St Canice’s Cathedral, Kilkenny, Ireland – 20 April 2024
Vicar Street, Dublin, Ireland – 21 April 2024
The Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow, Scotland – 24 April 2024
The Hall @ Aviva Studios, Manchester, England – 25 April 2024
Barbican Centre, London, England – 27, 28 (matinee) and 28 (evening) April 2024
Bristol Beacon, England – 29 April 2024
Four shows into Adrianne Lenker's 'Bright Future tour', promoting the biggest album of her career so far, our generation's greatest songwriter has got around to performing fewer than half the tracks on the record. In that time, she has played 30 other things instead, including a cover of a Chris Smither blues number, most of her previous album, and 'Oldest', which was cut from Bright Future, but which she appears to prefer to many of the songs on it. The opening, solo, portion of her climactic concert at the Barbican, arguably the most important date of her career so far, will consist, in its entirety, of the following: two tracks from 2014, one of which she has relearnt while on tour, and four unreleased songs, including a reworking of 'Evol' so new that it doesn't appear to have a name. "If love is simple, can you please explain this?", it begins. I can't explain much of this at all, if I'm honest, but I'll try.
A précis for the until-now-uninitiated: Lenker is a 32-year-old1 singer-songwriter from Indianapolis, via Minneapolis, Boston and Brooklyn, who for close to a decade has carried on a dual existence as a solo artist – playing what we can broadly term ‘alt. folk’ – and as the frontwoman and major creative force behind Big Thief, a band of Berklee music graduates whose approach to genre is largely summarised by the phrase “go on then”, and whose most recent shows have oscillated thrillingly between country and metal. While Lenker doesn’t do any Pantera covers on this latest tour, the country influence on her solo material is becoming ever more apparent: during an afternoon off, she pitches up at an open-mic in a Dublin pub and performs ‘I Don't Love You Much Do I’ by Guy Clark, off the cuff2; her new record has both a yearning fiddle and a cover photo of her in a cowboy hat. (The hat makes it onto the tour: she premieres it in Glasgow, never takes it off on the Sunday in London.) That she is wrangling with this supposedly reactionary genre while exploring the tender intricacies of queer experience does seem more interesting than whatever Beyonce is trying to do over there.
Though Lenker played one date at EartH in London two years ago, she hadn’t toured solo in the UK since 2019. Back then, she seemed paralysingly shy and uncomfortably exposed – hiding behind a thatched fringe in front of the Union Chapel's organ – though that impression would evaporate every time she started to play. When she returned, to EartH, it was off the back of four sold-out nights with Big Thief at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, and with her bleached buzz cut and swish jacket, she seemed to have segued into a rock star. Then she picked up her guitar, and began to cycle through songs, and it was like you’d dropped in on a mutual mate, only to find a genius in their front room.
That’s the feeling you get again in Dublin on this tour: that night is an extraordinarily intimate experience, Adrianne in cowboy boots on a fittingly carpeted stage, tossing off definitive versions as easily as falling off a log. But almost every show is special in its own way. The only exception is Galway, unspecial in its own way, with the crowd breaking various cardinal rules of gig-going, and seeming half-set on breaking the artist with it.3 After the show, I considered with a chill whether our musical hero might be passing into the realm of Mitski or Phoebe Bridgers, turned into a living meme by the most irritating people on earth, but no: it turns out that’s just Galway…
Because Kilkenny, the next night, is an incalculably special evening: Adrianne on a black platform within a startlingly beautiful 13th-century cathedral; fuchsia lights; the audience seated and hushed in reverence. “You’re so quiet and respectful,” she says at one point, and you think she’s referring bleakly – obliquely – to the previous rowdiness, but then you see how much fun she has in Dublin, and wonder if she just meant we’d been a little quiet. The atmosphere at those two shows fits each venue perfectly, though – and fits each set. They're the two stand-out dates of the tour. The St Canice concert ends with Lenker singing ‘Real House’, a song about her mum, with tears running down her face.
She’s at her most transparently happy in Ireland’s capital (at ease before an audience who offer a saintly spin on Galway, their backing vocals swelling, apposite and perfectly-timed), save perhaps for the second night at the Barbican, when the joy of collaboration is followed by the scale of the send-off. Every seated show ends with the audience on its feet, but that clamour in London hits another level. Between those shows, Glasgow is an over-amplified but good-natured gig in the Dublin vein: an art student called Amy is sketching Adrianne on the front row, someone has brought a monkey on a stick, a requester shouts “my angel!”, followed a few seconds later by the clarification, “…the song”, while Manchester is St Canice’s revisited, just with a touch more joining in and a lot less stained glass. The swansong of this leg of the ‘Bright Future’ tour, in Bristol, features a cheery but less obviously obsessive crowd, mildly befuddled by the deep-cutting of the mammoth setlist (the number of unreleased songs tie with those off the new album, 4-4; in an early fit of whimsy, Lenker plays her two John Prine-iest songs, ‘Cactus Practice’ and ‘Once a Bunch’4 back to back).
By then, you feel like you’ve got to know her a little, not simply as an artist, but as a person. In Kilkenny, Lenker talks openly about her nerves, saying she’s just taken the longest break from touring of her life – which turns out to be just eight months – but she otherwise gives the impression of being quite uncannily relaxed. Now at ease in a way she never quite was before, she begins to open up…
While the psychodrama of Adrianne's ever-changing hairstyle is a compelling subplot of any tour (the tousled 2014 shoulder-bob is back, baybee), here we get backstory. In Manchester, she punctures the delicate illusion of between-songs badinage by quipping, “It's good to be in Manchester, I always love coming through… I’m trying to small talk with you while I tune, so it's smooth.” But it's also true, she says: she used to use her friend Bernie's house here as a base, and it was in Manchester that a 24-year-old Lenker first lopped off her hair (me too – we have so much in common, we should hang out some time?). She shares one of her favourite semi-jokes – someone replying to “I’ve had a haircut” with “Which one?” – exhibiting the delight in wordplay and the guileless goofiness as crucial to the Lenker persona as her pained earnestness, before grinningly challenging the audience to identify various baffling chords. When she loses her thread during 'Sadness As a Gift, she spends five minutes telling us about her day (radio session, nap, dilemma over how quickly to eat chicken soup).
It is in Manchester too, and most memorably of all, that the ever-changing ‘Vampire Empire’ is welded to a snatch of Lucinda Williams’ ‘Like a Rose’. Lenker’s song, premiered on Colbert, exploding on TikTok, was essentially a recruiting tool that hoovered up young lesbians, but the first recording of the track (by Big Thief while on tour last year) was savaged online by entitled pricks. Perhaps as a result (though hopefully not), Adrianne re-recorded it for Bright Future, and she plays it six different ways during this tour, from a ‘Spud Infinity’-style5 parade of silliness in Dublin ("OK, freestyle solo,” she tells the audience near the end, "everyone do something different") to a blisteringly-paced honkytonk in Bristol. The great version, though, is Manchester’s, the medley rounding out the song, bringing together the various Lenker identities by spotlighting her open-hearted, open-armed sincerity. In London, she does something striking if less transcendent, adding an extra chorus, her voice plummeting through the octaves in tandem with the word ‘falling’, a vocal risk that replaces the physical jeopardy of last year’s performance in Hammersmith, during which she tipped over backwards, and dropped, laughing, to the floor.
In London, too, she tells us she could never be a stand-up comedian because she laughs at all her own jokes, and indeed she spends a lot of these shows laughing, the fragile music interspersed with sips of water, lengthy retuning and those dorky, squeaky giggles. Conspicuously, she doesn’t go near the two truly desolate songs on her recent heartbreak/heart-reclaiming record: ‘Evol’ and ‘Ruined’. She played one verse of ‘Evol’ as an encore back in March, and whether that was always the whole plan, she never went further: just sat stone still and silent, said brightly, “That’s all”, and went home.
Instead, she plays a joyous ‘Born for Loving You’, which is introduced with a disarming simplicity: “Here’s a song I wrote for my girlfriend, it’s nice to sing it in a church.” When I interviewed Lenker’s Big Thief co-conspirator and ex-husband, Buck Meek, last year, he said that the one thing he admired about Lenker more than any other was her honesty. At greater ease between songs, that has manifested itself in her being utterly candid; with her latest writing, it has resulted in a startling new literalism. If you think ‘Real House’ is brutishly direct, wait until you hear ‘Before You’ (which is what we’re calling her as-yet-unnamed song, premiered in Galway). Here’s how she describes that marriage and its aftermath, her life folded into a standard folk-country frame:
New York City
‘fell in love with a man
He asked me to marry
and I gave him my hand
So simple
I’ve lived a whole life through
But I don’t remember nothin’
Before you
I ended my marriage
‘went back home
I needed to scatter
Those ashes alone
“You know, honesty can be brutal,” Meek said to me, “but it’s always the right way.” ‘Before You’ is like In My Life if Lennon’s song had zoned in on the detail, before breaking both your heart and your legs. Seeing Lenker in love is quite something, though: ‘Born for Loving You’ (which I’ve written about here) is one of the great modern love songs, while ‘Baby, Honey, Sweetheart, Darlin'’, played for the second time ever at the first Barbican show, evokes McCartney’s ‘Here, There and Everywhere’, fitting Lenker’s crooked-hanging sentimentality into an ingenious pop-folk template. There is no feeling in modern music even remotely akin to the exhilaration of hearing Lenker unspool some new masterpiece for the first time, each line that she drops into the air somehow better than the one before. We felt it with the instantly immortal ‘Wait a While’ in Bristol in 2020, and with ‘Already Lost’ in Edinburgh last year. We’ve felt it more often than any audience would have any right to expect. Here, shaking her head, hair flicking, one eye on her left hand, she sings:
Honey
Whatcha smilin’ at, what’s funny?
Is it how I am with money?
Now my nose is gettin’ runny
You hold me when I cry
And make it sunny
When people smugly traduce pop lyrics committed to paper, what they miss are the intricacies: here, with Adrianne, it’s the effortless evocation of the fondness of her relationship, the specificity of her imperfection, the intentional lapse into quirky bathos, immediately spun on its head by the revelation of sorrow, and then the sun blasting through like in a ‘60s soul record. It is, too, the imploring quality of her voice, so affectionate and assured: comfortable in love. After she plays ‘I Don’t Love You Much Do I’ in a pub (and how I wish I’d been in The Cobblestone for those three minutes), she shares Guy Clark’s original on Instagram, together with a photo taken by her girlfriend.
That song is one of many she’s been voraciously learning during an extended period of musical autodidacticism. In Kilkenny, after covering ‘Leave the Light On’ by Chris Smither, she says guilelessly: “I didn’t grow up learning songs, I just learned guitar by writing songs. So learning other people’s songs is this new thing I’m really into: it’s amazing. There are so many good songs in the world!” The Smither number showcases her extraordinary guitar-playing6 and is, as my friend Peter observed, closer to her own style of writing than anything else she’s ever covered, both cosmic and intimate in the vein of ‘Spud Infinity’. She plays slide guitar too on her own ‘half return’, a throwaway, faintly Gothic ditty enlivened by that flitting finger. At other times she is the consummate country artist, a cowgirl picking, Travis-style, with a hint of a swagger. A music writer once said of cult folkie Nic Jones that he had an orchestra in his right hand. Well, that’s Lenker too.
The only thing she struggles with is telling people off – or telling them to sing (well, that and the fact that she can’t quite whistle). In Dublin, she gently quietens the hum of chatter by saying, “You guys are missing the tuning… it’s the best part,” before pointedly adding, “‘kind of serious, though… it does help to hear when you’re tuning.” In Manchester, she tells the crowd that it’s “a rare treat to hear you sing”, before an encouraging, “Alright, last chance to sing, guys” as she embarks on the final stretch of her signature solo song, ‘anything’. During the matinee in London, when the phrase, “If anyone happens to know any words on any of these songs, you are invited to sing along... formally” fails to elicit the desired response, she ‘forgets’ the words to the song’s second verse, prompting the first communal crooning of the afternoon. The crowd in Glasgow is so good-humoured that she's able to risk one of her drier jokes, mock-apologetically responding to audience requests at the start of the encore by smiling a touch, and saying, “We have such a specific plan. I like these songs, so…” It's clear that Lenker is unusually – indeed, universally – beloved by her collaborators and crew, but it's also true that you don't scale the heights she has without being able to occasionally flash the steel on behalf of your art.
That’s the only night where she plays ‘Already Lost’, one of 17 numbers that receive just a single airing across these nine shows. In total, she plays 50 different songs. Two are covers. The other 48 are her own, and they break down something like this: great (42), good (six). Given that she doesn’t dip into most of the heavier Big Thief material (there’s no acoustic rendering on this tour of ‘Not’ or ‘Masterpiece’ or ‘Real Love’ or ‘Black Diamonds’ or 'Contact' or 'Flower of Blood', or even songs she's played solo at Big Thief shows, like 'Change', though she does do the gentler version of ‘Dragon New Warm Mountain’), it’s an astonishing testament to her micro-consistency, prolificity and, yes, now you happen to mention it, genius.
The finest of the one-shot wonders is a desperately affecting version of the 2019 Big Thief title track, ‘Two Hands’, at the first Barbican show. “You somehow let me down,” she softly wails, the enduring ambiguity of that opening shooting a chill down the spine, the song breaking you and then putting you back together again, as most of her greatest ones do, from “the more that we try … to deny, deny…” to a wild recalibration of how we might see hand-kissing, and finally the guileless reassurance of, “New friends: you can make some too/I know.” In Dublin, there’s a stunning, slowed-down ‘Cattails’. It’s been more commonly a lolloping, propulsive 12-string stomper, but suddenly now it’s a slip of a song, distinct from the mumblecore of ‘half return’ or ‘heavy focus’, instead delicate and bucolic: the perennials don’t dance anymore, they sway. There's also ‘Jonathan’ (from her 2014 EP, a-sides, in Galway), ‘From’ (in Bristol), and Bright Future highlight, ‘Donut Seam’ (the last night at the Barbican). In terms of Lenker’s lyric-writing, it was the combination of the formative ‘Indiana’ (“…the talk that is told through the teeth of the mouth of the millions dyin’ to meet ya”) and ‘Mary’ (“your hands were making artefacts in the corner of my mind”) that first made me sit up and then slump back down again in amazement, and ‘Donut Seam’, from its pun title to its moth-Icarus motif, via climate dread and the confessional, is that talent seen a decade on. “Oh my heart has holes in it/And there you were exposing it” is the kind of rhyme that other artists spend a lifetime trying to find. ‘Candleflame’, meanwhile, is the current record’s secret weapon, and yet she doesn’t deploy it till the matinee in London. “I feel God here and there,” she murmurs, “people tell me he’s everywhere.” Well, he was definitely in the room during that song, so let's hope he doesn’t feel slighted. Hilariously, Adrianne also gives an airing to 'Bright Future', a song that gave its name to the album... but isn't on the album. And if it seems perverse that she repeatedly prioritises ‘No Machine’ over a song as remarkable as ‘Cell Phone Says’, the former does come to life in person. So does the woozy shoegaze of ‘heavy focus’, with its punchline of blissful release. So does ‘The Only Place’, its guitar part suddenly pulsating with purpose. I’ve said it before, but I’ll repeat it unto death – if you haven’t heard Lenker live, then you haven’t heard her at all.
Other new songs return time and again. ‘Sadness As a Gift’ might be the single best thing that Lenker has ever written, though like another masterwork, ‘Already Lost’, it works better as a solo number. The album versions may be lovely, but they’re not the equal of this ‘Sadness As a Gift’ or this ‘Already Lost’. What Adrianne does retain in the collaborative version of 'Sadness', though, even when it becomes a sing-along, is the stripped-back beauty of its seventh stanza. Her voice has never sounded lovelier, or more ethereal – strident then soft – than when it lands on “every second brimming with a majesty”, a time when time always stands still, and you are left immersed in that moment, wishing it wouldn’t ever pass.
My private theory has always been that the best version of any Adrianne Lenker song is done by her alone, as slowly as possible. However, the fleet-footed take on ‘Free Treasure’ that reaches its apogee in London – gorgeous three-part harmonies and an aching, climbing violin – makes me wonder if my take is watertight. She starts every show solo, but in Glasgow and Manchester is joined by the bear-like pianist (and support act) Nick Hakim, the developing threesome of ‘Bright Future’ alumni rounded out for the final four dates by be-fringed Swedish violinist Josefin Runsteen, whom Lenker met on a musical retreat in Italy.
I wrote after the 2022 shows that, like Dylan, Lenker’s songs are always in flux, and there are innumerable innovations on this tour. ‘Orange’ now has a gorgeous, a capella final verse, and, in Bristol, a busier picking style; ‘Simulation Swarm’ comes with a new staccato solo coda; and at the end of ‘symbol’, a hypnotic track from 2018’s abysskiss, Lenker dispenses a melodic, enormously satisfying ticking into her mic, her mouth sounding like a combination synth and Geiger counter. After a heartstopping version of ‘Born for Loving You’ at Hammersmith last year, she asked fans on Instagram if they could share their audio of the performance, so she could study how she’d done it; now she always sings it that way, save for an added country inflection in the chorus.
‘Pretty Things’, meanwhile, the delicate opener from Big Thief’s Captivity (2017), has become a subtle sort of a monster, building to that devastating sting in its tail, and mounting in menace throughout the tour. ‘anything’, too, is a song that changes across eight shows, the frenzied intensity of the chorus in Galway junked in favour of a tenderness that escalates from each rendition to the next: in Glasgow and London, the people are around me in tears, though there’s a lighting-in-a-bottle feel to this version in Manchester, Lenker seguing straight from ‘Real House’ into a dazed and sibilant ecstasy.
If some people left the London matinee disappointed not to hear ‘anything’, and departed Bristol trying to work out what on earth they’d just heard, usually Lenker’s sweet eccentricity and her audience’s deepest desires collide. In Dublin, she gets off so much on the audience’s backing vocals that she throws an extra chorus into ‘not a lot just forever’. In Manchester, she takes things far further. After a moving piano-and-voice take on ‘zombie girl’, her guitar largely silent in her lap, Hakim on the keys, Lenker murmurs: “I just want to sing that one over and over: that one feels good.” Someone in the audience shouts out: “Play it again!” And so she does, the whole thing, just slower. In Bristol, when Runsteen nips off stage for a sneezing fit, Lenker picks up a guitar and plays ‘ingydar’ off the cuff. Her tours are full of such small, semi-improvised miracles.
Other songs are excavated from her past. The first time she plays ‘Steamboat’, a decade-old highlight from her first album proper, she's yet to relearn its intro (a fact she realises while on stage in Kilkenny), but it's slotted back into the song in time for London. In Galway, someone in the crowd asks atypically sweetly for a deep cut – 2014’s ‘Angels’, with that insane guitar part – and Lenker says she can’t remember how to play it anymore, but is the audience member going to any later shows? "Yes, Chicago." It's all agreed: Adrianne writes that in her songbook7. A week later, she plays the song at two Barbican shows, her fingers flying over the fretboard. Just magic.
And then there are her standards, like 'not a lot just forever' (from 2020's modestly-titled, songs), which trades in Lenker-ish imagery (a dog, a wolf, a rock, a sweater) before trading that imagery in for a vulnerability that remains truly rare and daring, her vocal imploring and her heart wide open, stealing your breath as you stand:
And your dearest fantasy
Is to grow a baby in me
I could be a good mother
And I wanna be your wife
Though her usual dexterity with words fails her between songs in Galway – language an amorphous thing crumbling amid discomfort – her sense of playfulness quickly returns. In Glasgow, she trails ‘forwards beckon rebound’ with the Wodehouse-ish words, “This has always been one of my favourite songs to play, since I wrote it”, before revelling in the dual meaning of ‘since’, and setting the date of composition as “December 34th”. In London, when she invites the audience to sing, she does so first “formally” and then “casually” and in a handful of other ways, rifling through synonyms and variations. The most enjoyable linguistic experimentation, though, is in ‘Free Treasure’, her ode to unconditional love, in which she toys endlessly with the behaviour of “the guy at the nape of my neck who hangs out there all day”: sometimes on this tour, he tells her not to play, sometimes what to play, and, finally, in Bristol, not, what and how to play, these night-to-night changes subtly tinkering with the feel of the verse.
On that final night, she forgets a stanza of ‘Once a Bunch’ (“I might just have to skip to the best verse at the end”); in Dublin, she had aborted the opener, ‘two reverse’, before coming back to it later, because her energy had been too “up”. Her shows are like an art piece about the preparation and performance of a gig, in which the frequent retuning is part of the experience, turning the songs into a suite. And if she fluffs a line – or decides to change the key, or to interrupt with a brief anecdote8 – she doesn't restart the number, she just picks back up from where she was. That charming and scuzzy scrappiness throws her shimmering talent into thrilling relief – and makes it all seem even less explicable. In crudest terms: you see how the sausage is made, and you still haven't got a fucking clue.
I began the 2020 Big Thief tour piece by rather pretentiously suggesting that “every time you see Adrianne Lenker, she’s three different people”. Certainly there are several different Adriannes crammed into the one woman9: the millennial goof; the cosmic balladeer; the unshakably confident Travis-picking, throwback king of country; and the untrammeled soul who writes and sings those pained songs of unwanted experience, searching through the rubble for the glint of solace.
***
1In her song, ‘Simulation Swarm’, which is primarily about the brother she has never met, the 31-year-old Lenker describes herself as being “on the 31st floor of the simulation swarm”, if you wanted a cool way to refer to your age.
2That's the song listed on setlist.fm, perhaps because Adrianne shared Clark's recording on Instagram shortly afterwards... but isn't it more likely that she played his 'Dublin Blues'?
3It isn’t just the constant yelling of requests, but the tuneless chanting of the lyrics over her vocals, which smacks less of devotion than narcissism. "Such beautiful... singing," Adrianne says politely at one point, before immediately playing something (the new song, 'Before You') with which they can't join in. After she well-meaningly but unwisely refers to Galway as being “in the UK”, the crowd makes a distinctly ugly warning noise, and while Lenker clearly doesn’t quite grasp the nature of the gaffe, she refers endlessly back to her mistake in a kind of wounded panic, ruminating nervously and contradictorily on the pointlessness of borders and yet the importance of cultural pride. Some of the worst people on the internet had already taken to hectoring her online for being too pro-Israeli (Big Thief’s bassist is Israeli) or too pro-Palestinian (Lenker recently recorded a fundraising mini-album for Palestinian refugees), and in Galway, she is, for want of a better word (perhaps because this one is about right), bullied into addressing the conflict in Gaza by a between-songs cry of ‘Free Palestine!’ She immediately segues into a discussion of the charity record, to establish her bona fides, before, having not made a setlist, launching into a song off the mini-album, ‘fangs lungs ankles’. The earlier – standing – shows also feature an uncanny number of audience members halting the show by fainting, especially when caught in the secondary glow of the blazing blue stage lights. In Glasgow, this means we never do get the end of a Lenker story about her purchasing of a small antique chair.
4When Lenker was a child, she thought the words ‘Once upon a time…’ were ‘Once a buncha times’, which is how the song begins.
5‘Spud Infinity’ typically closes Big Thief shows and has become a cosmic country hoedown featuring improvised solos, including one by Adrianne’s brother Noah, on a jaw harp. He joins Adrianne on stage for an acoustic version at the Barbican’s matinee show, as well as shooting footage for a mini-documentary, which will focus mostly on the backstage experience of putting on a tour, with some bits of audience interaction and a few song clips.
6The best version is in Galway, but a decidedly more stop-start rendering, from Kilkenny, is up here. Apparently, the problems arose from the fact that Smither has, and here I defer to Lenker, “big hands”. After the performance breaks down, she says she’s going to play the song every night, and by the end it will be note-perfect. She plays it twice more. Both times it is.
7This is perhaps an innovation borrowed from one of her heroes, the folk songwriter, Tucker Zimmerman. There was one incredibly moving moment at Shepherd’s Bush in 2022, when the octogenarian Zimmerman, opening for Big Thief in front of 2,000 people, forgot to bring his cherished songbook out with him, and Lenker, who had walked him onto the stage, scooted off to fetch it.
8This sample from midway through the first chorus of ‘Steamboat’ at Kilkenny Cathedral: “I just realised I wrote this when I was 21, before I had ever gone overseas at all, or gone anywhere.” The post-song verdict: “Yeah, I still feel it. I still feel that sometimes.”
9You can even get a sense of this from her stage outfits, which sometimes inform the tenor of a show. The first night, she is sporting a green beanie, from which one of her ears obstinately peeks out. The next evening, in the cathedral, Lenker is a vision in white, resembling nothing so much as a heavenly painter-decorator, her hair tied back, and wearing make-up for the only time on the tour. In Dublin, she's the boy-next-door, in blue jeans and a tattered old motorcycle-shop sweater, but the next time we see her, she has gone Nashville, dressed in a plaid lumberjack shirt, a stetson and work boots. For London, she often seems to make a special effort (one of her few concessions to commercialism, along with exaggerating her mannerisms for show photographers, and thanking her manager from the stage), and though she's dressed for the opening night there in black jeans and boots, she's also wearing a see-through top, under a bralette embroidered with large red roses. She rolls up her sleeve, anyway, ready for action. "Gotta free the arm" for fingerpicking, she explains in Bristol, dressed down once more.
SUPPORT:
SETLISTS:
Words and pictures by Rick Burin. Photos, in order, are: 'Real House' in Dublin; London (final night); 'Real House' in Kilkenny; Dublin; the main window at St Canice's, Kilkenny; Adrianne and Nick Hakim in Glasgow; Dublin; Glasgow; Adrianne and Josefin Runsteen at the Barbican (final night); Manchester; Galway; Ellie O'Neill in Dublin; Galway; Dublin (below).
