COVER STORY | Adrianne Lenker Gets Closer

As soon as I finished listening to “Real House,” the opening track from Adrianne Lenker’s new album Bright Future, for the first time, I paused the music and immediately called my mother—not to say “I love you” but to hear her voice and remember the gift of connection we hold together even in distance. The song, easily Lenker’s rawest and intimate yet, rebels against mystery, refusing to be enshrouded by opaqueness. It’s a plainspoken, minimal and articulated collection of reflective vignettes—an archival of 22 years of Lenker’s life as she remembers them. She conjures images of braiding willow branches into a crown, trying to build a portal to another world, dreams of flying, a mother and daughter’s shared laughter in a hospital, a family coming together to say goodbye to their aging dog. Lenker’s only muse on “Real House” is the past, and there are no cryptic metaphors. It’s, as she calls it, “an autobiographical, condensed montage of the most pivotal moments in my childhood up until the moment of my dog’s death.”

“It’s foundational to whatever the hell it is I am now,” Lenker, 32, continues. “When I was writing, I was just trying to get this really important story down so that I could make sure to remember this sequence, this timeline, this feeling, these images that I never want to forget. It was kind of utilitarian to write [‘Real House’]; I got to archive these moments for myself, because I feel like they really changed me. I wasn’t trying to make something poetic; it was like, ‘Alright, I’m just going to state these things. I’m not going to think too hard about the poetry of it, or do it with that mentality.’ And that ended up making it feel so close to me.”

“The older I get, or the more time passes, the more I am able to say things more simply, which you’d think it’d be the other way, that you would start by saying things more simply and they would grow in complexity,” she continues. “The more that time goes by, I just want to get to the heart of it and learn how to articulate things in a way that is trying to make a clear translation of what I’m experiencing, what’s in my heart or what I’m observing. I think that making a clear transition, that brings the meaning that you feel through. It’s the challenge of it.”

Though the Bright Future singles—“Ruined,” “Sadness As A Gift,” “Fool” and “Free Treasure”—are four generous offerings of what the album’s cohesive emotionality truly is (a coalesced arrangement of love without measure and the heartbreaks, joys and braveries within), “Real House” is the epitome of Lenker’s curious drive as a storyteller. Once upon a time, she wanted to be an adventurer, often accompanying her parents to Home Depot and crawling around beneath the aisles and collecting “forgotten bits of metal that I would collect in my drawers.”

Lenker turned her room into a museum and charged her neighbors to come see it; she built human-sized dinosaurs out of cardboard and built mailboxes for her and her sister to send messages back and forth to each other in silence. Finding comfort in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Narnia, the breakfast machine in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and, simply, “the place beyond,” Lenker searches for the reality—or, even, the hopefulness—of magic on Earth. While the spectrum of her memory brandishes fantastical, youthful innocence and the grief that inherently exists alongside it, “Real House” begins with a meeting point, a beating heart, a tangible familiarity. It begins with home.

“I try to write songs in a way where it leaves room for me to grow into them,” Lenker says. “I still don’t fully understand what ‘Real House’ means. All I know is I moved around my whole childhood—year to year, sometimes twice a year—and I’ve moved around my whole adulthood. And there was something about this period of time, when I moved into this house that my parents bought. It was the only house they ever bought together—from ages nine to 13 and, to me, that felt like an eternity. And it was a real house. My parents bought a real house. We weren’t in an apartment or a van or at my grandparents’. We had our own house and there was this big, huge field behind it. And we had my dog Betsy, and I was building forts. Something about the space of having this house suddenly, that we deemed a real house, I think I’m fascinated with that concept and trying to understand what the real house is—because, even now, I think that the ‘real house’ is the fortress of love that we build internally that shelters and cares for our loved ones, our families, ourselves, our communities. It’s something that can’t just be blown away, but it provides a spaciousness to run and to roam and to dream.”

“Real House” features nothing but Lenker’s voice, Nick Hakim’s piano and a few notes of violin from Josefin Runsteen. “I’m a child humming into the clarity of black space, where the stars shine like tears on the night’s face with a cool wind,” she sings, auditing her own belief in magic or the beyond or a powerful good or all of the above. Lenker stretches eight four-line verses into a six-minute, staggering deluge of consciousness. There’s a bit of mythicality here, as she aches to trust not just her remembrance but that there is an enchantment still coloring it. Lenker was 12 when her parents divorced and, though there is an entire universe of chaos and grief that comes with that, “Real House” culminates in the entire family coming together when her childhood dog passed away in 2011. “My dog was this portal into the greatest form of unconditional love. I told her everything. I had her from age five to 20, and she took care of me and my brother and sister,” she says. “She was the rock, she was the quiet example of unconditional love and magic that, even at the end, brought my family into this peaceful circle around her, holding her and, as she slipped away, my family was together.”

When Lenker was younger, her greatest fear was her parents splitting up—though, in retrospect, she realizes that it would have been an even more postive outcome had it happened sooner. “At the time, the idea of separation was terrifying and life shows ripples and ripples and ripples of separation,” she says. “We have the ability to love and feel so much closeness with so much deep feeling and resonance with people to come into these feelings of attachment and connection—all while knowing that everything we ever come to love and care for, or will, will leave us. It’s quite the existence for any human, and it’s just encapsulated in mystery. I think there’s a part of me that, beginning to end, it’s unknown why we’re here or what it is we’re doing or what we are.” Lenker tells me a story about a recurring dream she used to have, one that included her getting on a horse so little that her feet would touch the ground and it “took away the majestic quality of what it must feel like to gallop on a horse.” She chuckles through her recital, but the laughter quickly grows into tears when she segues into talking about her relationship with her mother.

“I sing to my mother a lot, because she always has that bridge to this great magic. It’s real through her,” Lenker says. “I think some of the greatest joys and some of the most special moments that I had that were just absolutely transcendent were through the full embrace of this certain love that I felt with my mother. And just in the small moments, like braiding willow branches into a crown. It must have been one of my very early memories, but I think I was probably nine or 10, but I remember this really specific way in which she runs and bounces freely in a field. And being little and connected to this form of love and then, as you get older, always yearning for that true embrace and, maybe, yearning for it in ways in which you never even had it, as well.”

“Powerful love is real and I think, as you become an adult moving through life, it’s so easy to slip into numbness and into disconnectedness and to be submerged and feel like you’re not really breathing for a while,” Lenker continues. “I always wanted to keep myself awake and remember to experience things like I did when I was a kid—with an open heart and to, somehow, remain alive in life. It’s a fight sometimes. Throughout our whole lives I think, as humans, there’s a feeling of severedness or a separation that feels tragic. But my mom always tells me that it’s an allusion, that it’s a dream that we’re separate—because we’re not. I never wanted to forget that.”

While love and its endless, often-indescribable and unknowable pleasures, traumas and wonders remains the divine, all-encompassing throughline of Bright Future, the album couldn’t begin anywhere but the prologue of “Real House” and its soft-spoken, sparse celebration of trust flowing into “Sadness As A Gift”—a stop-you-in-your-tracks song Lenker wrote while grieving a relationship that “sets up the lens through which you could perceive the rest of the album.” “Sadness As A Gift” certainly is a breakup lament veiled with worn-in optimism, but its dressing in Runsteen’s violin that careens into Lenker’s devastatingly solemn voice is the engine that makes it a razor-sharp explosion of tender mourning and balmy nuance. “You could hear the music inside my mind, and you showed me a place I’ll find even when I’m old,” she sings, adorning her own heartbreak with the spirit of gratitude.

On “Fool,” Lenker rests briefly on the shoulders of joy and an unbridled future, setting a Frank O’Hara-style supper table of names—sending loving lines out to Jamie, Max, Jon, Jer, Tommy, Kenna, Lu-y, Zoe and B, all of whom have lives moving forward around her. “We could watch a show, we could watch a garden grow,” she lets out. “We could grow old, you could come in from the cold. Oh, just say what it is that you want.” “No Machine” pacifies with Lenker conceding that, without fail, devotion is our compass, as she and Mat Davidson play acoustic guitar and harmonize alongside Runsteen and Hakim. “Talk to me, tell me everything you see,” Lenker sings. “The sun that’s shining lighter than a feather, and every day the moon just sails away.” “Cell Phone Says” holds many built-in realms in just four verses—“Please deliver their angel eyes on the wings of moths and dragonflies / Through the morning and evening, their sunset my sunrise, let them come to me like the breath I’m takin’” is a particularly striking sequence—and she reckons she’ll always be connecting them.

Lenker wrote all of her last two albums—songs and its ambient companion instrumentals—while sequestered in a one-room cabin in Western Massachusetts with her dear friend and collaborator Philip Weinrobe. “I had a whole batch of songs, and then almost none of them made it onto the record,” she says. “I wrote all new songs for that record, whereas [Bright Future] feels like I had a lot of songs selected.” Indeed, the origins of Bright Future stretch as far back as 2018, 2019, when she wrote “Cell Phone Says,” a track she tried recording when Big Thief was making Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You. “Evol” and “Already Lost” were written during the Bright Future sessions, while “Vampire Empire,” according to Lenker, “took a few years to finish through different relationships.” Initially, she had 22 songs ready to go and trimmed the record down to just a dozen.

“Some songs come out in half-an-hour or an hour and are recorded right then and there and slapped onto the record right when I write it,” she says. “And then, these other songs live in this whole other time thing, where the most time-tested—and even some of the best, most favorite—songs I’ve ever written still have yet to be on an album. Maybe it’s because I have to live more life before I can get the right version.” Last week, Lenker released some of those songs as a collection of six demos titled i won’t let go of your hand, announcing that 100% of the proceeds would be given to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund while calling for an immediate ceasefire in regards to Israel’s ongoing war campaign in Palestine—a decision that illustrates an obvious period of growth for Lenker, who, along with her bandmates in Big Thief, were criticized heavily in 2022 for scheduling two performances in Tel Aviv, Israel (bassist Max Oleartchik’s home country) and defending their plans to do so (the band later cancelled both shows, which Lenker suggested was the “type of inner turmoil that could break a band up” in Jeremy Gordon’s recent New York Times profile on her).

In the past, Lenker has spoken about wanting listeners to feel cared for in her music, but on Bright Future, it sounds like she has finally surrendered to caring for herself, too. There’s a line in “Free Treasure” that I especially love, which goes “You show me understanding, patience and pleasure, time and attention, love without measure.” Lenker admits she’s always felt compelled to express vulnerability through her work, but quickly became exhausted from the part of the world where “people are presenting versions of themselves” and “there’s an immediate feeling of separateness,” harkening back to the worries her mother often quelled for her. Lenker points to a random night she spent in Pittsburgh who knows when, likely on one of her many cross-country drives alone, where she was able to remember the sensations of blissful, unbounded escape.

“I remember ending up at this house show that was like an avant-garde marching band,” she explains. “They were shaking the walls and going crazy and sweating and there were, like, 300 people there—it felt like it, but there were probably only 50 people there. And they were just spilling their guts out and sweating. I just remember being like, ‘Wow, just total abandon elevated from music and from the rhythms,’ and feeling like I had this moment where I was just like, ‘I want to rip the film off. I want to shake this facade of whatever this shit is that’s gunky and sticks to us over the course of time and makes us sick and makes us tired and makes us numb and makes us complacent or apathetic. I want to rip that off, even if it hurts, even if it’s hard. I would rather that than just shrink away into some type of autopilot.’”

Since she turned 21 and started playing shows and bringing music into the world more than a decade ago (though she has been writing songs since she was 10), Lenker has always explored how she can break through her own blockages “so that I can actually feel people and they can feel me and we can feel each other and we can meet for real and feel a bit more of what we are actually made of.” When listening to Bright Future, I am often reminded of the poem “There Is” by Tina Fulkner. “There is this space where weeks go into each other, whole days just get lost and nothing is ever retained,” Faulkner writes, “as the hand that gives warmth one day takes from you the next, like the wholeness once found in a shell is as easily washed away.”

Bright Future, like all of Lenker’s solo work (and her songwriting in Big Thief, too), is an effort to unearth a vulnerability or an experience that already exists, to not admonish or avoid lines like “When we’re together only one thing moves, everything else stays the same” or “Though the distances traveled are expanding still, we meet in dreams by the lilac river” or “This whole world is dying, don’t it seem like a good time for swimming before all the water disappears?” Lenker refuses to fabricate feelings, instead preferring to refine her tools and expound on the lifelong culmination of her own bravery—which she so deftly fosters on all 12 songs.

“With each record and with each year that I’m alive and lucky enough to be alive still and continue to work, that I’m working on myself and I’m working with music and I’m going for the same thing, which is just to get closer,” Lenker says. “I don’t know how to name it, because it’s a thing we can’t see. But, it’s also each other but it’s to the parts of each other that are immeasurable but so beautiful, and we know and we feel it. And I think I’ll probably be reaching toward that my whole life, and my hope is that, with each project, I can only just follow that thread of what feels true and what feels like love and what feels vulnerable—even if, sometimes, that maybe looks like a very silly song. But sometimes that might look like a very awkward song, and sometimes that might look like a very sad song—as long as it just feels like it’s actually there.”

Bright Future is a record that demands to be listened to with headphones on. It flourishes in its own details, which includes every possible sound that may have trickled into the 150-year-old room at Double Infinity that was used during the recording sessions. It’s a token that brings people into the space with Lenker, Davidson, Runsteen and Hakim—a micro of in-the-moment textures growing macro on a lush bed of Weinrobe’s sound-capturing. “The combination of all the elements—what’s out the window, what’s in the room, the way that things are resonating—it sounds really beautiful to my ears,” Lenker says. “If you’re recording, it’s trying to find wording that gives people the clearest translation of your internal meaning. I would say recording is trying to give people the clearest translation of what happened in that moment in that room. I think it’s easy to forget that it’s an archive of an event that took place and that, if you’ve been sitting there in the room listening in real time, even upon listening to the recording, it would still be different—because the way the microphones are picking everything up, it’s different from how your ears are.”

The minutiae that hums and yawns and twitches and smiles behind Lenker and the band’s arrangements, like birds outside a window or oxygen on a fire, exist because Weinrobe used a binaural head microphone to preserve them. Lenker points to how those noises influence scent and touch, too; that they help her hit her goal of building a rich but realistic soundscape not beneath her guitar-playing and singing, but alongside it. “You’re hearing the music but you’re also smelling whatever is cooking in the kitchen and you’re also feeling the breeze from the window on your face and then, maybe, feeling the wood floor beneath you and whatever your back is learning on,” Lenker explains. “And I like that you can feel that there’s wind blowing through it. It’s not airtight, it’s just a preference. I don’t think that’s how every record will sound or that will be the choice of every record, but it sounds so natural to me. It feels like I’m back in that room, I’m back in that moment and I can hear Josefin singing, I can hear Nick adjusting in his seat. I can hear my dog scratching on the door. That was exactly what happened in that moment.”

After making songs, Lenker and Weinrobe learned that solitude is singular, as is the necessary grief that punctures it. “I could barely eat a potato during the making,” Lenker admits. “I remember that was the goal of the day: Just eat a potato, if I can stomach that. It was a very hard time and somehow, miraculously, the songs were coming out and I was in this tiny little cabin and I was cooking on a wood stove. And Phil, he would walk through the woods every day from where he was camped. The quiet and solitude of that was so incredible.” But for Bright Future, Lenker was in a healthier state and found herself able to truly enjoy the company of other people—a communion she’d been greatly craving. Though she, Davidson, Runsteen and Hakim had never played together before, she felt like she was back at Berklee College of Music in Boston (where she met her Big Thief bandmate Buck Meek for the first time).

“When we all arrived to record in October 2022, I think we were still like ‘Whoa, people’ and we’d all been through whatever we’d been through in our lives up until that point,” Lenker says. “And I think it felt so joyful for me to be able to have some of my friends there and just share these incredibly personal, intimate songs and let go a little bit. It made it lighter. The actual process [of making Bright Future] had a different type of catharsis, because I was out of my head. I was hearing those sweet sounds on the fiddle and my friends practicing in the room while I was making tea. I had never played with this group before, so there was an element of newness that was exciting. The element of wanting to impress them kept me on my toes a little bit and got me out of my head, whereas [while making songs] I was so in my head.”

Upon the announcement of Bright Future, Lenker’s fans noticed something familiar with track six. “Vampire Empire,” which first caught fire as a once-unreleased staple of Big Thief’s live sets, was released last year as a double-single with “Born For Loving You” and reappears here. But don’t expect it to sound anything like the piercing, ferocious cut Lenker and her bandmates put out in 2023. No, this version quakes like a stripped-down country jamboree, as Runsteen’s violin bow flutters beautifully and she provides the album’s only percussion arrangement by playing the top of a mason jar with her fingers.

This rendition of “Vampire Empire” sees the return of the beloved “in her vampire empire, I’m the fish and she’s my gils” lines, which were changed to “in her vampire empire, I am falling” on the Big Thief recording (which came long after the iteration on Bright Future was recorded). Initially, the internet was not thrilled about the switch, pining for what they saw when the band played “Vampire Empire” on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in early 2023. “James [Krivchenia] really wanted to change [the line],” Lenker posits. “More and more we write together, and I really take into consideration their thoughts and I’m flexible with songs. I don’t believe they’re ever concrete. They’re moving and, personally, I think that ‘in her vampire empire, I am falling’ is better. I think they’re both good, but I grew to prefer the Big Thief one. But I still like the other one, too. Sometimes I sing the line, sometimes I don’t. Even live now, I change it up from chorus to chorus sometimes. But it’s not a big difference to me and I think it’s so funny how much people react to it.”

Lenker ponders the discourse and predicts that it’s going to pivot to the song’s vibe and sound next. “They’re gonna be like ‘I just want one that’s the Big Thief feel with the old lyrics.’ But I honestly think that this recording of ‘Vampire Empire,’ I much prefer it to the Big Thief recording as a moment in time, as a happening,” she continues. “The reason I’m putting it on the record is because I don’t think there’s going to be another time for this song, as far as my records are concerned. I can’t imagine releasing another version in the future, and I just feel like this version we captured is so raw.”

Lenker once said that “Mary” was a recognition of all the magic she started seeing through her best friend’s perception of the world. In turn, Bright Future is an album that, for her, serves as a reclamation for the magic she deserves to see through her own lens. She brings up the concept of past lives and how, a millennium ago, we all lived a life already. But for her, 1,000 years is an abstract number that likely cannot compartmentalize just how long her soul has been alive and wandering around. “It’s like that feeling of breaking through an old trauma cycle that’s passed down through the lineage of warring violentness between humans—feeling that in myself and, in this lifetime, breaking it and seeing a face or hearing a tambour in my own voice that is absolutely new,” she says. “I’m meeting this part of myself that I haven’t seen in 1,000 years that I get to reclaim now—because of the decision to work through certain traumas or unlock certain parts of myself that have been locked up that I haven’t had access to. It’s almost like a feeling of freeing this part of myself that’s been trapped for 1,000 years and I’m meeting it for the first time.”

Lenker, too, has been thinking often about the concept of lostness as a positive. “It occurs to me that being anywhere we could get lost is exhilarating in itself—because everything is so mapped out, there’s roads everywhere,” she says. “Now, you don’t have to walk far before you could knock on someone’s door or walk into a facility somewhere and figure out where you are. True wilderness is something that’s more and more obsolete. There’s something about the excitement of being lost, where you don’t know where you are or where you’re going. It’s through the years of playing it that it all starts to piece together.”

“If I’m still playing the songs—because I have no shyness about playing new songs, I will put out an album and go play a show and play all new songs that aren’t even on that album, I’m not scared—the reason why is, if I’m still playing the songs, it means that I’m learning from them,” she continues. “It means that I’m feeling them alive in my guts, in my bones, that they’re teaching me, they’re holding meaning for me, presently, in some way. It means that they mean something way more than what was happening to me in that moment that I wrote them. They encompass something larger. I love going for that with songs, because it gives them so much lifespan.”

That gesture rings true. When I saw Lenker play a gig here in Columbus at the Anthenaeum Theatre in November 2021, I was expecting her to bedeck the setlist with nothing but “Indiana” and abyskiss and songs tracks. Instead, she played five songs from Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You that no one had heard before. Lenker is always subverting what we expect from her, and has been doing so since she and Big Thief made Masterpiece nearly eight years ago. For a long time, she’s insisted that the textures and sounds of words are equally as important as what they mean. On a Bright Future song like “Evol,” she makes good on that insistence by playing around with backwards pronunciations of words like “love,” “speech,” “shell” and “kiss” as if she’s holding a mirror up to her own vocabulary. She delves into palindromes, too, and enjoys discovering double-meanings in words. “Dream is maerd, I’m married in your mind,” she sings. “Four words, forwards, can’t we rewind?”

“Taking back words is a lethal thing. And then also, thinking about the duality of things—the inherent duality in existence and ideas of words for every bright and beautiful thing. There’s a shadow that is equal to that,” Lenker says. “You can’t have the day without the night, you can’t be awake without your sleep. You can’t have the dark without the light. It’s two inherent sides of the same coin. It’s in everything, and love is evil. One can’t exist without the other, perhaps—or, at least the idea of. And maybe it’s even inherent in everything and everyone, I don’t know. I love words and I think that all of my songwriting is an exploration of these things, of feeling the weight of the way it feels to sing words with each other. But also, then, the meaning is first and foremost. That has to come through.”

On Bright Future, it’s clear that Lenker has found the language to talk about the necessity of wounds and how we can still have nuance and carry on with them, rather than try and exist without them. A song like “Sadness As a Gift”—or even a batch of lines like “Now our love is dying, don’t it seem like a good time for kissing? One more kiss to last the years” in “Donut Seam”—is such an emotional undertaking, for those who are in love, out of love or someplace in-between. From Lenker watching her mother cry for the first time to noting that the moon is the only thing that moves when she’s in the company of a lover to her working up the courage to call a lover by recalling small, cosmic moments, we are all born into love and asked to nurture, question and, perhaps, abandon and reunite with it for however long we take to this lifetime. In turn, there is no doubt that Bright Future will endure as a particularly powerful and important album for anyone who exists—or has existed or will later exist—in a place where absence takes form and all that is remarkable is the language we are left with.

“You fill the space. You put it on like a garment you can wear. That’s what I want for the record—I want to leave space for it to belong to anyone who wants it,” Lenker says. “I want to leave room that feels like kindness. It’s an amazing thing to work on in my own life, to make sure to leave room for the people I love—even just in little ways, like in conversation or in the way you can think of someone when you do something with care and loving intention. I do want there to be room inside the songs for them to belong. Maybe some of that emptiness is meant for you or any listeners, just to exist in there. Most of the time, I’m just writing songs out of necessity, like this is what I need to do to be here on Earth. This is what I need to do right now. Some of the songs that mean the most to me came over the years of feeling like I only had the guitar to turn to for true embrace and understanding. Turning to the songs, it’s always caught me. When I’m falling, it’s been there to catch me.”

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Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.