The world is full of wonder: Big Thief on tour, 2026

Sentrum Scene, Oslo, Norway – 8 and 9 April 2026
Brixton Academy, London, England – 23, 25 and 26 April 2026

Pre-amble

‘Orthostatic Intolerance’ sounds like one of those Dragon New Warm Mountain songs that you don’t put on quite as often as ‘Certainty’. But it is, in fact, the reason my insane plan to see 12 Big Thief shows on the Somersault Slide tour became somewhat derailed (and why my fabled Hollywood Bowl pilgrimage last year bit the dust, and why everyone is so far away in these photos). Can’t stand up, you see. I’ve had health stuff since I was a teenager, but this is new. Hopefully temporary.

Life still has wonders in it, though, like five nights with my favourite band, squinting from my seat in the gods or on the accessible platform. It was, I’ll admit, a very different experience, and often a lesser one, but that’s OK. Nothing was ever going to match the Ireland shows from 2024 anyway, and two of these five nights were nevertheless spectacular. Big Thief are a live band if ever there was one.

This piece includes unpublished quotes from my recent i Paper interview with Adrianne and co.

***

Oslo: first night

The first show of the tour, in Oslo, pinned me to the wall. It was, simply, and even in row 11 of the circle, one of the most exciting gigs I’ve ever been at. You know the drill, and the quirks, and even if this tour didn’t quite prove it all true again (since the fabled lottery of the setlist would draw from a smaller pool), the first show seemed to – and in the most exhilarating way. “That was absolutely bananas,” I wrote in my notes afterwards, with my usual high-minded eloquence.

Adrianne kicked off, solo, with the live debut of the greatest of her new songs, ‘What I Only Dream Of’ (later retitled ‘Cruel and Beautiful World’, though I prefer the original, more singular name). And, yes, there is still no feeling in life remotely comparable to Lenker unspooling some new song that sounds as old as the rocks, and feeling so miraculously blessed that you are among the first to ever hear it. (I, personally, would not have gone to grab another beer during such a moment, but there’s no accounting for the men of Oslo.)

“What I only dream of is waiting...,” sings Lenker with that slight catch in her throat, and I find that I have one too, as I always do in that pin-drop silence where the only sound on earth is her voice, backed by the gentlest of guitars, casting truth into the air.

When I interviewed the band last year, Adrianne explained her sense of composition as a multi-layered thing that has not altered, merely ascended. “I feel like I’ve always had these multiple different veins of writing: the simple and the small and the big and then the cosmic and then the literal, the physical, the macro and the micro… There’s all this going on simultaneously. I’ve just grown to a new level of it.”

In her online songwriting course earlier in 2025, she talked about the ‘key’ to her songs: not a musical key or a way to understanding them, but a key that she turns partway through, moving the subject matter from the intimate to the infinite. “Strangers’ eyes bring me alive,” she sings in ‘What I Only Dream Of’, grasping the key and turning it, “as I wade through the terrible wonder, the wonderful cruel and beautiful world.” It is an astonishingly beautiful song, just a touch short of her two greatest ballads, ‘Sadness as a Gift’ and ‘Already Lost’ (both, it is worth reiterating, heard best in their live solo iterations: perhaps at the Hammersmith and Edinburgh band shows of 2023).

Such majesty merely kicks off the night’s revelations, though when you open with a song like that, you’re erecting a glorious prism through which to see everything that follows.

The band are touring Double Infinity, an overproduced record of great songs, and eventually they’ll remember that, but tonight they include just one track off the album (the lead single, ‘Incomprehensible’, to close the main set). They play six newer songs, three of them for the first time. You could put this down to an appealing perversity, but I think it is simply a sign of an artist questing endlessly forward, and hewn to such folky, folksy maxims as Lenker’s oft-expressed, “If you write a song on tour, you have to play it.”

She follows the opener with ‘Forgive the Dream’, written during the North American dates, which can’t help but pale next to what came first, but casts a slighter spell of its own. It’s an elusive mood piece that conjures images of wintry industry and crushed expectations, as Lenker’s voice purposefully strains in and out of key, which isn’t my favourite thing she can do with it, but is always a gamble I admire, when being recorded for all eternity or else in front of a thousand people. As, indeed, is tossing out songs that your audience has never heard before.

I bumped into Dylan Meek, the brother of Big Thief guitarist, Buck, and support at three of these shows, at Brixton, and he told me Adrianne was putting aside a dedicated two hours for writing, every day of the tour. I tried to articulate to him what I wrote here about the feeling I get hearing those songs for the first time, and he said he gets it too. “And then you might never hear that song again,” he said, “or only four years later.”

Which brings us to ‘Wait a While’, a song I’ve written about several times, as it’s one of my favourites. It assumed a fabled place in the Big Thief narrative, after they debuted it in Bristol in 2022, played it four times (including Adrianne's heartstopping version during the famous Shepherd’s Bush run) and then put it back in the drawer. It poked its head out briefly once more when Buck joined Adrianne for one of her solo shows in 2024, and then suddenly here they were, playing it in Oslo. The gorgeous possibilities of what Adrianne's voice can do to the word “Hilary” are no longer apropos, since the chorus has morphed into the clunkier, “Wait a while, wait a while, don’t HU-rry" (perhaps because there is too synonymous a Hillary). Yet even with that dab less ethereality, being serenaded with it was the most glorious surprise.

From the stage, Lenker promises a setlist of “new songs, old songs and some inbetween”, which seemed to show how the song that she most wishes she’d written, Townes Van Zandt’s incomparable ‘High, Low and In Between’ (which she covers here) has invaded not just her writing – since there is barely a line of that song, nor a feeling within it, nor an idea, that does not find an echo in her work – but even her everyday chatter. (Incidentally, when we chatted about the artists whose songs have moved her most deeply, she named her friends Steve Fisher and Twain, along with “some of the greats”: namely Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Nina Simone.)

‘Certainty’ is next, with Lenker and Meek gazing across the stage at each other throughout, these “deep friends” who once felt this romantic love for one another, and now feel it for other people, and wrote this masterpiece to capture the feeling.

And then things get heavy. A ferocious ‘Shoulders’ (a song I like but which Adrianne likes more) is followed by ‘Real Love’, which climaxes with an explosive, spitting guitar solo, though its real revelation is the way Lenker transforms this early rocker by singing it in a conversational tone, and in the fragile voice she usually reserves for her solo records. Throughout this show, she takes risks with that most mesmerizing of instruments: rolling the dice on improvised melodies, in heady communion with her muse and in tandem with Meek’s Texan quiver and Krivchenia’s unstudied high harmonies. ‘Real Love’ is followed by a relentlessly cyclical ‘Real House’ – ‘Fools Gold’ via Henry the Human Fly – which explodes into the live debut of the cathartic ‘Christmas Day’, being another chunk of confessional domestic sadness depicting the early life of Adrianne Lenker, though this one coming with a cacophonous chorus.

That’s topped by the best of her new rock songs, the rampaging ‘Beautiful World’, which has some of the most phonetically satisfying moments in her recent writing (not just the rhyme of “coffee and a bagel” with “Winnebago” but the glee with which she belts it out), and is the closest thing she’s ever written to a protest song. There are some curiously clunky lines in its third verse, but its balance of whimsy, humanism and rage, and the way it turns the key to shift us from a “fucked up world” to “a beautiful world”, while retaining the rest of the chorus (“Why must everything be conquered?”), is a very definite vision of genius. Its author’s conception of politics never seems to have strayed beyond the childlike, but the innocence at the centre of her art is an essential part of its iridescence. Townes Van Zandt had it too: “I don’t know why we can’t be brothers here,” he wrote in ‘High, Low and In Between’, “I know we should be.”

The band follow that with the live debut of ‘Mr. Man’, and the best of the five versions they'll play across these five shows. It’s a bit riot grrrl, a bit Belly, a bit Breeders, Lenker pouncing on the Iran crisis, backed by her insouciant slacker riff, though finding more profundity in an ellipticism that hints at solidarity or at life’s obstacles (“Could you get past two, could you get past three?”) than in the more literal later passages (“Hey, Mr. Man, with a plan, what’s the confusion/Trashing the land, ‘cause you can, just for amusement”). Directness in her work is so often a virtue, and tonight immediacy is a godsend, it’s just when you hear the song on four other nights that it seems to fall short of sustained greatness.

'Muscle Memory’ is the final new song, in which Adrianne articulates the blank adolescent feeling of post-orgasm clarity. Around it, she does ‘not a lot just forever’ with the band, and ‘anything’ without. She plays a conventional ‘Not’ and a new arrangement of ‘Vampire Empire’, then ends the set with ‘Incomprehensible’, which sounds great though will be even better by London. Last year, Lenker described the song to me as “like a journal entry or something”, and introduced it tonight by saying, “It’s a big time right now. And I suppose in some small way this song is just a call to be the wild thing that I am.”

The encore is ‘Change’, her incomparable song about life’s very meaning lying in its finite nature, which survives a stumbling start that almost serves to accentuate the song’s miraculousness, then turns first into a singalong, and then into an experiment in revised phrasing and spontaneous falsetto, before the familiar jam of the mundane-to-cosmic ‘Spud Infinity’ closes the show, the key in the lock once more.

Adrianne said she was almost “vibrating with nerves” but even by her standards she is sensational on this first night of the tour. She told me last year, “The most comfort I’ve felt from music in my life is through playing.” I felt that tonight. She would hit a similar but different peak on the Saturday in London.

***

Oslo: second night

It happens again.

Not the whole thing. But the first thing. Adrianne opening a show solo, with a sad song you’ve never heard before (and, at the time of writing, no-one has heard since), and it feeling like nothing else on Earth. She must know, right?

This time, it’s one we’ll call ‘Leaving Her’, since its chorus goes, “Leaving her gets harder every time.” (If we’re ranking the songs written since her last visit, I’d have it third after ‘What I Only Dream Of’ and ‘Beautiful World’, alongside ‘These Are the Days’). Fingerpicked arpeggios, a Karen Dalton-ish melody, and Lenker at her most sincere (“I am helpless in your glow”, she sings at one point, before simply crooning the words, “I love her, I love her”). Once more she is drawing a contrast between emotional pain and the illimitable beauty of creation, which extends to me and you.

She adds a delicate ‘heavy focus’ and a pleading ‘anything’, before plunging into an even heavier show than the previous evening. ‘Christmas Day’ is a grunge anthem tonight (weren’t they predominantly a country band the last time we saw them?); ‘Real Love’, ‘Not’ and ‘Vampire Empire’ all end in solos of squalling feedback; and a rampaging ‘Beautiful World’ is even better than the previous night, with Adrianne vocally inhabiting the alpha psychos of her first two choruses, prior to the song’s simple yet profound shift.

Four of the first five songs tonight are new, though such mixing-it-up will not be sustained, this evening or across the tour, as the last album creeps towards centre-stage. Double Infinity’s problem as a record – that it is overly busy – is almost instantly solved by the simple expedient of it being played by a four-piece band. (Meek told me last year that for him the key word to understanding the album was “play”: they invited a big group of musicians to come together, who heard the songs for the first time in the studio, at their microphones, “and everyone was responding intuitively and responding to each other and self-arranging very quickly, and just recording that”.) I wonder how many of Big Thief’s minor musical missteps have had to do with the politics of their bassist’s departure, and of an innate and ever-present desire for intra-band harmony. There was no real reason for them to record this record with a ton of musicians, nor for them to play festival shows in 2024 with two drummers, except to shield their new live bassist (Joshua Crumbley) from being the only new member; Big Thief have released just one poor song: ‘Grandmother’, off Double Infinity, which has the unfortunate distinction of filtering Adrianne's singular worldview through the chords of Status Quo and the generic fixations of Kiss, but presumably made the album because it was a full-band collaboration, and the limelight tends to fall on Lenker, which can’t be simple for any of them. We heard that song in Gunnersbury Park in 2025, where it took up a sixth of the set-time, and I thought something similar might happen with these shows, but no: we didn’t hear it once. Its position was arguably taken by an expansive ‘No Fear’, meditative to the point of rambling, more of which later.

In our interview, Adrianne described the latest album as “floaty, shimmery, uplifting, and faster than other records we’ve made”, saying that thematically it covered the same themes with which she was always preoccupied but “there’s a feeling that ties everything together”. On this second night, we get a thumping version of Double Infinity’s title track and its soundalike, ‘Los Angeles’, which highlights Lenker’s Lorenz Hart-like facility with a rhyme (“Los Angeles/You sang for me’), a current predilection of hers. When she explained the title track to me, she said its central phrase, “At the bridge of two infinities”, was “almost Orange-ish” in its obscurity, then half sang a snatch of that Two Hands album track: “Orange is the colour of my love…’”

‘Muscle Memory’ has extra verses tonight, apparently improvised. Then Lenker does ‘Simulation Swarm’ which is always ‘Sim Swarm’ on the setlist, such shorthand implying its centrality to Lenker’s own conception of her person as an artist, its lyrics alluding half-cryptically to the half-brother she’s never met, and its licks signalling to her status as one of our best living guitarists. It’s given a stunning reading tonight, flipping out into an insane second solo.

‘Real House’ might have been hypnotic but still doesn’t quite seem to work as a purposefully persistent dirge, though in any incarnation, it’s surely never going to approach her tear-streaked version in Kilkenny. While it’s an intensely personal song, she observed in our interview that “it’s funny how sometimes the more micro you get, the more macro it is. The more detailed you get, the more universal it is.”

Night two: Not.

For a while, Lenker and Krivchenia have been experimenting with a drum-and-vocal section in ‘Not’: creating that automatic rush of adrenalised exhilaration as the guitars rush back in. Tonight they try it in both ‘Not’ and ‘Vampire Empire’, but both feel slightly muted. Lenker may never write a more perfect song than ‘Not’, a thunderous Cole Porter-ish list song that makes its point through endless negation, but for the more obsessive fans, it needs (like a good cover version) to be something extra or something different, since we’ve heard it so many, many times. Here it’s neither, for the longest while, only for its heavy, formless solo to turn into an almost laidjack, Layla-ish jam full of gentle noodling, which is really nice, and gives the song some closure to go with its catharsis.
‘Mr. Man’ sounds ever more like Lenker proving she can do what boygenius do, 10 times better with her eyes closed (they offered her the chance to join, she does not appear to have taken them up on it, but then would Springsteen have joined McBusted?). Last night it was Adrianne inhabiting the bolshie spirit of riot grrrl, but tonight Buck gets more involved, coming in with loud vocal harmonies and a sprinkling of sparkling notes (remember when he tossed those onto ‘Ruined’ at Hammersmith in 2023, and how good it sounded? He'd do the same to 'Sim Swarm' too, on the first night at Brixton).

Just as great is a gorgeous ‘Promise Is a Pendulum’, a song in which Lenker edges towards the twee and repetitive but somehow falls into some space of wonder through sheer sense of conviction. She wraps the main set once more with a brilliant take on ‘Incomprehensible’, even better than the first night, its prelude (‘Incomprehensible... incomprehensible... incomprehensible... Let me be’) suddenly seeming to hint at a debt to Macca. Her talent stretches the farthest way, further than any songwriter still working, then occasionally snaps or falls over. Here she is toying around with the melody, finding brilliant new nuances in her delivery, then strains too far, her vocal turning flat and discordant. She goofs off to cover her embarrassment, as the others race in to obscure her blushes. The encore is ‘Forgive the Dream’, b/w ‘Masterpiece’, the latter pitched somewhere between the anthemic and conversational readings that Lenker will usually choose between.
“How was it?” texts a friend. “First night: 11/10. Tonight: 9/10,” I reply, then tell them some of the above.

***

London: first night

An absolutely gorgeous show, with highlights I mostly hadn’t seen coming. A rampaging ‘Beautiful World’ (which I had admittedly been singing beforehand; all day), a spacious, spacy ‘Incomprehensible’, and ‘anything’ with a hushed mid-section performed to rapt silence, in the rudest of all places to see a show: London. (It is city that has so many virtues but often makes its inhabitants feel as if they are the main character in their own movie.) Plus ‘What I Only Dream Of’, just a touch less personal second time around, with Adrianne accompanied only by Dylan Meek on portable keys.

I had griped to myself in Oslo that ‘Vampire Empire’ was like Suede’s ‘Beautiful Ones’ or the Manics’ ‘If You Tolerate This’: a great band’s signature song that to me feels not just mannered and shallow alongside their best work, but essentially unillustrative, being resented by some diehards for that reason and by others because it’s emblematic of the jump to arenas, and the distancing that creates. Yet tonight, suddenly, the song works. I’ve never heard it even half as good, nor half as triumphal. It is, after all, and for all of ‘Not’’s off-kilter profundity, the band's first howl-it-at-the-sky anthem, their first anthem in any conventional, mass-appeal sense, and despite that seeming like the sort of thing I wouldn’t like at all: how I did. Lenker clearly loved the spectacle of those five minutes too, turning fleetingly into one of those pop princesses who lets the audiences do half the work.

‘Sim Swarm’, ‘Not’ and an explosive ‘Real Love’ get heavy solos, though ‘Not'’s ambient jam, that lengthy Clapton-ish outro, remains. ‘Pterodactyl’, premiered in Paris, is given an outing, and though it’s hard to make the words out, they do seem rather literal. Yes, that is indeed what it would be like to be a pterodactyl. The band play four off the latest album, three of them in the encore, accompanied by the 83-year-old Laraaji, who guests on Double Infinity, and is one of those vaguely mystifying figures with whom Big Thief surround themselves.

If the show lacks the profundity of that first night of the tour, the experience still shimmers in the South London air.

***

London: final night

You feel like a privileged and ungrateful dick saying it to anyone who could only make this show, but it does all seem a little anticlimactic after Saturday (I’m juggling the chronology here, since who wants an anticlimax?). I am up on the balcony, and feeling pretty woozy, so perhaps that is a part of it. “Not sure if I was tired or they were tired or everyone was tired,” a friend says afterwards. It feels to me like the band is trying to capture the intensity of the previous night, and failing, so has taken to miming it, and hoping some chemical reaction might result.

It’s certainly true that the setlist is largely shorn of surprises, which I hope is to do with the demands of a new bassist and a guest star, rather than a sign of relative conformity to come. Travelling home, it occurs to me that, so far on the tour, and accounting of course for music’s utter subjectivity, across these five shows they haven’t played either of the two best songs on the most recent album (‘All Night All Day’ and ‘How Should I Have Known’), just as Adrianne didn’t play two of Bright Future’s most revolutionary numbers (‘Evol’ and ‘Ruined’) across the UK and Ireland tour that shared its name.

When I asked the band about the process of concocting their setlists (traditionally a task led by Krivchenia), Meek described it as “pretty somatic”, and Lenker said it was “based on how we feel”, with Krivchenia adding, “Which could be anything: a specific mood we’re in, or just people throwing out songs, saying, ‘That one would sound good next. It’s intuitive.” In Meek’s words: “Sometimes it’s what we feel like that town or that crowd is wanting that night, then it becomes something reciprocal, or sometimes it’s just for us: ‘Whaddo we wanna do tonight?’ I think we’re just trying to be present and play what we wanna play … set ourselves free.”

On the balcony tonight, the demand is for the Spotify Top Songs. During the show that I’d missed, Adrianne had reportedly led a plodding 15-minute version of ‘No Fear’ that seemed to enrage not only the casual fans but several of the diehards. It was inevitable, given that reaction, that she would try again. Not, I would imagine, as an act of aggressive contrarianism, but because she had had an artistic idea that hadn’t yet come off. In her 2025 online songwriting course, she talked about the idea of ‘drone’ songs, where the artist forces us to meditate on a single phrase. This is her clearest expression yet within that subform (in our interview, Meek and Krivchenia compared the song to ‘Happy with You’, in the sense that adding words would have diluted its meaning), and it promptly proceeds to lose most of the crowd, as much as one can tell a thing like that. Knowing the intention does help, though, and after being at first intrigued by the concept, and then amused by how incredibly bored the people around me have become (some gazing about themselves in the hope of finding something more entertaining upon which to fix their attention, some simply leaving), the song begins to work its loping and cyclical magic upon me.

Despite departing with a vaguely unsatisfied feeling that I’m not sure I’ve ever had from a Big Thief show before, this one is still worth it a thousand times over for the echoes of ‘Change’ and ‘Time Escaping’ from the previous night, for the Beach Boys’-ish ‘Casual Touch’ (which worked despite Adrianne playing the majority of in the wrong key; she likes the song, as she said), and one of those instances of alchemy with which live music in general and this artist in particular can suddenly floor you: a deeply beautiful, solo ‘not a lot just forever’, a song I’ve heard countless times live, but never loved like I do tonight. Amid a little plodding and a fair amount of repetition, those four minutes are just breathtaking.

***

London: third night

What is this, a concert venue for ants?

Life doesn’t have to be linear, you know. Nor writing. Why not climax with how night three made us feel?

The idea of the ‘guitar god’, beloved to rock magazines of a certain vintage, who use phrases like ‘of a certain vintage’, is one that has never meant much to me. Perhaps briefly near the end of ‘Shoplifters of the World Unite’, or whenever I hear the Hammersmith Odeon version of ‘Sultans of Swing’. But give me voices, and words. This evening, though... well.

Because Big Thief on the Saturday at Brixton is hereafter the ‘guitar god’ show. Adrianne is, in the urban parlance, on one tonight. “Euphoric,” says my mate Peter, which says it. There are astounding versions of ‘Incomprehensible’ and ’Words’ to open, the latter spiked with blasts of six-string. (In our interview, she described the song as referencing “this whole other world that’s with you that is non-verbal … this whole universe that is wordless”.)

Lo-res, sure, but clock the atmosphere.

There is the new metal coda to ‘Christmas Day’, a frenzy of headbanging. There is the fingerpicking that dances around the duelling voices on the Fleetwood Mac-ish ‘These Are the Days’. An exuberant ‘Sim Swarm’, its second solo now scraping the ceiling with fuzz. My favourite version of ‘Change’ since the legendary one (when Adrianne walked back on alone at the end of the Shepherd’s Bush run in 2022 and sang it solo, and I never felt afraid of death in the same way after that). During it, she raises her arms to dance, and touches her heart. There’s a stunning ‘Time Escaping’, a ‘Beautiful World’ that comes marauding out of the traps, and a ‘Vampire Empire’ in which Lenker pulls away from the mic to encourage the crowd to belt out entire verses: maybe it’s the “falling” that brings the crowd to this song, maybe it’s the articulation of the soft butch experience, or of mystifying seesaw relationships more broadly. Whatever it is, the place crackles.

And when you take as many risks as they are tonight, things fail too. You experiment by adding Laraaji’s incongruous murmurings to ‘anything’ and it doesn’t work. You embark on a frenetic ‘Not’ and find that you’ve twice misplaced the words. You select ‘Red Moon’ for the encore, giving solo spots to a couple of the band’s brothers, only to find it’s a self-indulgent, haphazard, under-rehearsed mess. You start a guitar break and your ex-husband has to wander across the stage and flick the switch on your amp. You start some freeform experimental poetry in the calm after ‘These Are the Days’ and, yes, you’re the greatest living writer but this isn’t much of anything at all. Yet more often than not you’re in this space where you aim for the heavens and find them far beneath your feet.

Jake Tilson wrote the next day: “Adrianne’s solos were really on fire. When she starts, you never quite know if she’ll land on that perfect moment, you can sense her feeling it out, looking for it, that slight worry draws you in – and OMG did she find it last night.” So she did.

She seemed happy too, but to have much unfinished business. “Take care of each other out there,” Lenker said to close, “we have a lot of work to do in this world together. Let’s keep going.”

***

Setlists:

***

Thanks for reading. The headline this time comes from the lyrics of 'Leaving Her'. Previous tour diaries are here: 2020, 2022, 2023, 2024

Effortless audacity: Big Thief on tour

Sage Gateshead – 05/04/23
Usher Hall, Edinburgh – 06/04/23
Manchester Apollo – 07/04/23
The Great Hall, Cardiff – 08/04/23
Hammersmith Apollo, London – 11 and 12/04/23
Chalk Brighton – 13/04/23

There is a song that Big Thief have recently started playing called ‘Born for Loving You’.

If you want to understand it, there is a simple, biographical way. And then there is another way.

The simple way first: when the band’s frontwoman, Adrianne Lenker, was a student at Berklee, her music showcase betrayed the powerful influence of the husky, highway-fixated alt-country chanteuse, Lucinda Williams, right down to the very voice she was affecting. That influence hasn’t been as pronounced since (manifesting merely in the odd cover, with Lenker slipping back into Lucinda-voice), but as the band prepares to tour with Williams this summer, here’s a song – co-written with drummer James Krivchenia – that in its feel and its hook could be seamlessly snuck into Williams’ setlist. It may also be the straight-up sexiest thing that Lenker has ever sung (“Take me to the back of your pick-up truck,” she implores at one point, “show me a thing or two.”).

And now here’s the other way to think about ‘Born for Loving You’: no-one else on earth could have written this song.

‘After the dinos fell’: the world of Adrianne Lenker

In its first two lines, Lenker dispenses with the entire history of the universe up to her birth (“After the first stars formed, after the dinos fell/After the first light flickered out of this motel…”). That effortless audacity is characteristic. But the song’s conceit is not conceited: it is a way of understanding the magnitude of love. Everything that happened – to me, to us, to anyone – was just a prelude to this. From blood-soaked birth to teenage nightmare, via “waddling around, looking at birds”, well: “thank god we made it through.”

Dylan once said, “It isn’t me, it’s the songs. I’m just the postman, I deliver the songs.” And here is Lenker’s current online biography in full: “songs of all sorts from places unknown”.

The places are, admittedly, occasionally known. Across the seven shows on this UK tour, ‘Born for Loving You’ gets four airings: twice as a lush ‘70s California-style singalong, then as a plaintive solo ballad, and finally as a stripped-down full-band version with simple harmonies. For those last three, Lenker adds a coda: a falsetto snatch of ‘I Will Always Love You’ (Whitney version).

Yet even when the sources are, as she says, “unknown”, those songs come filtered through a unique sensibility: ideas are ingeniously inverted, images recur, motifs are endlessly shuffled. Her characters are gender-fluid, avian, feminist and quasi-biblical, traversing a world of blue skies, cluttered kitchens, bare plains and flat roads. Whether broken, fixed or flailing, they are loved.

And certainly she seems a conduit for whatever immortal music is floating in the ether right now, whether fragile or thundering. The most exhilarating part of following Big Thief on tour is the regularity with which miracles happen. “This is a new song,” Lenker will say, most nights, before playing the greatest fucking thing you’ve ever heard in your life. On the last tour, she composed ‘Wait a While’ on the ferry over from Dublin, performed it six times in concert, then retired it. It has never been released. Most musicians would kill to ever write a song just half as good.

But Lenker just keeps them coming. She begins the encore at Edinburgh with ‘Already Lost’, for which the word ‘timeless’ is barely sufficient (by the point she unspools the line, “How slow and how fast you are,” your soul has gone into spasm). She commences the second night at Hammersmith with ‘Sadness As a Gift’, which does for depression what ‘Change’ did for fear of death; turning your understanding inside out. She isn’t soothing you with song, she’s showing you another way of perceiving pain. While her between-songs badinage is regularly ridiculed by reviewers committed to the cheap shot, there’s something appealingly counter-intuitive about her worldview, about an artist who’ll tell a huge crowd that a mammoth show feels like a dream (so far, so banal), only to dazedly add: “I don’t really even mean career-wise, I just mean in general: it’s so bizarre to be a human being, and we all ended up here, right now.”

A live band who also make records

And here is where you want to be. You don’t know Big Thief if you haven’t seen them live. They are not a group you fall in love with at a distance: they are a live band who make records on the side; the intensity of their in-person performance rarely, if ever, transfers to your preferred streaming service.

Nor does its extremity. They continue to spread out in all directions, the quietest band on the circuit, and about the loudest. I saw them in Oslo last year during one of their particularly metal phases, an evening that did unspeakable things to my left ear. It is a decision I will never regret.

The live experience, gloriously, is never the same twice. That’s how I can justify seeing them seven times in nine days. Across those shows, they play 38 different songs, 14 of them just once. So if you want to hear their most popular song (‘Shark Smile’), a recent album track like ‘Blue Lightning’, or an unexpected cover of ‘Strangers’ by The Kinks, you’ll have to catch them in London, Manchester and Brighton. They start the second show of the tour, in Edinburgh, by playing four songs we haven’t heard the night before.

Every gig, too, has a different narrative, often built into the sweep of Krivchenia’s setlists. Edinburgh begins with that country-inflected singer-songwriter fare, before shifting into tortured rock, a sequence bookended by two absolute beasts: ‘Contact’ and ‘Dragon New Warm Mountain’. The former explodes into ugly metal screams; the latter continues to delight those who only know the gentle, balladic version that titled their last album.

That’s an emblematic number when talking about how their music continues to evolve, and how no Big Thief song is ever finished. At Gateshead – a curious, slightly muted show (presumably because it was largely seated) – ‘DNWM’ came galumphing out of the gate in a way that just made me think, “yeah OK, but we kind of did this last year”. The next night, it was reborn as a monster, and by Hammersmith, it had mutated into something unstoppable, the band adding more and more mad shit to it: a vocoder, a vocal-coda (Lenker’s drifting falsetto), and squalls of physically-induced feedback, Lenker turning her back on the crowd and throwing her torso at the amp. The song's opening line, "It's a little bit magic," is essentially now a public service announcement.

Not winning

Songs are in constant flux. While ‘Flower of Blood’ reaches its apogee on the first night – as if shoegaze died and went to Heaven, where the Shredding Festival was taking place – two of Lenker’s greatest songs don’t quite find their new place in the world until the final one.

‘Not’ often felt curiously tired, an incomparable song given oddly perfunctory treatment; and after glorious versions exhibiting the extroverted solo (2020) and the internalised one (2022), its climax here seemed technically impressive but hard to follow, either musically or emotionally. Manchester was an exception – Lenker beginning and ending the song on her knees, her guitar part suddenly pleading – while the first night in Hammersmith was an enjoyable anomaly in which she either forgot the words (not, ironically, for the first time) or just tried something new: a ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’-style semi-rap on the verses. It’s Brighton, though, where the song comes to life again in exhilarating fashion. It’s longer, unerring, precise in meaning, Lenker drawing a defining message of futility from its endless negation, as she circles back for a last chorus, screaming the words “not winning” over and again, like some apocalyptic benediction.

She ended both the last UK tour and this one with ‘Change’ – her song about life gaining its very meaning from the existence of death – and while the deeply moving solo version that closed the Shepherd’s Bush run remains the indelible one, her message best delivered by a single voice, the four-part harmony and falsetto ending of this new reading also reaches its full flower by the seaside.

Other songs have been completely reworked. ‘Spud Infinity’ continues its transformation from a wispy, metaphysical ballad to a showcase for a band at its happiest and silliest, complete with Jew’s harp, stomping and a sing-along. While ostensibly a country song, it’s also a jazz number in as much as it allows for showy improv, including guitarist Buck Meek’s characteristically weird anti-solos. ‘Zombie Girl’, another song that Lenker played as a haunting solo song at Union Chapel in 2019, is performed in Edinburgh as a seven-minute prog number with two guitar solos.

At other times, the emotions are simply dialled up. Lenker’s guitar-play is further spotlighted in a newly funky, swaggeringly cocky ‘Simulation Swarm’ that contains two killer – and subtly different – solos, while the cult favourite, ‘Sparrow’ (whose accompanying t-shirt has become practically a uniform for teen girls paying pilgrimage), escalates into tormented fretwork. Simply ditching her acoustic 12-string is enough to conjure up a different world of ‘Cattails’, as if rural America finally got electrified. And in ‘Certainty’, she effectively improves upon perfection by dropping onto a blue note on the pivotal word ‘wild’, an innovation that makes the song more – not less – certain; and irrevocable, without end.

Real love: a horror show

Manchester, probably the best show of the tour, offers a first outing for ‘Real Love’ (Lenker memorably responded to audience cries for the song at Shepherd’s Bush by murmuring, “I know that one”, and mock-innocently singing a bit of the chorus). It’s a blistering rendition, with an extended solo, a huge riff and a similarly huge performance, Lenker grasping glorious, frenzied at the falsetto finale. It remains one of her greatest and most deceptively important love songs: a haunting and seductive marriage of adolescent goth imagery and childhood trauma. This is love as illness, incapacitation, sudden death; a life sentence; a horror show; a beating; a curse, endlessly repeating – and who doesn’t want love?

There are also the moments when Big Thief drag out a deep cut, and drag you around to their way of thinking. I didn’t get the fuss over ‘Change’ until the final moments of last year’s tour. Adrianne starts the first show here with a beautiful solo rendering of ‘UFOF’ – despite twice forgetting the words – a song I’d never cared about at all, before the band blasts out ‘Blurred View’ in a version that finally makes the song make sense: hypnotic and insistent. Other apparent filler from last year’s mammoth double-album grows in stature over the nine days, ‘Time Escaping’ in Cardiff emerging lopsidedly gorgeous from bizarre tuning and improvised wordless vocals; the yearning ’12,000 Lines’ rising to meet the majesty of its cosmic sentiments; a finger-picked ‘Dried Roses’ finally opening up in London, rather than repeatedly shutting its door in your face. In Brighton, the band turn the thin pastiche of ‘Red Moon’ into a total winner, the song racing past and carrying you with it.

And then there are those new songs. Alongside the ones already mentioned are ‘Horsepower’ – a groove-filled metaphor about fucking, via Top Gear Driving Classics, Vol. 5 – an amiable solo number called ‘Bright Future’, and a pair of instant classics. The sensual, longing ‘Ruined’ is one hell of a choice to kick off your biggest show in four years, while the raw and imploring ‘Free Treasure’ sounds like Springsteen’s more talented sister knocking about in the back yard. “Just when I thought I couldn’t feel more, I feel a little more,” Lenker sings, her voice breaking. Tell me about it.

Psycho-drama in Hammersmith

If the first Hammersmith show was, to me, the night she sang ‘Free Treasure’ solo (and the night I got to see my band with my best friend for the first time), then the second show felt more like a psycho-drama. In the 22 hours between, Adrianne had met up with her ex, and the band’s return to London had been damned with varying degrees of faint praise by the reviewers of two national papers. The armchair psychologist in me wonders whether that personal experience informed the quietly anguished elements of the show, while the professional brickbats inspired the setlist and the ferocious physicality. ‘Vampire Empire’ ended with Adrianne falling in tandem with the word itself, ending the song sprawled on her back; once up on her feet again, she took quite some time to compose herself for the repetitive, unrepentant, pseudo-cheery toxic ballad, ‘Happy with You’ (Krivchenia’s favourite Big Thief song). Incorporating ‘Masterpiece’ as recorded – rather than the conversational iteration performed the previous two nights – along with the only outings this tour of fan favourites ‘Shark Smile’ and ‘Mary’, this was the band’s version of a hits show, though they remain the only band whose hits show has four unreleased songs in it.

One of those is ‘Vampire Empire’, which – in typically offbeat fashion – Big Thief decided to showcase on prime-time TV, despite the fact it isn’t available to stream or buy. Whether that was 4D chess, agreeable iconoclasm or a mild form of commercial self-sabotage remains to be seen, but it’s looking increasingly like the former. Adopted as a Gen Z anthem, its spiky gender nonconformity (a preoccupation that found its most beautiful expression in Lenker’s 2016 song, ‘Paul’) might just boot them into the next level of rock stardom. Is it selfish to say that I hope not? I love this band, I don’t want to watch them in a large shipping container.

These spaces just feel right. In Cardiff, Lenker adapts her songs not just to her mood but to the acoustic peculiarities of the low-ceilinged Great Hall. After playing to 10,000 people across two nights at Hammersmith, the band could have treated the 800-capacity Chalk Brighton as a comedown; instead they embrace the intimacy.

Fashion rocks

When I wrote about the 2022 tour, I received two tweets that really stuck in my mind. One, from @roryisconfused, said: “I love that since I saw them 3 days ago, the bassist has dyed his hair pink.” Someone else, their name now sadly lost to history, wrote: “Each member looks like they’re in a different band.”

Last year, Lenker manfully continued with the solo to ‘Not’ despite the fact that what appeared to be a wedding dress was coming down around her. This time she has to negotiate the thrashing climax of ‘Contact’ with a green beenie having fallen down over her eyes. This band suffers for their art, but also occasionally for their fashion. In Gateshead, they are wearing: an untucked pink satin shirt and tall hair (Buck, guitar adornments); a silver jump suit and matching sandals (James, drums); a pale pink dress (Max, bass); a cut-off motorbike shop t-shirt, old black jeans and silver tooth (Adrianne).

Each has a stock expression on stage. Krivchenia’s mouth hangs open, as if in a drum-induced trance. Meek endlessly shakes his head, his front leg bent, a slim shoe pointing towards the crowd. Bassist Max Oleartchik greets regular deviations from formula by shrugging contentedly and giving it the big lower lip. And Lenker has three principal modes nowadays: eyes closed peacefully for a solo spot; eyes closed tormentedly for a howling guitar break; hopping from one foot to the other in a hoedown style when she feels the need to lighten up a little.

Her place on stage was always front right, but apparently a bad back has forced her inwards. Ironically, shifting to centre-stage makes her seem less like a solo act with some willing accomplices, and more like one of the band. She also seems younger on this tour, somehow. Maybe it’s the hair: a tomboyish tuft rather than the blonde buzzcut that made her look so otherworldly at Shepherd’s Bush. She was married to Meek, way back in the mists of 2015, and their dynamic remains hugely touching. For his part, he is possibly the most wholesome person on earth. In Edinburgh, he tells a story in his faltering southern twang about how as a child he stayed in a nearby castle where his grandfather – a dealer in antique coins – made the children a treasure hunt in which they had to find doubloons. Alright, Keith Moon.

Sadness as a gift

That gentleness extends to the whole band. Most nights, they spoil the big rock star reveal by shambling onto the stage an hour early to introduce the support act and ask the audience to be quiet and attentive. Lenker says in Hammersmith that it’s the part of the show that makes her most nervous. What I pretentiously took to be a delight in linguistic invention when she did it at EartH, may, instead, just be mere awkwardness.

But the vagueness that can beset that plea, or her chats between songs, vanishes when she sings, or writes, or plays. Her commitment to emotional truth habitually forces her to disrupt the band’s best laid plans by politely interpolating whatever song she suddenly feels like playing (you can think of their printed setlist as an interesting alternate reality). And it informs both the sincerity of her singing and the specificity of her songs. Even if the songs still come from ‘places unknown’.

In ‘Sadness as a Gift’, perhaps the most vivid example of Lenker’s ability to leap repeatedly between the everyday and the eternal, she addresses a lost lover. “You and I both know there is nothing more to say,” she begins, before saying it anyway, if only to herself. The song builds to a remembrance – or an offer? – of profound simplicity, as Lenker croons with a fractured strength: “You could hear the music inside my mind.”

I just feel privileged to live in a time when I can do the same.

***

With thanks to old friends and new on this tour: Paul, Jess, Jamie, Sorrel, Jordan, Chris and Orlando.

Setlists:

My pieces on previous Big Thief tours: 2020, 2022