![]() ![]() "There's a lot that happens to the body in the beginning of the record that's harsh," she says. It is the feeling of being held at last in love, by yourself, through others. To Lenker's mind, "Great White Shark" is, roughly, the bridge from the troubled opening to the record's nurturing latter songs. ![]() It's a meditation on resilience and recovery with an emphasis on the painful moments that beget them. The front of the record is often intense, and sometimes violent. That's the sound of Capacity's two polarities. "That song feels like crying and laughing at the same time. "First it sounds and then it means," Lenker says. SXSW Music Festival Big Thief Whispers, Then Roars, At SXSW 2017 Lenker writes at once from the sound of words and their meaning, creating a blissful avalanche of euphonious phrases like the childlike "boom balloon machine and, oh." She lands on a note and repeats it ("What did you tell me, Mary, when you were there so sweet and very / Full of field and stars you carried all of time"), swoops on the beguiling phrase "monastery monochrome" and eventually lands on a passage where she flickers between two notes so lightly the change is almost imperceptible: "Aching planning high and smiling cheap drink dark and violent full of butterflies the violent / tenderness the sweet asylum." Her phrasing, lyrics and performance recall Judy Garland in "Over The Rainbow" - the sound of a voice rocking back and forth in a lullabying third as if it were the beating of small wings, lifted off a catalog of simple beauty. As the piano draws back, Lenker incants a quickening series of memories and images in alliterative, internally rhymed fluidity. The song has a simple structure, but its chorus especially is uncommon in its elegant lyricism. And when I first wrote the song I thought I was definitely writing it all about this dear friend and these experiences - and that time folded into other memories and just like a non-linear stream of life - but then later I started realizing in listening to it that a lot of the lines were applicable to myself, and things that I needed to hear." and sometimes a little more challenging to direct it inwardly and give it to myself. There's a few lines where I realized that sometimes it's easier on this journey for me to give love and kindness and tenderness and empathy to those I really care for. "There's just a little capsule of a song that allows me to revisit all these colors and pictures and textures and feelings. "It's about childhood being brought to life and reignited after the slush of the teenage years," Lenker says. ("There's really nothing like meeting a real friend on this earth who holds a space for you to be yourself," Lenker says.) "Mary" carries the warmth of that friendship and those winters. ![]() She first played it on her grandparents' keyboard some years ago, when she was 21 and just home from college, where she'd met a lifelong friend named Mary. It just had this particular smell - like potpourri and cloves and cinnamon. Just that feeling of being completely cradled. My grandparents - and my grandma, in particular - defined homey coziness in my life when I really needed it. And she'd bring out all these crafts and we'd sit and work on paintings and making things. And then go inside and my grandma would make incredible hot chocolate with whipped cream and cinnamon - she was a heavy cinnamon user - and my grandpa would put a fire on, and we would be there. And we would just slide down the hill for hours. I have memories of sledding down in the backyard there was a hill that went down a path through this patch of woods. "And every winter - we spent every single winter there. "We had a fireplace there," she remembers. It is the sound of snow piling on the windowsill of your childhood home, of a summer rain slanted against some beloved attic's cooling roof, of a childhood photograph rediscovered in a faded frame.Īnd it's the sound of Lenker's grandparents' house in Andover, Minn. ![]() Recorded in one take with Mat Davidson from Twain on piano, "Mary" is a song that so flawlessly captures an ineffable, deeply personal experience of the world that it becomes universal. It's hard to imagine any other arrangement sounding this fitting. Instead of Adrianne Lenker and Buck Meek's wiry guitar arrangements, "Mary" pairs a hallowing piano and organ with the closeness of Lenker's consoling voice. "It's about childhood being brought to life and reignited after the slush of the teenage years," Adrianne Lenker says of "Mary."Īll the songs on Capacity, the upcoming album from Big Thief, are guitar songs - save for one. ![]()
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