running water or plumbing, and basically just carrying water and chopping wood and dealing with the compost toilet every day and cooking on the wood stove. Human presence was not the dominating force. It was just the trees and the squirrels and the porcupines. I basically felt safe enough to go into my own creative zone, uninterrupted, which hadn't happened in a really long time. That’s the way I started playing music: just playing guitar by myself in my room when I was a kid, and exploring the guitar and exploring the space I was in, with no project in mind. And it was really my source of comfort and company, making those songs and playing that music. I had this little radio—that was how I was getting news, pretty much. I guess it was just a form of processing.

Were you and Phil on the same page from the beginning, in terms of the music you were looking to make?

Really, I was in the cabin not to record, or make music at all. I was just there to heal and rest from basically six years of nonstop touring. And I was also going through a lot of stuff at that moment too—I was there to be near my sister and heal my body. [But] I was playing and writing so much—I loved the sound of the cabin. I was just like, I would love to record this, I'd love to capture the sound of this room. And that's when I called Phil up, and I asked him if he would be into the idea of escaping the city for a little while and coming out and working together on some music. The sound of rooms are really important to me in playing music. And in that cabin, I felt that effect of, “Wow, I can't stop playing and writing. It just sounds like I'm inside my guitar, and I'm feeling all these reverberations from all the wood around me. It just sounds so beautiful. What if we captured this on tape?”

You mentioned “going through a lot of stuff”—songs is full of ambiguity, but it’s also very literal in the sense that you include people’s names and describe very specific feelings and sensations, many of which nod to that.

I think that being alive is intense for most beings in some way. Even the process of being born is an intense one, and coming to see and understand and experience the physical world, and all that goes along with being a physical being, and experiencing all of these different forms of loss throughout life. Death, and people passing away, or relationships passing away, or whatever it is. Being alive and being human, you basically lose everything in your life, and then you die. Without that death, without that loss, nothing would be as we know it, and all of the things that we love and appreciate about life couldn't exist. If there was no such thing as death, there would also probably be no such thing as grandmothers and babies and puppies and seasons. There's a constant process of healing that's happening, that we're constantly wounding and experiencing just the hits of life and nature, and then needing to repair and mend ourselves. Our bodies and our spirits are simultaneously so fragile and sensitive, and then at the same time resilient. And we're somehow caught in between this double infinity web, where we can't see anything beyond, before or after.

The song “Ingydar” deals with some of that, in a way. What is that word, “Ingydar”?

Ingydar was the name of my great-aunt Becky’s horse, who passed away when I was a kid. But the song itself, I have to say, it isn't really about that horse. That was just a fragment from the pool of ideas, or colors that I wove into the song, but yeah. “Everything eats and is eaten / Time is fed.” Have you ever used a vacuum cleaner, and there's a button that sucks the cord back in?

Yeah.

I imagine life being like the cord, and just being sucked back into the mouth of time, or that time is built up of experience in life. I suppose this is a pretty common thing to think about and philosophize about, but just looking at it as nonlinear, and as like a big orb or sphere, or maybe shapeless, but not with a before and an after and like a linear trajectory, but actually cyclical. Everything is constantly being born and decaying simultaneously. We're both growing and becoming, and also unbecoming and decaying simultaneously. It's like there's this inherent duality within everything. I was going through a transition in a relationship at the time that was so painful and still is, but that feeling of our relationship just being eaten, or the idea of like, whatever state we're in now, me and this person that were in this relationship, it's our relationship, and all the journey and processing we had to go through was the sacrifice for our new state of being. And it was eaten by time.

I experienced these albums very differently once I learned that they had been written in the wake of a breakup. I feel like it speaks to the ambiguity that runs throughout—“Everything eats and is eaten” is either this harsh, “dog eat dog” philosophy or something more Zen, about how everything returns.

Eats and is eaten, simultaneously. How many little microscopic things feed off of our bodies while we're simultaneously feeding? And what does that [look] like in a relationship? At the cabin, I remember watching this ant demolish a worm. And I had gone through this thing when I first moved into the cabin where there were all these ants everywhere, big carpenter ants, and at first I was kind of killing them, and then I stopped over time. I was like, Why am I killing these things? Why am I killing these creatures? But then I watched the ants just destroying creatures, themselves, and things in nature too, just killing each other. And it's confusing. Because I'm thinking about the idea of radical anti-violence and just refusing to kill creatures at all. And then I think, But why is the world like that? And how is it different between insects and animals and humans?

The music is gentle, for the most part, but there’s a real sense of darkness in the lyrics. Is incorporating that violent edge a way of processing, or of warding things off?

I think both. You can't just banish the shadow world from existence and just say, “I'm just gonna focus on these light things.” It's so beneficial to just look at it right in the face and just let it be there. But I put a lot of light talismans in my songs too, I suppose as protection. I think that trauma and violence and pain can be inherited and passed through lineages. And I think that we do have a lot to work with that our ancestors and relatives have passed down. To become more accepting and kind, and open-hearted and aware, I think, is so important. And I don't think that can be done without acknowledging and seeing and stepping into the things that we're afraid of looking at and acknowledging and seeing. I don't have any interest in just writing about warm, fuzzy, happy things, or only the light side of things, because if that's all I had to write about, I wouldn't need to write songs at all.

On “dragon eyes” you sing, “I just want a place with you.” What would it mean to settle down and to call a place home, after having spent so much time on the road with no permanent living space?

That's the question that I've been asking myself. These times really call us to look at the things that have been conditioned into us, and turn them over and ask where they came from and what they actually mean. My perception of what a family can look like and be has changed so much as I've grown over time. I've had relationships with both men and women. Being in relationships with women put it in my awareness that maybe I could adopt kids, or there's all these alternative ways of having a child, or all these different family structures. And what does motherhood even mean? And do I even want to have a child? And is it just because my mother and her mother had kids by the time they were 21 that I'm feeling like it's weird that I haven't had a kid yet?

And the idea of settling down, what does that even mean? I never want to settle down, I want to be riled up all throughout! I want to find peace, and I want to feel more and more peace within myself, hopefully, through loving myself and accepting who I am. But besides that, I want to be awake. I want to be moving and shaking, and alive. And who knows, maybe I'll end up staying in one place for a long time because that's where life carries me and there's a lot of work to be done in one specific community or something. I don't want to settle down just to settle down, just like I don't want to move around just to move around. I want to follow the current of deep inspiration, and I want to follow the path that keeps me curious and keeps me learning throughout life.

You were married, right?

Yeah, I got married. Me and Buck [Meek, Big Thief’s guitarist] got married when I was 24.

Does that experience inform how you think about this stuff now? You obviously still have a relationship, in that you’re bandmates. How do you navigate making music together?

That experience brought us even closer, but I think it's because we just refuse to be in a box. We had no examples of people successfully transforming their entire relationship and just being really close, still. And we were like, no, we can do that because we actually love each other. And it's deeper than that: our friendship and relationship and connection is deeper than what form it takes. It was such a learning experience for both of us. We were both figuring out who we are. It was funny actually, all our conversations surrounding marriage. It was like, “Wait, so should we do all the papers? And should we get the license? What does that even mean?” And also when we got divorced, we actually went into the court arm in arm. We were just hanging out and laughing, we felt really close.

That's sort of an amazing divorce image.

We were literally arm in arm, walking into the court, and then we were talking, giggling. But it was also sad. I witnessed stuff in that court, too, that was really sad, and made me feel sad about the structure that we have set up and our society.

What even is marriage? You can be so deeply, deeply, deeply connected to someone and committed to them through all of time and not ever be married, or you can be married and be completely absent. I think we were exploring, just running like rascals around the country, making music and in a band and getting married and getting a divorce and figuring it out.

You’re from Minnesota, and you mention Minneapolis by name a couple times on songs. How has your perspective on the city changed, if it has at all, with all the upheaval there this year?

It's just sad. My little brother still lives there and he's kind of right in the thick of the things, very close to the memorial site for George Floyd, and he said stuff got pretty intense there. It makes me feel sad that things have had to come to this, but also encouraged by the many people like my little brother, who have anti-racism book clubs that they're a part of, and who are educating themselves and taking things really seriously. But there’s just also just a lot of violence around in Minneapolis, mainly from the police, and it was scary. The curfews, the way that they were enforced, and people getting shot with rubber bullets on their porches.

Do you feel like your perspective on your own music, and on your artistic practice, has changed at all over the course of this twisted year?

I think that art is powerful and important in that it's a space where expression can be unlimited, and it can be a space that is shared between people and not controlled. Music has a power to be incredibly unifying. People are joined by the music that they listen to. But it also helps people to feel more connected to themselves. And that's powerful because the more tools that one has to explore themselves and become more deeply acquainted with themselves, the brighter their own light can shine out there in the world. And if you have all of these people who are connecting to their core selves, the light just gets brighter and brighter and brighter and brighter. Art brings life, and openings, and portals into deeper ways of perceiving, and deeper ways of thinking and understanding things. It’s always helped push movement and revolution to new levels, or it’s assisted it. It’s the motor oil for change.

Artists are responsible for what they’re putting out into the world, especially people who have bigger voices, and who are reaching the masses. What people are repeating in their cars or singing to themselves, speaking on a musical level—that’s powerful. These are mantras. As an artist, or as a person with a voice, you have this platform and this power to shape and change people’s thoughts. It’s so important that what you’re putting into people’s psyches is thoughtful, and is consciously done, in a way that isn’t manipulative or numbing, or supporting apathy. Maybe what’s even more insidious is music that just deals with things on a surface level, and so you feel like it’s just enough to satiate some kind of craving for meaning, but it’s only dealing with it within the matrix, rather than looking for things outside of it.

I had to ask myself, “Should I even put this record out right now?” Because things are so crazy, and there are so many people whose voices should be amplified and uplifted other than my own and also there’s so much vital information that needs to be passed around, I don’t want this to serve as a distraction in any way by putting it out. But also, I felt like I shouldn’t just keep it to myself. If anything, I’ll just put it out as an offering. Take it or leave it. And if it can be helpful or beneficial to anyone at all, at least it’s there.

Originally Appeared on GQ