Sometimes, the easy disenchantment of the music business overtakes us, its lab-grown and cut stones a little too much. Have you ever taken a fist-sized rock – maybe in your backyard, maybe somewhere in the woods – and cracked it against the ground, its hidden crystals shining on the pavement, its center split, like two caves of shimmery beauty?
Big Thief is that, glimmering heirs to this beautiful world, manufactured by time and experience, the pressures of existence.
Adrianne Lenker – Big Thief’s principle songwriter – pens songs that reflect the pursuit of understanding, less of knowledge and more about what it means to exist. She explores the tangled vines, less interested in taming or manicuring them, and more interested in knowing what it’s like to have the vines in her fingers, for her nails to fill with dirt and chip against unseen stones, to feel life in her hands.
The songs ring with the tense both/and dichotomy of the knowable and the unknowable; the deeper meaning is only understood when it’s been lived. And sometimes I suspect that sense of meaning listeners derive from the songs isn’t always strictly intended – though this is a serious band – and like all good and honest human philosophy, it comes from a place of experiencing, listening, reflecting, and telling. The songs very much function as living memories, tangible reminders of what was and will be again.
It’s a confusing thing to write about being human.
It’s an irrepressibly beautiful thing to learn about being human.
Kara-Lis Coverdale opened the show, the audience filtering in as her dreamscapes filled the Anthem. Her music is textured, something more than ambient; it takes on a holiness, that soft beauty of sitting on a log under a blanket of trees while the green air breathes life, or the way I felt sitting in a pew as a child and god still felt tangible, real. It made me remember midnight masses, the interplay of the darkness of lost light and the brightness of a stage, the quiet devotion of a congregation in silence.
The Anthem is a big place, and DC houses ungentle crowds, but they kept quiet close to the stage, the voices largely restricted to the Anthem’s foyer and thereabouts. During the beginning of the set, when I stepped around the photo pit, the music assailed me like heady incense: sudden, alluring, and truthfully captivating.
I think it’s the kind of music I’d love to see in a sacred space.
The Anthem crowd hummed with anticipation, and when Big Thief took to the stage, they met the audience with smiles, waves, little hellos, and ambled into their first song, “Change”, its bittersweet beauty and almost-tense exploration of life, death, living, and letting go. They followed it quickly with “12,000 Lines”, a near-reflection of “Change” on Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You (henceforth, Dragon). Dragon – essentially a 4-part album broken into sections based on geography (and absolutely the best album of 2022, one that will eventually enter the indie-rock pantheon alongside the likes of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) – largely featured on the night, comprising just under half the playlist.
“Blurred View” was the biggest surprise – I don’t think it’s been played live yet – but the most revelatory songs from Dragon were the pulsating “Simulation Swarm” and the absolutely and unexpectedly powerful set-closing “Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You.” Many fans will also express a lighthearted joy at the encore-ending “Spud Infinity” (appropriately and frequently likened to John Prine), which included Adrianne’s brother Noah on jaw harp.
I remember the first time I listened to Masterpiece, past the sun’s setting but not yet in the dark dark of a summer night, Adrianne’s quiet-to-powerhouse voice rising like heat from my car windows. Something broke inside me.
That’s how you know.
On the earlier records, the songs buzz between ragged beauty and sleek shadows, at times raw like a just-remembered and once-forgotten dream, her voice alternating between a whisper and an explosion, the music shimmering between a storm-beaten surf and a gentle tide. Big Thief plays with tension and dynamics, painting with broad and tiny brushstrokes alike.
The band – Buck Meek (guitar), Max Oleartchik (bass), and James Krivchenia (drums) – buoys Adrianne’s voice, lifting her higher and higher until it’s time to come back down. The songs reach for something – love, memory, hope – and the noise and melody of the music bring the ideas into reach while somehow embracing the true anguish in the words.
Dragon moves the songs along the same path, but there is a newness to the path, as though the fog lifts and it becomes easier to walk it. The songs are musically and lyrically fearless, exploring different ideas and textures in a quartet, recorded in four places in four ways in four parts.
Everything is the same and everything is different.
A Big Thief audience is a congregation, and the shows are a service, the songs its hymnals, scriptures, and homilies. To those of us who have known religion and the connectedness of shared faith, these Big Thief shows are wine and wafers.
And as with any congregation, we know when revelation is at hand. When Adrianne stepped away from the mic, leaned into her guitar, and released the nearly-unhinged solo on “Not”, the audience froze in rapture. It is the kind of moment that feels like being filled and emptied, of finding and being found, of exorcism.
These songs, these shows – they thread the line between the sacred and the profane.
Please buy their records and merch, listen wherever you can, and go to their shows. Big Thief might just be the best band in the world right now.
The setlist and a selection of photos are included below.
