Thoughts on Adrianne Lenker's Bright Future
A couple of weeks ago—in preparation for the release of Big Thief frontwoman Adrianne Lenker’s new, sixth solo album, Bright Future—I took stock of the run that she has been on since 2016:
2016: Big Thief’s Masterpiece
2017: Big Thief’s Capacity
2018: Adrianne Lenker’s abysskiss
2019: Big Thief’s U.F.O.F. and Big Thief’s Two Hands
2020: Adrianne Lenker’s songs & instrumentals
2021: A rare year with no Big Thief or Adrianne Lenker releases
2022: Big Thief’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You
2023: A rare year with no Big Thief or Adrianne Lenker releases
2024: Adrianne Lenker’s Bright Future
Across nine years, her band has released five albums, including two albums in 2019 and a double album in 2022. Over this same period, she has released three albums herself, including her own double album in 2020. This rate of productivity is ridiculous, and reminds me more of the release schedule of a rapper dropping mixtapes in between studio LPs. Taking into account Big Thief’s relentless touring schedule and her own solo touring, one can understand how, across the press cycle for Bright Future, she has recounted being hospitalized in early 2020, presumably due to exhaustion. Very few artists have “went for it” to the degree that Lenker has over this period, and her complete devotion to songwriting craft feels increasingly rare in an economic reality where creating—in basically any medium—is imperiled by automation and chronically devalued by ghoulish tech oligarchs.
Bright Future was recorded in fall 2022 at Double Infinity, a woodland studio in New England with producer Philip Weinrobe and a tight-knit group of musicians: Nick Hakim, Twain’s Mat Davidson, and Josefin Runsteen. Lenker’s last solo record, songs & instrumentals, was also recorded in a cabin (in Massachusetts) by Weinrobe, but it was a starker affair without collaborators’ contributions. Bright Future is a beautiful record, full of (mostly) tender songs. Weinrobe recorded all analog in a way that leaves in generous amounts of room tone and includes audible evidence of the interplay between the musicians throughout as they figure out the song arrangements in real time.
One thing that I have noticed about Lenker’s songwriting in recent years is that—speaking generally of course—it has become more simplified. Some of the early Big Thief material is nearly math rocky in its guitar interplay, whereas Lenker’s most recent work has taken up open hearted and familiar “cowboy chords.” Consider, for example, a song like “Objects” from Capacity, which, at certain moments, almost sounds like it has a lineage in Midwest emo, and compare it with Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You’s single “Change.”
“Objects” has a jittery arrangement with several different riffs and transitional parts, whereas “Change” feels like an old tune that you would stumble across next to Grateful Dead’s “Ripple” while paging through Rise Up Singing around a campfire.
Even if you take a more recent song like “Two Reverse” (off songs) and compare it with “Sadness as a Gift” (off the new record), the simplification in arrangement is striking. Lenker is clearly a masterful guitarist1—an intuitive player particularly adept at intricate fingerpicking patterns and open tunings—but she is choosing to write in first position at this moment and to keep things (relatively) plain.
This change in Lenker’s songwriting tracks with her recently professed admiration for John Prine and Lucinda Williams, whose songs she had participants analyze as part of her School of Song songwriting workshop: Prine’s “Far From Me” and Williams’ stunning “Minneapolis.” In other interviews, she has also shouted out lifer songwriters like Tucker Zimmerman with whom she has also performed.
Essentially, what does it mean when someone that is immensely talented at playing her primary instrument decides to simplify and scale back her playing? To me, this amounts to the greatest musical flex: “I can rip and shred, but I’m choosing not to do so here in service to the song.” There is a mature sense of restraint to many of Bright Future’s songs that evinces how Lenker likely wrote them after engaging in profound study of others’ work. “Sadness as a Gift,” “No Machine,” “Free Treasure,” “Candleflame,” “Already Lost,” “Cell Phone Says,” and “Donut Seam” are all compositions that a beginner to intermediate guitarist could play and sing with minimal practice. They are accessible and utilitarian songs similar to “Change.” The restraint demonstrated on those songs also makes a track like “Fool”—where Lenker indulges in some intricate fingerpicking reminiscent of her earlier work—pop even more on this record.
Bright Future’s two ballads where Lenker helms the piano— “Evol” and the pre-release single “Ruined”—have proven to be a bit more divisive in the online responses to the record that I have read so far. “Evol”’s reception as a piano ballad is undoubtedly complicated by the exercise that Lenker undertook to write its lyrics where she thought of anagrams and tried to write lyrics containing them in close proximity to one another.2 “Ruined” is more straightforward, both lyrically and musically, though I do have to agree with Stereogum’s Chris Deville that the song’s line, “[y]ou just gave me an amethyst from your jeweled vest as you cried” veers almost completely into parody territory.
I am honestly not entirely sure how I feel about these two tracks yet. “Ruined” underwhelmed me when it was released as the record’s first single in December 2023, and I haven’t shaken this impression. There is something almost too simple about it. Lenker’s heart-on-sleeve lyrics and basic piano chording come off as a bit redundant and plodding, and the two combine in a way that will likely make it too tempting to playlist “Ruined” alongside other sad bastard piano ballads. “Evol” is musically more interesting to me, however, lyrically Lenker’s writing exercise in the song doesn’t entirely land. I love the track’s chorus, but some of the wordplay in the verses seems a bit overworked.3
“Evol” and “Ruined” are also the Bright Future moments where I tend to most forget the crucial presence of the record’s other contributors. Weinrobe, Hakim, Davidson, and Runsteen add so much to the album. Lenker wrote about her collaborators, “I think the thing these people have in common, they are some of the best listeners I know musically. They have extreme presence.” Their “extreme presence” as collaborators comes through most powerfully in specific moments: the beginning of “Real House” as the song comes into form organically, that aching fiddle solo in “Sadness as a Gift,” the kinetic percussion on “Vampire Empire,” the beautiful banjo lines on “Already Lost,” the powerful vocal harmonies on “Donut Seam.”
I’ve found that the musicians’ extreme presence as collaborators on Bright Future—developed, as Lenker says, from being skilled musical listeners—encourages heightened attention on the Bright Future listener’s part. Listening to other music as I’ve been immersing myself in Bright Future has made me aware of how little other contemporary recordings tend to let me into the space of their own creation. What did the room sound like? Who was involved in the music? What did this song sound like the first time it was worked through by the people involved? Why is this recording compressed to hell and makes my ears hurt so much? There is a time and place, of course, for antiseptic, weapons grade studio rock, but Bright Future has made me reflect more on the small decisions involved in all musical cultural production. It is a record that showcases a generational songwriting talent operating at the peak of her powers in a room with a small group of attuned collaborators that are musically unafraid. Though Lenker has said that the album’s title is meant to convey some ambiguity,4 it is a record that, in existing, has already brightened my own days with it and will continue to do so for some time to come.
Rafael Leafar has provided YouTube tutorials for many of Lenker’s guitar parts on his channel. Amazingly, Lenker has actually popped up in video comments thanking Leafar for helping her remember how to play her own songs.
As a taste, here’s “Evol”’s chorus: “Teach, cheat, part, trap / You have my heart I want it back / God, dog, devil, lived / The giver takes, the taker gives.”
For example, I have no idea what “[d]ream is maerd, I'm marred in your mind” means.