Adrianne Lenker: The Art of Narrative Songwriting
©️ Adrianne Lenker by Erinn Springer for The New York Times
Adrianne Lenker and the band Big Thief have come to occupy an indispensable place within the contemporary music world. Lenker's literary, narrative-driven songwriting in particular has grown to become one of the greatest assets of both Big Thief and her solo project. Personal memories are flawlessly intertwined with complex, magnetic instrumentals that bring her vivid story world to life. What’s the difference between poetry and song? Not much in Lenker’s case.
I was seventeen, cotton-candy rain,
driving with my lover,
we missed our plane
In the unreleased Big Thief song Incomprehensible, lead singer Adrianne Lenker reflects on the arrival of her thirty-third birthday. In this live performance, she stands on stage in a large T-shirt, and begins the song lightly as her wild hair falls in front of her eyes. The first verses travel back to an idyllic road scene sixteen years earlier, when her life still consisted of carefree freedom, young love and cotton-candy rain - a brief metaphorical insert that grabs the sweetness of nostalgia in just the right way. Lenker's descriptive opening verses contextualize the broader narrative in her songs and illuminate the path to her life's journey. Only deeper into Incomprehensible does she deploy her familiar textual prowess. The following verses spread across social media as thousands of people share their ode to aging:
My mother and my grandma, my great-grandmother too
They wrinkle like the river, sweeten like the dew
And as silver as the rainbow scales that shimmer purple blue
How can beauty that is living be anything but true?
Halfway through the eight-minute Way Out West live show the first words return. Groovier this time, with more emotion. A stretched instrumental interlude operates as the soundtrack to an inaudible band meeting where a message goes around; Lenker wants to play the song again. Without a guitar this time, magically nonchalant, as she runs her fingers through her untamable hair and dances in front of the audience without a care. The rest of the band follows her lead seamlessly - merging into a single musical entity. The sound of Buck Meek and Justin Felton’s (bass)guitars smoothly fill the space Lenker clears. Big Thief masters remarkable synchronicity, even with two drummers: James Krivchenia and Jon Nellen.
Incomprehensible is an honest confession about the dualities of aging. It combines society's negative attitudes toward aging women with a kind of future nostalgia toward reaching this old age; to wrinkle like the river and sweeten like the dew. Cryptic and symbolic phrases are interspersed with easily digestible and crisp verse lines such as “I'm afraid of getting older, that's what I learned to say, 'cause society has given me the words to think that way,” which convey a clear message without the usual ambiguity or imagery found in her songs.
On August 14, 2024 at OLT Rivierenhof in Antwerp, Big Thief played Incomprehensible twice as well. “I'm gonna be honest with you, we played the previous song way too fast 'cause I had to pee so bad,” Lenker shares with the audience. “I pissed myself once on stage when I was about sixteen. I told the guy I was seeing that I had my period or something. So here it is again” she adds, followed by loud cheers and the first notes, now with a slower BPM.
The show sold out months in advance. Ticketswap tickets disappeared like snow in the sun mere seconds after they came online. I was able to attend the show thanks to a spot on the guest list. This list was filled almost immediately — which hardly ever happens. However, my good fortune did not rob me of my first manic episode, nor of a rekindled understanding of gambling addicts — both caused by a bodily takeover that forced me to refresh the event page every five seconds for hours. I was determined to secure a ticket for a good friend amongst the 398 desperate hijackers. She had to share this memory — soul sold or not. After spending half a day glued to our phones and laptops, at a certain point with three people at once, I finally got my hands on one.
It was worth it.
Tucker Zimmerman played the support act, a good friend of the band and 83-year-old undercover songwriter who spends his time in a cottage in Wallonia. Together with Lenker, he performed songs from their collaborative album Dance of Love (2024) and some of his solo songs, such as She's an Easy Rider from the album Songpoet (2006). One of the songs they sang together was Burial at Sea, a beautiful duet filled with seaside imagery, full of whales and lost time. The first phrases poured in slowly - Zimmerman sings:
Take me out to the edge of the sky
Fill me with laughter and a lopsided smile
Roll back the waves that cloud my eyes
I want to dance with the whales for a while
Oh, yeah. And later,
There's a message in a bottle
from fourteen hundred and ninety-two
shipwrecked sailors on a rock
a stone's throw away from the village they plundered
'Our time is up, no more shall we count
the clicks of the clock'
They also performed The Season, a slower double-voiced reworking of Zimmerman's original version from the album A Feather Flies Out (2021).
Both The Season and Incomprehensible reflect on the aging process as a ritual of beauty. The weight of aging differentiates significantly when the perspective switches from a 33-year-old woman to an 83-year-old man. Where Lenker sings about society telling her not to get saggy or gray, and balances it out by saying thirty-three doesn't really matter next to eternity, Zimmerman sings:
I'm amazed when
I come awake each day and see the light
And I'm so grateful
I made it through another night
I can't believe I'm still hanging around
I can't believe I'm not hanging upside down
And yes, I'm so lucky to be alive
And kicking too
Getting older evolves into an honor, a joy rather than a burden. “I can't believe I still get to do this in my old day” says Zimmerman, as he wearily puts his guitar on his lap. He addresses the audience with the same grounded, humble and down-to-earth charisma that the members of Big Thief possess . “Thank you for being here, and thank you to these amazing people for giving me the opportunity to sing some of these old songs for you.” Zimmerman's vulnerability and fragile stage presence moves the audience considerably. Hundreds of people become silent under an open blue sky. They share tears and admiration, a new sense of belonging and appreciation for life. As he shuffles off the stage, Lenker's arm supports him, until they slowly disappear behind the curtains together.
The moving and rare sight of intergenerational friendship and mutual respect illustrates the humanity Lenker brings to today's music scene. In an interview with 3 voor 12, a Dutch music channel, Zimmerman talks about how he completely distanced himself from the music industry and its false promises some years ago. Big Thief’s offer to collaborate with him changed his life drastically. “Now I have to learn to answer e-mails, and suddenly do interviews,” Zimmerman says jokingly. He tells them how he turned down Lenker's offer to collaborate many times, until he finally gave in. “It turned out to be one of the best choices of my life.” Instead of choosing a hip, young, upcoming artist Big Thief prefers to use their resources for a project with an artist like Zimmerman, breathing new life into the work of a previous generation of musicians that simply do not reach modern audiences without these kinds of collaborations.
©️ Adrianne Lenker by Erinn Springer for The New York Times
At seventeen, Lenker earned a full scholarship to the Berklee College of Music by being the exact opposite of their model student: a young woman, unknowing of the technical side of music but full of raw talent. “I went into [Damien Bracken's] office and I said, 'I don't know any of this music theory, any of this stuff that is on your curriculum, but can I play you a song?'” she tells the New Yorker. In the same interview, Lenker describes how her parents left a religious cult when she was a young child. Their decision opened up a world of possibility and freedom, both for her and her family. This theme echoes in Real House, the opening track on her solo album Bright Future (2024), a unique gathering of anecdotal stories and honesty. The first words are introduced by a picturesque piano tune that is representative of the song’s poetic simplicity. This interplay reveals the thin space between the past and the present, and the distance created when describing early memories from a contemporary perspective:
Do you remember running?
The purity of the air around
Braiding willow branches into a crown
That love is all I want
The verses are filled with childlike emotions read aloud by Lenker, not quite singing yet not quite talking:
We moved into a real house
A wild field behind it
I wanted to be an inventor
Collected scraps to make a portal
I wanted so much for magic to be real
Real House is essentially a six-minute epic poem. Instead of speaking of gods and supernatural forces, she speaks of her mother, her own memories and invites the listener into her childhood home as she rebuilds it sentence by sentence.
“The scenes and names in her music are rarely pulled out of thin air — they belong to friends, moments in her life that she has lived through or constructs in hindsight through metaphors.”
Lenker’s songwriting is a map of familial anecdotes and the subtle, often invisible details of interpersonal relationships; a series of compact stories that fit tightly into complex musical rhythms and mosaic rhyme schemes. The scenes and names in her music are rarely pulled out of thin air — they belong to friends, moments in her life that she has lived through or constructs in hindsight through metaphors. In Mythological Beauty, for example, she describes how she suffered a severe head injury as a child, of which the scar is still visible:
Rented a house in Nisswa, Minnesota
Shrapnel and oil cans, rhubarb in the yard
I built a ladder out of metal pieces
Father was working hard
Standing beneath the oak tree by the front door
You were inside baking bread
Sister came out and put her arms around me
Blood gushing from my head
You held me in the backseat with a dishrag
Soaking up blood with your eye
I was just five and you were twenty-seven
Praying, “Don’t let my baby die.”
A second example of metaphorical and elliptical reconstruction is found in songs like Not, Shoulders and Dried Roses, in which she leaves space for interpretation and projection by naming details and interpersonal dynamics without giving away too much and remaining cryptic.
Although the vignettes in Lenker's lyrics are often marked by modesty and humanity, her use of language is anything but worldly. She uses “shrapnel and oil cans,” “rhubarb” and “Nisswa, Minnesota” effortlessly in two consecutive sentences and invariably employs complex rhyme schemes that never feel overly complicated due to their narrative quality. Lenker's lyrics are unreproducible and highly distinguishable from other modern songwriters in both lyrical dexterity and originality. The qualities in her work (especially songs like Rock and Sing) are reminiscent of the poetry of Maya Angelou, Walt Whitman, Arthur Rimbaud or Bob Dylan — who have received countless literary accolades due to the passage of time, the societal relevance of their work and academic analysis.
Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. This event caused a resurgence in the study of song lyrics as literature, and (re)introduced the idea of music as poetry with additional dimensions back into the collective consciousness. As a result, Craig Morgan Teicher argues the following in the article Why Bob Dylan's Songs Are Literature:
“There is a common sense that poetry exists in a world of pure language, but a poem is, in fact, both the music and the words. Poetry’s sonic aspects — such as syllable sounds, rhyme, rhythm, assonance, dissonance, and meter — are meant to “accompany” the content, to set the mood, to refer to and elicit a sensory experience related to the emotions and images of the poem. […] Dylan’s lyrics alone don’t compare to a poem, but a complete song — words, music, arrangement, instrumentation, all of it taken together — does.”
Back in 1988, Aidan Day already introduced Dylan into the world of literary studies with Jokerman: Reading the Lyrics of Bob Dylan, in which he highlights the poetics of his songwriting through literary criticism. Also of note is Lloyd Whitesell's 2002 analysis of Joni Mitchell in Harmonic Palette in Early Joni Mitchell, in which Whitesell meticulously studies Mitchell's language and poetics – who remains a great inspiration for many contemporary songwriters like Lenker. In addition, the recent 2023 book publication of Paul McCartney's The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present invites us to take McCartney's lyrics out of context and to uncover the literary value of his songwriting on paper.
Artistic explorations and language analyses often remain limited to canonical texts and authors. Dylan’s triumph is a major step forward toward the recognition of songwriting as a literary practice. However, it is still unlikely to extend to contemporary music in the near future, as praise is too often retrospective — to the exception of thousands of music lovers on the internet and a handful of critics.
In The Ordinary Brilliance of Big Thief Jia Tolentino, American writer and journalist, compares the song Mary to the work of modernist writer, playwright and poet Gertrude Stein, one of the few substantiated celebrations of Lenker's songwriting. The combination of carefully crafted vowel rhymes, the complex rhythmic expressions of syllables, empirical references and the overall exceptional narrative make Mary strong both as a lyrical story and as a song. It is no less engaging or formally interesting than modernist poetry, and can easily be read as such under the wings of Big Thief's instrumentation, performed even more powerfully live. Mary's post-chorus goes like this:
Monastery monochrome
Boom balloon machine and oh
Diamond rings and gutter bones
Marching up the mountain
With our aching planning
High and smiling
Cheap drink
Dark and violent
Full of butterflies
The violent tenderness
The sweetest silence
The clay you find is fortified
We felt unfocused fade the line
The sugar rush
The constant hush
The pushing of the water gush
The marching band
When April ran
May June bugs fly in
Push your own gin Jacob
With the tired wiry brandy look
Here we go around Mary, in your famous story book
Lenker masters the skill of grasping the most seemingly futile details, painting a clear picture of the range of sensory stimuli surrounding specific scenes – both existent and non-existent. Lenker takes the listener on her lap and lets us see through her eyes, as if she were showing an unfamiliar world to a child. The same elements recur in Simulation Swarm, a highly abstract but at the same time very specific story told under a melodic, round sound that travels in circles through the words:
I remember building an energy shield
In your room, like a temple
Swallows in the windless field
Very thin, with your mother
Tall as a pale green tree
Very wild, bright as winter
Rising with a prism key
And a child to deliver
Taken with the blood and vine
As the first little angel
Little Andy, soft in your newborn skin
Only one, little Andy, will you return again?
I believe we can renew
And you could be my brother
Once again, fall asleep with our backs against each other
You believe, I believe too
That you are the river of light who I love
That I sing to in the belly of the empty night
Another example of careful narrative framing is the song dragon eyes, released on songs (2020), a heartbreaking album full of highly personal ballads with exceptionally complicated but seemingly accessible guitar patterns - obtained here and there by using a paintbrush as a plectrum. Once again, Lenker draws us into her world from the first verse while leaving her acoustic guitar as raw as possible:
Freezing at the edge of the bed
Chewing a cigarette and repeating
Shadows of the words I said
I don't wanna blame you
I don't wanna blame
On the same album, anything seems to reflect a diary entry that could belong to a Christmas edition of Woolf's Ms. Dalloway or Joyce's Ulysses:
Christmas Eve with your mother and sis
Don't wanna fight but your mother insists
Dog's white teeth slice right through my fist
Drive to the ER and they put me on risk
Grocery store list, now you get this
Unchecked calls and messages
I don't wanna be the owner of your fantasy
I just wanna be a part of your family
Further into the song, Lenker sings:
Weren't we the stars in Heaven?
Weren't we the salt in the sea?
Dragon in the new warm mountain
Didn't you believe in me?
You held me the whole way through
But I couldn't say the words like you
I was scared, Indigo, but I wanted to
I was scared, Indigo, but I wanted to
The third and fourth line refer to the Big Thief album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You (2022) — a heartbreaking intertextuality in and of itself — followed by the name Indigo in the last two verses, referring to Lenker’s ex-lover and fellow musician Indigo Sparke. songs, along with instrumentals (in which Sparke reappears in music for indigo, a twinkling guitar session that sounds like she's playing in the room next to you) was recorded in the isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic, somewhere in a shack on which you can hear the rain falling in come. Again, the album is incredibly intimate, and the scenes are too specific to be fiction or impersonal, a unique value reminiscent of the isolated self-expression found in public journals. Lenker’s solo project balances out the strength of Big Thief. She explores a deeper rawness and leaves her instruments stripped down more often. The two different versions of Vampire Empire, solo and Big Thief, perfectly illustrate the difference between the two projects, leaving more room for nuance rather than anger in her own version.
“The mystery in Lenker’s music remains unresolved, and the pure message of her songs is barely traced (except for a few interviews). Yet you seem to reach the core of what they describe, who she is, who she used to be.”
Lenker's music is a slow love that over time turns into love at first sight, due to the inevitable blind trust you develop in her skill as a songwriter and musician. It creates nostalgia for a past you didn't experience yourself. The mystery in Lenker's music remains unresolved, and the pure message of her songs is barely traced (except for a few interviews). Yet you seem to reach the core of what they describe, who she is, who she used to be. Lenker makes space for what she wants to create at any given moment, whether it be the arrival of her thirty-third birthday, or a sensual bedroom scene in Pretty Things.
The power of narrative songwriting lies in artists’ ability to tell stories in a unique way, with the skill of their own voice and hands. This visceral element creates a deeper familiarity with a writer and the possibility to expose their soul many times more than most canonical writers are able to do. The illusion of familiarity creates a clearer dive into the hearts of artists who truly write their own songs, which is undoubtedly the case with Lenker, even without checking the credits. Music possesses, arguably, infinitely more potential for dissection than poetry on paper, or any form of literature for that matter — especially for writers who are alive and kicking, and exist in the world as discernable public figures. Factors such as image, personality, punctuation, instrumentation and social context constantly change the message of music.
Everything depends on the artist's subtle sound choices, the listener’s interpretation and the moment in time; a river whose same water is never touched twice. Essentially, you learn a lot about Lenker through her songwriting, though much of it remains a mystery. The true meaning of her stories remain incomprehensible; some of the truest indications of great contemporary songwriting.
©️ Adrianne Lenker by Erinn Springer for The New York Times
Aline Janssen (she/her) is a literary scholar, writer and model who enjoys sounds, listening to others speak and various types of sunlight. In recent years, she graduated in both Linguistics and Literature and Film- and Theatre Studies. She is currently working on her novel, while writing for the Groene Amsterdammer and investigating side-quests such as music, visual arts, craniosacral therapy, solitude and possibly beekeeping.