Big Thief is muscular and frail. Its songs revolve around singer and guitarist Adrianne Lenker and her musical partner, guitarist Buck Meek. They’re storytellers as much as song makers and their distorted guitar-based music is a powerful underpinning to vivid and stark imagery:
“I’ll be your morning bright goodnight shadow machine.
I’ll be your record player baby if you know what I mean.
I’ll be your real tough cookie with the whiskey breath.
I’ll be a killer and a thriller and the cause of our death”
Masterpiece is one of the strongest debut albums of 2016. It’s an album on being human, finding compassion, being a lover or just a friend.
“Cry like a bird, fly like a baby
Mama got drunk and daddy went crazy.
If your speech slurs, if you feel shaky
meet me out back, I’ll be there waiting.”
Masterpiece shakes off the trite relationship cliches that are trappings of so much rock music. It’s a special world they’ve created and it lives in my head on repeat.
Sometimes the most revealing lyrics for a song can come from deep within one’s subconscious. For Adrianne Lenker of Brooklyn-based band Big Thief, that statement would likely ring true more times than not. Lenker feels that much of the lyrical content on Big Thief’s debut album Masterpiece—which came out in late May on Saddle Creek Records—spilled out from her subconscious. It’s like a volcano that had built up so much pressure that it erupted.
For example, on the album’s title track she sings, “Old stars / Filling up my throat / You gave ‘em to me when I was born / Now they’re coming out.” She says she was at songwriting festival, and that “there was a lot of stuff happening with friends and family and teachers.”
“I got my guitar and walked up to the top of hill and wrote the song and just sang it. I didn’t have anything with me to record it or write it down,” Lenker says. “All the verses came out at once. I guess it was just in the air.”
She’s joined by members Buck Meek, James Krivchenia and Max Oleartchik. The seeds for the band were planted several years ago when Lenker moved from Minnesota to New York and met Meek at a New York marketplace.
Lenker didn’t know anyone in the area, and he had been living in the city for awhile, so he offered to be her tour guide. That led to them playing songs together and going on tour They become as dynamic as tenacious as the old Dragnet episode that their band was named after. The band recorded Masterpiece over a 12-day period at a friend’s family’s old lake house with producer Andrew Sarlo. They worked in the makeshift studio they had built and used their own gear to record.r as a duo in a 1987 Conversion van. It became evident right away that Meek was someone that she wanted to work with.
The Fat Angel Sings 