Big Thief Stole Our Hearts On 4/27/22 by Isaac Crown-Manesis

Concert Review

Big Thief Stole Our Hearts On 4/27/22

Isaac Crown-Manesis

Big Thief returned to Minnesota for their Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You tour Wednesday, April 27th 2022. Led by Adrianne Lenker (10 year resident of Plymouth, MN), Big Thief has had a whirlwind several years. With exceptional lyricallity, and a distinctly strong and beautiful voice, Lenker has skyrocketed through the indie scene, bouying Big Thief with her. Releasing their first album as “Big Thief ” to rave reviews in 2016, Lenker alongside Buck Meek (her now ex-husband), Max Oleartchik, and James Krivchenia articulated a vision of indie folk rock that was at once generic and yet promisingly fresh. Throughout their discography, each album has remained fresh and elaborated thematic and formal elements upon which the band tends to fixate. The air surrounding the band is electrically charged, their careers are only just beginning.

Photo: Isaac Crown Manesis

Everyone seems to have a different Big Thief song. Their discography is expansive, encompassing five full band albums and six solo albums from lead singer Adrianne Lenker (two of which are joint albums with Buck Meek). Surely, each album brings with it a new indie chart topper, yet a room of Carleton Students I polled provided vastly different answers to the “favorite song” question. Her work is expansive stylistically, ranging from sparsely acoustic folk to careening electrified rock. Throughout her oeuvre, Lenker’s songwriting has explored her world, returning to themes of love and loss as they have manifested for her throughout the years. Her vulnerable writing has lent itself to her sharing of life milestones as they occur. When she and Meek found themselves at a terminal point in their marriage, the band played on. In a New Yorker profile, Lenker shares that their divorce only strengthened their friendship and artistic bond, but that the pain of separation was not an emotion they hid. With radical honesty, Big Thief lives through and alongside their music and performances.

Lenker’s music crafting process often involves improvisation and an experiential approach. The original version of Shark Smile begins with a brief passage from an hour-long guitar riff Lenker played during a session for the song. Her bandmates have spoken in interviews about her almost magical connection to Music (presented as almost a platonic ideal) through her use of the guitar, describing her as touched by the muse as she pieces together notes and lyrics. During their recent St. Paul show, Lenker performed several improvised solos as her bandmates looked towards her with wide-eyed awe as she played. After countless hours on the road with one another, and an apparent bond that goes far beyond working relationships, Lenker’s work still seemed to amaze them once again. The audience was captivated as Lenker, ever relaxed, performed variation upon variation of the bands most familiar riffs. This clear love and respect the band mates have for one another is palpable and diffused through their audience.

Photo: Isaac Crown Manesis

A noted fan of the band, Jeff Tweedy of Wilco remarked upon Lenker’s, “disorienting quality all real-deal types have… a precise angle that only she seems to possess.” Close listening of the band’s music reveals this novelty and almost magical quality. Melodies resolve in complex and thematically cogent ways throughout an album. Lenker’s work can only be described as “essayist” as articled by Timothy Corrigan. The essayistic, “describes a personal point of view as a public experience,” and the audience is thus implicated in a conversation with the artist. The essayistic often requires a center of mass, a knot an artist will untie. The essayistic piece of art is more of an account of this process of unknotting than it is a presentation of a distinct theme or argument. Lenker’s work exemplifies this quality. She writes prolifically often during album sessions, and records simultaneously. The band’s, and her own solo work, contains the textures of this process of discovery and articulation. Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You interrogates love and life expansively, and is their most life affirming work yet. As Corrigan notes, this knot does not always need to be made explicit, but is felt by a viewer of a work. The band’s new album provides a deep feeling reminiscent of that articulated by many friends upon reflecting upon the past two years of intensity. I saw Big Thief this past summer during Pitchfork’s 2021 Chicago festival. The energy was reflective and slow paced. Many sat. Lenker performed without any musical accompaniment for much of “Orange,” and flexed her impressive vocal range. Their 2022 St. Paul show was different entirely, in ways shared by Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You’s distinctiveness within their body of work. Leaning on the dynamism of the album’s sound, Lenker invited her younger brother to the stage for a performance of “Spud Infinity.” The audience danced. Within the first Big Thief album since the pandemic began, Lenker articulates a vision of togetherness, of a humanity woven together with love, that defies without denying the world’s shared collective trauma. It is an exciting time in the world, emergence to a new normal has been protracted and stunted but feels imminent. However, as the band reminds us, life’s vast mysteries are contained in the microscopic. Their show reminded me to pay heed to the beats and pulses of the everyday, to be vulnerable and to live passionately.

“From way up there it looks so small / From way down here it looks so small / One peculiar organism aren’t we all together? / Everybody steps on ants / Everybody eats the plants / Everybody knows to dance, even with just one finger”

NoFi