The Big Themes and Big Dreams of Big Thief

“Sorry, I need to get a napkin to put my tooth in,” Adrianne Lenker says, briefly abandoning a steaming bowl of pho. When she returns, a sly smile glimmers as she lifts two fingers and pulls out a pink hunk of fake gums attached to a little kernel of gold. “Sometimes when I talk with my tooth thing in, my mouth starts to feel really dry,” she says, laughing. “It’s really sexy.”

The singer-songwriter-guitarist of Big Thief lost an incisor in a bike accident a few years ago. When she finally gets a permanent replacement, she figures she’ll probably go with bone-white, but it has been fun to temporarily have a gold tooth—an external gesture toward a more private treasure. “It’s just a space holder, until I can get an implant,” Lenker says, chuckling to herself as her eyes drift off. “I need some space right now. I just need some space …”

When we meet on a chilly late-February afternoon in Manhattan, though, Lenker has almost more breathing room than she knows what to do with: This is the longest stretch of time that the members of Big Thief have been apart since the band formed in 2015. It’s a bigger deal than it might be for other musicians; Lenker and her bandmates speak of their bond in language that’s reminiscent not so much of tourmates as of fellow members of a support group. “We’ve done so much work interpersonally really developing our communication to be super honest and direct and being able to express our vulnerabilities openly with each other on the road,” guitarist Buck Meek tells me on the phone from Santa Monica. “It’s really hard sometimes. It’s easy to just go into your hole of abstract resentments and grudges whenever you’re living like astronauts together for hundreds of days a year. But the only solution is to be totally open about it and work through every little thing.”

The result of this commitment to interpersonal trust, though, has been three albums of disarming intimacy and emotional candor. Big Thief debuted with enough bravado to title their first record Masterpiece, but the title track wasn’t a boast so much as a confession of tenderness: “I saw the masterpiece, she looks a lot like you,” Lenker sings with a sweet, almost Springsteen swagger. Their follow-up, 2017’s Capacity, was even more stirring: a driving, intricate duet between Lenker and Meek’s interlocking guitars, which weave together to form a safety net for some of her most trust-fall-vulnerable lyrics. “You gave Andrew to a family who you thought would love and take better care,” Lenker murmurs to her own mother on the stunning “Mythological Beauty,” “I have an older brother I don’t know, he could be anywhere.”

Though none of them grew up in New York, it was the site of the band’s beginning. Lenker met Meek immediately after she moved to New York (“The very first day!” she says. “So that was a gift from the universe”) and they played as a duo for a brief time. They eventually filled out their sound with the additions of bassist Max Oleartchik and, later, drummer James Krivchenia. The music Big Thief makes is difficult to pin down, and it seems to exist somewhere outside of time: It’s folksy but modern (Krivchenia is especially keen to experiment with a pedal board of effects processors the band refers to as “the Magic Box”) and a little reminiscent of ’90s alternative rock without being explicitly nostalgic. Lenker’s presence is forceful and intense, but she sings in hushed, inviting tones. Murmur would be a perfect name for a Big Thief album were it not already the perfect name for an R.E.M. album.

To listen to Big Thief is to be welcomed into a makeshift family, immediately briefed on ancestral trees and private anecdotes. This is first-name-basis music: Their songs have titles like “Paul,” “Mary,” “Randy,” “Lorraine.” On the cover of Masterpiece is a photo of Lenker’s mother as a child, playing with a toy dinosaur; her uncles appear on the back. Capacity features an unforgettable photo of a teenage boy in overalls holding a newborn baby, his expression a youthful combination of defiance and fear. “That’s my Uncle Adam,” Lenker tells me. Which means the baby is … ? “Yeah,” she says before I can finish. “He was there when I was born.”

The songs on Big Thief’s third album, U.F.O.F. (their first on the legendary indie label 4AD), though, are linked by something more nebulous than family. “A lot of them had this theme of death, and life beyond death, and supernatural power,” Lenker says, between sips of pho. “Extraterrestrials and animals and sort of witchy stuff.” Lenker is fascinated by the openness of children’s minds, that state of wonder before they learn to be limited by the rigid laws of the universe. “I think sometimes you see visions as a kid but they’re so real to you that it’s hard to know what it was,” she says. “It might have been real life, or it might have been something invisible.” Big Thief captures this sense of strange, Spielbergian awe on the first single and title track, a gently eerie acoustic invocation on which Lenker mourns:

She’ll never return again
Polarize, polarize
The seasons will bend
There will soon be proof
That there is no alien
Just a system of truth and lies
The reason, the language
And the law of attraction

Lenker’s own childhood was itinerant, intense, stranger than fiction. She was born in Indianapolis, into what she has called “a religious cult, straight up. They had an apartment complex in this one area, and there were all these rules.” Her parents broke with the cult when Lenker was just 4, and she spent much of her childhood moving from place to place with them, sometimes living out of a van. In some sense, it’s not that different from the restless life she’s forged for herself as a musician. “It’s like a never-ending road trip,” she says of the past few years of her life, during which she’s been on tour virtually nonstop. “I keep saying I’m gonna get a home and live somewhere, and it keeps not making sense, because there’s always more to do. I can see myself in 10 years being like, ‘Yep. Yep! I’m still on the road.’ But I wanna know what’s the key to actual relaxation. It’s probably not settling down. There are no fewer problems, as a human, being in one place.” She sighs. “It might just be difficult to be alive.”

Loud-quiet-loud has long been a trusty indie-rock mantra, a songwriting structure supposedly perfected by the Pixies and made ubiquitous by their thrashing disciples Nirvana. On U.F.O.F., though, Big Thief achieve an even more delicate balance: They make music that is somehow loud and quiet at the same time. There is an intimacy to their sound, yes; as a teenager, Lenker was blown away by Elliott Smith and still recalls the experience of hearing his songs, songs that made the listener feel like she was in the same room as the musician, as “life-changing.” But there is a grand, skyward sweep to their music too. One of my (and Lenker and Meek’s) favorite songs on the new record, “Jenni,” sounds like Hum’s 1995 alt-rock hit “Stars,” had it been recorded in a teenager’s humid, imploding bedroom.

But that image is perhaps even less weird and florid than the manner in which the song was actually recorded. “We hung the guitar from the rafters of a barn, from this 30-foot ceiling on a rope,” Meek explains to me. Around it, Stonehengelike, they arranged a circle of amplifiers. “[It’s] an idea I kind of stole from [Sonic Youth guitarist] Lee Ranaldo, who has an ambient set with that setup, a circle of amps.”

The suspended guitar had been set to an open tuning, corresponding with the chords of the song, and, as the hanging guitar spun in its orbit, Meek took a cathartic run “punching it around, kicking it, strumming it, and getting all this feedback in the circle.” Because the song contains three chords, Meek says, he got to retune the guitar and repeat that process three different times. Yet again, being in Big Thief appears to be its own unique school of therapy.

Even more than their first two records, recording U.F.O.F. allowed the band to indulge in all sorts of sonic exploration. They had already demoed most of the songs in advance, Meek says, “so once we got to the studio we were really able to focus on just getting the most inspiring sounds, and also experimenting with overdubs a lot.” He excitedly lists some of the pedals they used, and they all sound like strains of marijuana: Red Panda Particle, the Count to 5, Hologram Infinite Jets.

“There’s a lot of atmosphere that we created in the studio in layers, and it’s been my job to re-create that with a guitar, with just one guitar and one amp,” Meek says. He sounds undaunted by this considerable challenge. “It’s actually been really fun. It’s impossible to re-create them exactly, so it’s really just an impressionistic, interpretive thing. Like trying to chase a ghost or something.”

During Big Thief’s hiatus, Lenker and Meek were both touring their respective solo albums. (Drummer James Krivchenia was recording an ambient record of his own, in New Mexico, while bassist Max Oleartchik decamped to his childhood home of Israel, where he was, in Meek’s telling, “flying his drone in the mountains and living life.”) Meek had been writing songs for years, but this was his first excursion as a solo artist, a pivot he describes as being “vulnerable at first, for sure.” Among a run of intimate house shows, though, playing in acquaintances’ living rooms, he managed to snag a slot opening for one of his musical heroes, Jeff Tweedy. “It was this really sweet balance,” he says. “I feel like I drew insight from both environments. Playing these big theaters, blackout with a spotlight on me, not being able to see anybody, I felt a lot more connected to the people because I had just played a bunch of living rooms. And vice versa, because playing these living rooms I felt the capacity to fill a bigger space. I’d like to maintain that balance—it’s really grounding, to have both.”

That, too, is the equilibrium Big Thief always seem to be chasing, as they accumulate more recognition with each album. But that conscious commitment to some kind of middle ground between intimacy and grandeur, between the personal and the public, between earth and sky, is essentially what makes Big Thief, Big Thief.

Last fall, when promoting her excellent solo album abysskiss, Lenker said to an interviewer, “Have you ever liked a band or an artist and then they start gaining more recognition and getting busier, and over the years their music starts to [lose its power]? I think that’s one of my biggest fears.” When I paraphrase this quote back to her and ask whether she still feels this way, she gives me a look that is deeply amused and a little bit spooked, as though I’ve just seen right through her own skin.

“You read that somewhere? Wow! Wow.”

“Do you not feel that anymore?” I ask.

“No, it’s just funny that you can find that out …”

“... all your greatest hopes and fears?”

She laughs, as though in disbelief of the way her own words can travel. “Well, I can rephrase that: It’s not my deepest fear. But it’s a deep intention to not let that happen. We can control that, and that’s an important thing to realize. … I just think [recognition] can be kind of trapping, and no wonder the more success some people have, the more their art tends to diminish. With exceptions, there are exceptions. But I’ve seen that happen, I’ve felt that happen in people’s work that I admire, and understandably so. I just don’t wanna be so lost. I’d just rather meet a slower trajectory for our career than to skyrocket into, let’s see how quickly we can gain hype and attention. Because … then what?”

Lenker wrote her first song when she was 8. A few years ago, in an interview with Pitchfork, she tried to recall some of the lyrics: “It was like, ‘The pile of things I got to do stacks up to the sun. I’m angry at the world. I just want this feeling to be gone. I’m not sure that I can take it anymore.’ Then the chorus was like, ‘That’s just the way life is sometimes.’”

Her father, who was a musician and a fan of jazz fusion artists like Pat Metheny and Michael Hedges, started teaching her about songwriting and taking her to open mic nights. When she was about 13, she started experimenting with open tunings on the guitar, a style she favors to this day. “I would just hear things in my head and shift the strings around,” she says. “It’s cool, the guitar is such a versatile instrument you can really get it to change and play what you want to hear. Having all those ringing open notes, it’s just a powerful emotional thing to me.”

In her early teens, it was clear that Lenker was gifted, prodigy-like. Her father, who had since separated from Lenker’s mother, became her manager when she was 13. She started studying for her GED so she could work on music full-time. “I was on this train towards becoming a child pop star,” she recalled in 2017. “Not that I would have necessarily become a star, but that was the goal. It wasn’t my goal, though, which I learned after making a couple records with producers and professional adult musicians.” At 16, she severed ties with her father (professionally and, for a bit, personally) and moved in with a friend. What she was actually craving, she realized, was to go back to school and once again be among peers. The following year she got into a summer program at Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music and felt finally at home, though she was dismayed that she couldn’t afford the tuition to enroll there full-time. Lenker decided to play the dean of admissions one of her original songs. He was moved. He called her a little while later to tell Lenker that Susan Tedeschi of the Tedeschi Trucks Band had been doing a series of shows to raise money for one student to receive a full ride to Berklee. Lenker would be that student.

“It took some time but I found my way to the teachers that really understood me,” she says. “But mostly I just learned from my peers, because everyone would just jam. I had a band in college, and we were practicing a lot of different things—practicing relationships, everything.” Away from her family, she finally learned how to tune into her inner voice and write songs she felt comfortable putting her name to. “It was just like, ‘All right, I’m ready. I think I have some songs I wanna share.’”

A refrain you hear a lot these days about indie rock music by millennials is that there’s no such thing as “selling out” anymore, that the industry is stacked so heavily against musicians making a living that you might as well monetize your art in any way you can, flinging it far and wide, hoping for quick success. Still, this can leave a band like Big Thief—who speak of their music and inspiration as something precious, like a tiny flame they don’t want to accidentally blow out—seeming as alien as the creatures they’re singing about on U.F.O.F. But they sound content enough to build a moral compass from scratch.

“Even though it’s a slower process sometimes, in terms of building a fan base, but I believe if you’re fulfilling yourself in a really genuine way, that’s what people want to be a part of,” Meek tells me on the last day of rehearsal before they play the new material live. “We’re constantly changing things around on stage and flying by the seat of our pants, but I think people really just come for the honesty. Trusting us to be ourselves. It’s good to see that people want that.”

Meek says it was inspiring to watch Tweedy perform every night, transfixing thousands of people with the simplest tools: voice, guitar, and two mics (“He didn’t even plug his guitar in, just a condenser mic.”) “To see him hold that space and really guide people,” he says, “to guide thousands of people through this huge body of work, thousands of songs. Improvising a set list every night. It just felt so organic and rooted in something very essential, that people are really just looking to empathize with each other, to tell a story and hear a story and understand their own paradigms through the reflections of another. It was really inspiring to see how something so simple could exist within a sustainable career.”

Lenker, too, has her eyes on the long road. “I really admire Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen—how they have such a breadth of material throughout the years, into old age,” she says. “They seemed to follow their own thread of curiosity and creativity, even through some weird phases when people were like, ‘I don’t know what they’re doing.’ But the foundation is so strong that you follow them anyway.” Her eyes flicker a little mischievously with the possibility of the future: “We’ll probably make records at certain times where people are not as into it, or are like, ‘What the hell were they thinking?’”

Not yet, though. U.F.O.F. is likely to satisfy their fans and usher in a few new ones—it nudges Big Thief’s sound forward while protecting what makes them so wonderfully strange. Talking to Lenker in particular feels a bit like holding a conversation with a DIY Yoda, who espouses such advice as, “Sit with a guitar and learn a new piece. I know it will be so hard to do at first, but at the other end, you’ll feel richer in this deep way—you have the riches that no one can take from you.” In a more practical sense, this last sentiment will almost be proved false when, at the end of our meal, she nearly throws out the napkin with her gold tooth in it. She laughs, admitting this would not be the first time.

Although Lenker has been playing guitar for more than half her life, when I ask her whether she still feels she has new things to learn from the instrument she looks at me like I have five heads. “Oh yeah,” she says. “Endless. I’m actually really craving some time to just sit with my guitar and learn some new things, or take some lessons.” I tell her this seems like an uncommonly healthy attitude, that plenty of people who have been playing for a fraction of the time she has would be insulted by the idea of taking lessons from someone else. “You’re only limited when you decide there’s nothing else to learn,” she says. “I feel like I’m just at the beginning. It’s really weird how there’s so much emphasis put on learning when you’re a kid, and then when you’re an adult it’s like, ‘Now you’ve learned. Now you do.’ It’s like, no, that’s only the first quarter of your life! There is so much more to learn.”