Adrianne Lenker: Casting Spells in Song

 When one of my best friends and bandmates moved to Chicago with me, many nights were spent playing guitar and us sharing our favorite artists with each other, and she would often gush about her favorite band Big Thief. The heart of the band and the lead singer is a solo artist named Adrianne Lenker, whose band consists of Buck Meek, Jason Burger, and Jame Krivchena. Shortly after going to their concert at Pitchfork, my friend took me to a solo show Adrianne Lenker was playing, and I soon also fell in love with their solo music and genuine love and care for both their music and fans. Adrianne does something extraordinary with their music, they combine the most beautiful lyricism I have ever heard, with the most beautiful guitar parts. They revolutionize the folk genre, bringing a whole new audience in, by openly expressing their queer identity and often expressing extremely hard stories and topics through song. 

Throughout their childhood, Adrianne lived in many places throughout the Great Lakes Area, and most notably grew up in a Christian cult. This strange situation becomes the topic of many of their songs. They spent a lot of their childhood living in a van and being homeschooled. This mobile life allowed Adrianne to become a karate champion, and work on their music. By the age of 8, they wrote their first song, and by the time they were 13, they recorded their first album. They then attended the Berklee College of Music on Scholarship, where they met their future husband, and the co-founder of their band, Buck Meek. 

They would soon get waiting jobs after undergrad, move to New York City, and spend every spare hour either making music or playing live. While both Buck and Adrianne started the band, Adrianne was the main director in writing songs and giving the band a signature sound. 

Buck often described Adrianne as the kindest and most genuine person he has ever met, even after their divorce. He also has compared writing with Adrianne to watching a witch brew a spell. In an interview with The New Yorker, He said “She’ll hold her guitar, and she’ll start to speak in abstractions, or speak in complete nonsense—just sounds and shapes. Then she emerges from that space, and slowly the words start to form into syllables, and into the English language, and become a story, or a character, or a reflection of her own experience. But it has this really clear element of Grace." I think Adrianne really embodies the idea of going into flow, and producing something when you are in a certain mental space. The Covid lockdown was the time that Adrianne was creating relentlessly in a cabin in the woods, cranking out both albums for their band and for her solo career within a matter of weeks. 

There is something mystical in their music, as they often experiment with bizarre tuning and finger-picking patterns. When watching Adrienne perform their solo show, this concept becomes evident. All her fans were loudly chatting and talking to each other, but the minute Adrianne came on stage and greeted the crowd both shyly and quietly, everything fell to silence. She picked up her acoustic, with nothing but a plain metal chair and a microphone, and started playing. No percussion or other instruments were needed to entertain their audience as we all just sang quietly along with them, as we were all enchanted. To this day I have never experienced anything quite like it.