“We look at the world once, in childhood,” Louise Glück wrote in her poem “Nostos.” “The rest is memory.” This quote comes to mind every time I listen to Adrianne Lenker's new album, Promising future, which, as its title suggests, may be looking forward to the road ahead, but it allows itself the treasure of remembrance, the freedom to linger on memories that fade and harden with adulthood. Lenker — the lead singer of Big Thief and one of today's most celebrated songwriters, recording her new album in a studio hidden in the woods with frequent collaborator Philip Weinraub and friends including Nick Hakim, Matt Davidson, and Josephine Ronstein — probably has little reason to introduce a new record about The way to erase past traumas. But in these fortunate circumstances, she finds the clarity of her senses as awakened as when she ran through the woods as a child—a child who happened to be born into a cult and have lived in 14 different homes before she was eight, about that time. She started writing her first songs. When writing, Lenker said New York times“Sometimes, I feel like I have to check: Is this 10-year-old still inside me?”
Not only is she there, still looking at the world and now adept at turning it into poetry — a child “humming in the clarity of black space where the stars twinkle like tears on the face of the night” — but the 32-year-old musician treats her presence as a gift worth sharing. “We lay down for hours and talk about childhood pain/Mom and dad and past lives too, I can tell you anything,” she sings on “Free Treasure,” a song that is both open-hearted and extroverted at the same time, alluding to different forms of love and reserving so much for the listener. “Real House” is not just about the first real house her parents bought, or the pain or the “trauma” – it follows a stream of emotions that leads Lenker to the heaviest and most precious memory, which is seeing her mother cry. For the first time after their dog's death, it took shape: a family coming together to hold the body, the way her mother held her hand in the hospital when she was 14. The word “needle,” which connects the two memories, strikes me as a powerful metaphor for her pen: a sharp, delicate instrument that can hurt her but also cuts through the fabric of her life, affecting others. “Just when I thought I couldn't feel more/I feel a little more,” she sings on “Free Treasure”; song after song, Promising future It should elicit the same reaction.
Part of what makes “Real House” so raw and sad is that it separates Lenker from the instrument she first picked up and which is naturally described as an extension of her body. Hakim, whom she has known since she was 17, was playing chords on the piano, so she started singing along, and because the tape was always rolling, the pure gravity of the performances was captured. It's easy, when she sings, “I wanted so much for the magic to be real,” she sways again SoTo feel that she not only perceives the magic, but also shares it. This feeling is at the heart of “Sadness as a Gift” (“You and I can see the same eternity / Every second is filled with sublimity”), a song that both complicates and softens the sadness documented in this remarkable 2020 song. Songs And Instruments. In many of Lenker's old songs, love was about blood flowing, an endless tug of war, something to dive headfirst into, preparing to fall — and with a muddled, raucous take on Big Thief fan favorite “Vampire.” “Empire,” it only emphasizes the overall calmer approach of the album but is still, naturally, evocative and complex. Maturity transforms love into the quiet reverence of “No Machine,” but longing remains born of contradictions, as in “Already Lost”: “Staying so close, standing so far / How slow and how fast.”
“Real House” is one of three piano-based songs that serve as the album's emotional backbone. Close Promising future “Devastating,” which may sound like a harsh note on which to end; But there's power, more than just resignation, in the constant repetition of the title, the kind you feel without in the opening game. In the middle is “Evol,” a charming song in which Lenker formalizes the theme of emotional mirrors by reversing the words — “knowledge, cheat/part, trap” — twisting and enlivening their meaning. It flows like a dream in which Lenker can finally see a brighter version of her reality: “You have my heart, I want it back.” It's the present the album is always rooted in, always desired, but it bleeds into the past and the future – a future that rarely seems hopeful. Lenker was seven years old when she saw the film Deep impactWhich made her think about “the end of the whole world.” The idea no longer frightened her – her Known that it; That death, like a kind of magic, like the door, is not an illusion, and we have little control over it. “Everyone we love, we lose,” Lineker said in a recent interview. “We have to give up everything, all the way, until the end, even when you give up yourself and your body.” Promising future It shines because he remembers to hold and release, often in the same breath, as if he could hold it forever.
