IIt’s early afternoon in downtown Nashville and the party is already going strong. Single women in pink cowboy hats flow, unmasked, in and out of honky-tonks. However, Big Thief members Adrianne Lenker, Buck Meek, Max Oleartchik and James Krivchenia are sitting outside the Ryman Auditorium like drops of oil floating on water. No one seems to notice that one of the best bands in the US is scattered around a patio table a few hours before their show tonight, just feet from the 24/7 bacchanal.
“There’s a pigeon breeder up there,” says Lenker, the gang leader, leaning forward in his chair in a horse-print shirt, jeans and a bandana, his gaze fixed on a small skyscraper. She points, and the rest of the gang follows her finger to a group of birds on top of a building, moving furiously. “They’re flying in circles, so there has to be a cage up there. They only do that when there is someone leading them.”
There is no director in Big Thief, nor do they move in circles, but they stay in formation. Since the release of their debut album Masterpiece in 2016, they have been one of the most prolific working bands collectively and individually, lacking the best practices of the music industry (two equally brilliant albums, UFOF and Two Hands, were released in 2019). , Instagrammable perfection, or any kind of pomp and circumstance, with Lenker’s intricate and vulnerable lyrics leading the way on songs that cut across indie rock and folk. When they take the Ryman stage later, they will do so without any big displays or sets, unfiltered, and unfiltered in front of a closed stage curtain. They have two Grammy nominations and have graduated to great places, but they’d rather talk about the wonder of human consciousness than praise, discussing the process of creating art as if they were astronomers not just excited to find the next star, but eager to for revealing an entire invisible universe.
Everything that makes Big Thief work could be the undoing of any other gang. For one thing, Lenker and Meek are divorced: They met and started the group together in New York in 2015, marrying young. Bassist Oleartchik lives a world away in Israel, and each member of the band has a vibrant set of solo interests that overlap rather than compete with Big Thief. During the pandemic alone, Lenker released two solo albums, Songs and Instrumentals, guitarist Meek had one, Two Saviors, Oleartchik worked on his jazz material, and Krivchenia released an ambient album and played drums on numerous projects, including Taylor Swift’s Red (Taylor’s Version). “The alchemy of all those things is what makes Big Thief Big Thief in the first place,” says Meek, who wears all black and smiles like he’s known you forever. “So we’ve all honored each other with that, and each other, I think.”
Her new 20-song album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You draws, in title, from that interconnected continuum: it’s taken from a line in Anything on Lenker’s Songs album, further bridging the gap between what’s hers and theirs, as if that even matters. They got here by engaging in a non-stop battle against the ego. “We don’t allow ourselves to be the rock star cliché,” says Oleartchik. “It can feel like this: You’re on stage, people are screaming, but that’s where you can lose yourself.”
Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You isn’t trying to fit neatly into a box that further defines the Big Thief sound, whatever that may be, or hold on to bigger rock stardom. Sometimes his songs meander beautifully without a chorus (certainly), or the music melds perfectly with the feel of the lyrics, though not specifically with the meaning. There are mentions of potato knishes and elbows (Spud Infinity) and microwaves (Dried Roses) that would have made John Prine laugh, and lines that kick you in the stomach with their brilliant simplicity: “I want to live forever until I die.” Lenker sings a country song.
“Maybe I’m delusional, but I don’t think we did anything because someone else expected us to. If anything, it’s just the opposite,” says Meek, turning to Lenker, who is rubbing a bottle of water on his forehead to help cure a headache. “You write the songs because it is a form of survival. You are my favorite songwriter on Earth, and we are definitely my favorite band on Earth. We are the recipient of the music that doesn’t exist and that I want to listen to.” This comes across as enthusiastic joy, not ego, and the music sounds like he feels it too.
“You are me favorite composer!” Lenker replies: This love is more sincere and less corny than it seems. But Lenker had to dig a lot to find this happiness, and when the pandemic hit, it all came to the surface once the crowds calmed down.
“I had been through marriage and divorce,” Lenker says in a separate Zoom call later, alone in a hotel room with her dog. “We had to try to transform our relationship, let it die and be reborn, all while on the road close to each other. And keeping space for other people through our art, writing about it and singing it together on stage. It’s like a family now, which I think is a testament to the love we have for each other. [still] Share.”
Big Thief was in the middle of a European tour when the pandemic hit in March 2020; They had been touring non-stop for three years, and Lenker had started a new relationship, with musician Indigo Sparke, which came to an end in his early forties. “My heart,” he says, “broke to pieces.” Suddenly, it seemed that his body began to “purge everything”. His sister and solo album co-producer Phil Weinrobe had to remind him to eat every day, and he contracted shingles and multi-day migraines, ending up in a hospital in Brooklyn before retiring to his sister’s cabin out west. from Massachusetts.
She worried that something might really be medically wrong, until it became clear that it was the routine she had been involved in since she was a child and the trauma that came with it. “I realized it wasn’t about this thing with this person,” says Lenker, “it was about an old trauma playing out in the current life.” She doesn’t say specifically what that trauma was (although she has spoken elsewhere about how difficult her childhood was), but the breakup of the two romantic relationships “triggered this whole thing inside of me, and I was living in a state of self-control.” -abandonment. I’m not going to perpetuate that cycle, but to do so I really need to not be violent with myself. And that’s not something that happens overnight.”
Lenker was born in Indianapolis, raised in a cult Christian sect from which his parents eventually distanced themselves, and began writing music before the age of 10; her first album, Stages of the Sun, came out in 2006 and shows the origins of her penchant for incorporating country or folk textures into her work, though others around her seemed to think she was more destined for pop stardom. Lenker clearly wasn’t interested in that.
After attending Berklee College of Music in Boston on a scholarship and moving to New York, Lenker met Meek in 2015, who played, as he puts it, “a crazy ragtime swing band.” Meek, from Texas and appropriately well versed in singer-songwriters like Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, was a perfect busking partner for Lenker in the early days. Oleartchik was a jazz musician and the son of Alon Oleartchik, a popular Israeli musician and member of the revolutionary 1970s rock band Kaveret, while Minnesota-born Krivchenia established himself in the punk scene. Once the quartet formed Big Thief, they all became fully committed to the collective.
Krivchenia, who produced Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, presented the concept to the band one morning over continental breakfast at a hotel in pre-pandemic Copenhagen, typed and printed in the hotel’s business center. The idea was that they would go as a group to four places: upstate New York, Topanga Canyon in California, the Arizona desert, and the mountains of Colorado, with four different studios and four different engineers, each with a sound goal. in mind.
“Before it was over, we were all like: oh my God, yeah,” Oleartchik says. Krivchenia really believed in the concept, but also didn’t want to upset the balance of power in the gang, or the lack of one, really. “There’s a communal thing with this band where all opinions are very important,” he says. “I just wanted to check my ego to make sure I wasn’t positioning myself in any kind of role.” Mainly, I wanted the band to help create some time, some freedom from the ticking of the clock.
“It’s like sex,” Lenker says of the recording, chuckling slightly. “If you feel pressure to make love right and you only have an hour to prove yourself, forget it!”
Lenker’s songs are a fundamental strength of Big Thief, never intended to drive definitively one way or another, yet extremely revealing at the same time. “His writing is more complex than ‘is it his nature album or is it his breakup album,’” says Krivchenia. “She wants to leave room for people to add their own meaning,” Oleartchik adds. Her bandmates talk about her songwriting so she doesn’t have to; he doesn’t like to deconstruct his own work that way. He prefers to remain vulnerable with the songs, so that he can remain vulnerable on stage.
Sometimes Lenker will be chatty during a set. Other times, she won’t say anything at all. “Sometimes,” says Krivchenia, “Adrianne rambles for five minutes and we say: let’s do a song, it’s getting cold back here!” He is so resistant to cultivating a performance or character over an authentic shared experience that it wears down emotionally and can “feel like a flat piece of cardboard” after a night or two on tour. “A big part of our craft is trying to come to this radical acceptance of what’s going on and our imperfections and idiosyncrasies,” says Lenker. Big Thief’s music expresses a constant yearning to heal, and his own process is constantly evolving. Recently, she shaved her head to face her insecurities about her face and beauty. “I’m still on that journey, and it could be a lifetime… We have quirks and we travel with them. Hopefully, the people in the room can feel a wave of inspiration to accept exactly how they are in the present moment, happy, strange, or chaotic. I think we need more of that in the world.”
Meek remembers something Krivchenia said to him at a show in New Orleans a few nights before when they got together in a group. “You said, ‘Remember to keep saying yes,’” he says. “So all night I reminded myself to: keep saying yes because it’s so easy to say no. Even if you hit the wrong note. Just go: ‘Yes! I hit the wrong note! Yes!'”
“It’s like an improvisational parody,” says Krivchenia, “Saying no fucking kills the parody.”
“And all of a sudden,” Lenker interrupts, “you’re creating something.”
Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You launches on February 11 in 4AD.
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism