To open the fourth season of the Gladden House Sessions, Big Thief’s lead singer and songwriter AdrianneLenker stopped by to perform an intimate and haunting solo set in the early evening of that Thursday. The intense and soft-spoken Lenker, armed only with an acoustic guitar, captivated the festival goers in attendance with a curated selection of songs.
Lenker opened with a gorgeous rendition of the title track from Capacity (Saddle Creek). Her second song was an unexpected treat; an unreleased, and hereto yet to be recorded, song that she has rarely performed. This new track was a delight to the many fans of Lenker’s enthralling approach to performance. Lenker closed the set with another track off of “Capacity”, the album opener “Pretty Things.”
We are excited to announce Big Thief’s highly anticipated second album,“Capacity”, will be out June 9th. The trails that the band takes us down on Capacity are overgrown with a wilderness of souls. These are carnivorous stories, with pangs of sadness and joy. Songwriter Adrianne Lenker shows us the gentle side of being ripped open, and then recounts the second act of pulling oneself back together to prepare for it all to happen again.
The first song to be shared (which will also be available on Record Store Day as a 7″ Vinyl single b/w non-album track “Breathe in My Lungs”) is the utterly captivating and semi-autobiographical “Mythological Beauty” (learn more about the song via her interview with NPR Music’s Bob Boilen on All Songs Considered.
The video for “Mythological Beauty” features a cameo by Lenker’s mother (who also graced the cover of Masterpiece). The gorgeous video, directed by Vanessa Haddad and Adam Gundersheimer, leaves itself open to interpretation as it follows a resolute woman played by Adrianne carrying a stricken man played by Buck Meek through the woods.
Big Thief – Mythological Beauty
From the upcoming album Capacity – Out 6/9/17!
The Brooklyn-based indie-rock outfit Big Thief made the trip to the Late Night Show With Seth Meyers to perform the title song from their aptly named album “Masterpiece“. The band seemed at home on set, with frontwoman Adrianne Lenker even busting a few moves on stage. Even more exciting, however, is SethMeyers promise at the end of the show that the band has a new album in the works, to be released this comimg summer.
2017 is off to a busy start for Big Thief ! Last night they performed the title track from last year’s beloved album “Masterpiece” on Late Night with Seth Meyers.
They also captivated a massive crowd at NPR’s SXSW 2017 showcase earlier this month. You can now watch the entire set recorded at Stubbs BBQ..
For Big Thief, fragility and power come inextricably intertwined. Singer and guitarist Adrianne Lenker may let her songs sit and seethe for long stretches, but those slow builds only maximize the catharsis of the big, loud, high-volume bursts of force that follow.
Onstage at Stubb’s BBQ in Austin, Texas — recorded live Wednesday as part of NPR Music’s SXSW showcase — Lenker brought a mix of new material and songs from last year’s terrific Masterpiece. Throughout the set, BigThief’s sound billowed out in grand waves, matching the large stage and open-air setting, and by the end of “Masterpiece” (the band’s signature song so far), Lenker was on her back, lost in the intensity of the moment. It felt like just the beginning for a band with a big, bright future.
Set List
“Orange”
“Real Love”
“Vegas”
“Shoulders”
“Paul”
“Shark Smile”
“Parallels”
“Masterpiece”
“Mary”
Now we’re excited to announce their first release of 2017, the “Mythological Beauty” , which will hit store shelves this Record Store Day (April 22nd). The RSD Exclusive version of the 7” is limited to 700 copies on opaque yellow vinyl and features the tracks “Mythological Beauty” and “Breathe in My Lungs.” Be sure to head out to your favorite local record store on April 22nd to pick up your copy!
Big Thief also have a long list of tour dates in the coming months.
It takes nerve to title your debut album “Masterpiece”. As we noted on the midyear list, the Brooklyn band BigThief has an awful lot of nerve. What is more important is that the group has excellent songs, which run on smoky, vulnerable vocals and superb melodies. Led by the midnight twang of Adrianne Lenker’s voice, Big Thief’s songs capture the rural desperation of a freight trainyard romance (“Paul”), a motel-screen movie marathon (“Vegas”) or an abusive family (“Real Love”). It is a taut, emotionally resonant collection of songs with a killer climax in “Parallels.” And among the group’s many recently converted fans is Jeff Tweedy, of Wilco fame, who tweeted: “Great guitars, great lyrics, great melodies…. What more could you possibly want?” It’s just that simple.
Big Thief’s Masterpiece is a shared experience. It was an album I’d put on riding in a car with friends, travelling to festivals and gigs . For their album debut, Big Thief added heft to these whispery tales. And that often comes in the form of Buck Meek’s guitar, as he underpins Adrianne Lenker’s chilling voice. I’ve listened to this album more than any other in 2016. It’s just about perfect. Calling your album “Masterpiece” is a bold statement, but BigThief get closer than you’d think on the title track to their debut for Saddle Creek Records. Against a backdrop of beautifully ragged guitars, frontwoman Adrianne Lenker describes what sounds like a late-night bar crawl, always one drink ahead of loss and grief: “There’s only so much letting go you can ask someone to do.”
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 