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

REVIEW: Father John Misty at the Hammersmith Apollo

Tuesday 7 November 2017

I’d listened to Father John Misty a little and dismissed him as “not really for me” (I reasoned that I didn't have room for a whiny, self-obsessed white man in my life aside from myself), but my brother and my friend Katie wanted to go, so I took the plunge. In revising for the gig, my Last FM (helloooo, 2003) tells me that I’ve listened to his songs 151 times in the past week, and by the end I was brainwashed. Sorry, ‘a fan’. And even his proselytising about the evils of religion, which seemed to be operating at the level of a GCSE textbook, began to make sense to me (a Catholic) when I read about his background, and understood the writing to be more about white-hot anger, lived experience, existential desperation and the repugnant hypocrisy of evangelist America than in-depth theological debate.

From interviews – and reputation – though, I was still expecting the morose, meandering, confessional Misty who turned up to a gig the day after Trump’s inauguration, did a rambling 15-minute speech, played a 13-minute song and then went home. Instead, we got a proper pop show: a sensational pop show – 24 songs across two hours, with confetti cannons, a band and a string and brass ensemble, a dazzling light display and Tillman’s full repertoire of struts, poses and guitar moves (and when I say ‘guitar moves’, I don’t mean his guitar-playing, I mean him taking his guitar off and flinging it halfway across the stage to a roadie, mid-song), but with enough room for the sincerity, the lamentations, the howls of protest and shards of bitter wit that make him one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary music.

There's almost no between-songs chat (a few 'thank you's and 'good to see yer's), it's just the music: the bearded Tillman, his hair slicked back, in a flowery shirt and black suit, his drainpipe trousers accentuating his slender legs, and the heeled boots just right for cutting a dashing silhouette as he's frequently backlit in a mist of pink or codeine white.

We kick off with 'Pure Comedy', climaxing with that explosive realisation that religion is "the kind of thing a madman would conceive!”, complete with panto-esque ‘loony’ gesture, 'Total Entertainment Forever' – an irresistible, rockabilly paean to just how fucked we are – and 'Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution', most people’s favourite on the album. I’m still wrestling with the song’s philosophy (is he foggily denouncing leftism or acerbically critiquing the comfort of capitalist conformity?), but it’s a definite Tune, and when the confetti cannon explodes on “Industry and commerce: toppled to their knees”, creating a red, mirrored supernova, everybody loses their shit. After a somewhat muted 'Ballad of the Dying Man' (and so the first four songs from the current record), we dip into the old stuff, including a plaintive, insistent, seductively reimagined 'Nancy From Now On', a lovestruck, crowdpleasing 'Chateau Lobby #4' (“You left a note in your perfect script/’Stay as long as you want’/And I haven’t left your bed since”) with Tillman striding around the stage like a Butlins redcoat, and a conversational 'When the God of Love Returns There’ll Be Hell to Pay', as he has a few choice words with his maker. The pay off, “Oh, my Lord/We just want light in the dark/Some warmth in the cold/And to make something out of nothing sounds like someone else I know” sounds like vintage Vonnegut in the land of Steinbeck, and I don’t have higher praise than that.


I didn't spend much of the gig taking pictures. Will this do?

There are Misty songs I don’t like much, and if a couple of them are banal live – ‘A Bigger Paper Bag’ and the interminable ‘So I’m Growing Old on Magic Mountain’ – others are given an individuality missing on record, and extraordinary life. ‘Only Son of the Ladiesman’ is chokingly broken amidst the country-rock sound, ‘This Is Sally Hatchet’ becomes a great lost Beatles song, ‘When You’re Smiling and Astride Me’ so fragilely self-mocking, and ‘Strange Encounter’ sensitive and vulnerable as it moves from Misty’s familiar boasting that he has sex with a lot of women to something like tentatively self-justifying self-realisation ("Yeah, I'm a decent person/Little aimless"), the perfect counterpoint to the disposable fun of, say, ‘I’m Writing a Novel’. 'Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Goddamn Thirsty Crow', by contrast, is an absolute bastard live: a sleazy love poem that turns increasingly belligerent and violent, with Tillman spitting its bitter denouement, "Why the long face, jerkoff? Your chance has been taken," into the crowd.

And then there are the songs I can never get enough of, like ‘The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apt’ – basically his ‘Idiot Wind’, a character assassination of a woman he’s just slept with, which would be completely indefensible if it wasn’t so beautifully, rhythmically sung, and so incredibly funny:

She says, like literally
Music is the air she breathes
And the malaprops make me want to fucking scream
I wonder if she even knows what that word means
Well, it's literally not that

And ‘Bored in the USA’, a chronicle of depression, a portrait of a wasteland of a homeland: America’s culture reimagined alternately as The Road, or as a tacky, narcotised, identikit, subprime, debt-ridden monument to nothing, guarded over by white president Jesus – the whole song springing from a profound pun for the ages. Tonight, though, the “white Jesus” that he pleads to becomes “honky-tonk Jesus’”, and the President Jesus just “President Anyone”. ‘The Memo’, one of the best songs on his current record, Pure Comedy, is mostly more pointed than despairing, and its targets are more specific and less existential, though its conclusion is similarly bleak, depicting a world in which people “won't just sell themselves into slavery/They'll get on their knees and pay you to believe”. Live, it comes with its wild card intact: a voice generator increasingly barking out mundanities and platitutdes: “This is totally the song of my summer,” “This guy just gets me” and “Music is my life”, as Tillman himself asks: “Just quickly, how would you rate yourself in terms of sex appeal and cultural significance?” “Do you usually listen to music like this?” and finally “Can we recommend some similar artists?” All three songs are just wonderful live – faithful but raw and immediate – though screening the video for ‘The Night…’ was kind of pointlessly distracting.

The main set ends with ‘Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings’ and then a climactic ‘I Love You, Honeybear’, a rousing, glorious version that catapults it high into my favourite Misty songs, with Tillman making his second foray into the crowd, playing both the woodland indie messiah and the pop god, as the confetti flies and the singer performs the laying on of hands, as he pleads: “Don’t give into despair/Cause I love you, honeybear.”

What I loved – and what most surprised me – about the show was how much thought, effort and enthusiasm had clearly gone into it: into the choreographed stage moves (though never so choreographed that there's no room for him to extemporise as he's swept away by emotion), the lighting that creates an icon out of his silhouette, the reshapings of older songs. Tillman’s distaste for the entertainment industry doesn’t translate into a contempt for his fans, as it does with so many artists. As a mentally ill bloke myself, I can understand that sometimes his interviews are car-crashes, and that he has good gigs and bad gigs. I know too, of course, that it need not necessarily constitute an enormous challenge for a man to behave nicely towards a roomful of people who adore him and his art. But I’d thought of him as probably being a bit of a dick, and that didn’t come across at all. He even did an extended encore: ‘Real Love Baby’ – which is pleasant, but could have been written by anybody – and the tedious ‘Magic Mountain’ followed by something extraordinary: his shopping list of contemporary ills (some real, some imagined), ‘Holy Shit' incorporating a mid-song freak-out and seguing straight into an explosive, furious grunge version of the waspish, self-annihilating character study, ‘The Ideal Husband’, which ends with him lying on his back on the stage, writhing around on the floor as he screams: “Wouldn’t I make the ideal husband?” Yes, Josh, you probably would.

One of the gigs of the year. I’m a fan now. A convert. I left the Apollo moved and exhilarated. Speechless. I’m glad I took up that ticket offer.

SETLIST:

Pure Comedy
Total Entertainment Forever
Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution
Ballad of the Dying Man
Nancy From Now On
Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins)
Strange Encounter
Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Goddamn Thirsty Crow
Only Son of the Ladiesman
When the God of Love Returns There'll Be Hell to Pay
A Bigger Paper Bag
When You're Smiling and Astride Me
True Affection
This is Sally Hatchet
The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apt.
Bored in the USA
The Memo
I'm Writing a Novel
Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings
I Love You, Honeybear

Encore:
Real Love Baby
So I'm Growing Old on Magic Mountain
Holy Shit
The Ideal Husband

(Source, as ever, setlist.fm)

***

I'm only really reviewing movies now (and only here), but last night had such an impact on me that I thought I'd write a little about it. Thanks for reading.