Adrianne Lenker

Since 2006 · United States

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songs (2020)

Recorded alone in a cabin with minimal equipment, songs keeps everything at the scale of a single room: acoustic guitar, voice, and the audible creak and hum of the space Lenker was sitting in. "anything" builds a whole song out of small, specific images — half-formed thoughts, physical sensation — rather than a conventional narrative, and the closeness of the recording makes every catch in her voice audible. "Ingydar" and "Forwards Beckon Rebound" show the same intimacy applied to more fragmentary, dreamlike writing. It's a record that sounds like transcription rather than performance.

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Adrianne Lenker

songs · 2020

Adrianne Lenker is best known as the songwriter and frontperson of Big Thief, but she has maintained a parallel solo catalog since her teens, one that strips her writing down to its barest elements — usually just voice and acoustic guitar, recorded with minimal production. songs (2020), written and recorded during an isolated stretch in a cabin in western Massachusetts, extended that instinct further than any of her previous solo work.

Her lyrics favor concrete, often domestic imagery — the texture of a room, the specifics of a body — over abstraction, delivered in a voice that can shift from a whisper to a full-throated cry within a single line. Alongside her work with Big Thief, her solo records have established her as one of the most closely watched songwriters of her generation, cited by younger artists for the unguarded intimacy of her recordings as much as for the songs themselves.