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This piece includes unpublished quotes from my recent i Paper interview with Adrianne and co.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

What a dream that was: Adrianne Lenker on tour

Black Box, Galway, Ireland – 19 April 2024
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

She is a label PR's darkest nightmare, and we love her for it.

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.

'Someday I'm gon' be a steamboat, baby'

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.

'I'm happy with you – why do I need to explain myself?'

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…

'Please, cut my hair'

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.

'I see God here and there'

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

'A convulsion of honesty brought me to life'

“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.

'Men are baptized in their anger and fighting'

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.

'Places you have been that I needed'

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.

'Wednesday in August, I was playing with my band'

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.

'I wanted so much for magic to be real'

‘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

'Both arms cradle you now'

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.

***

NOTES

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:

Queer Irish singer-songwriter Ellie O’Neill opens the first three dates, her voice racing around the octaves. She’s great, with killer melodies, and lyrics that slip between memoir and abstraction on standouts like ‘Song for Peter’ and ‘Anna with the Silver Arrow’. Nick Hakim, who’s known Adrianne since they were 17, and has often played on the same bill, is the support for the other six shows, singing slow, introspective indie ballads at the piano, including a touching cover of Chocolate Genius Incorporated's 'My Mom'.

SETLISTS:

Thanks to Peter, Fran, Paul, Sorrel, Jamie, Jordan and Jess for their company and friendship on the tour. And thanks to you for reading.

The abiding mental image from this tour is of Adrianne frowning with a kind of emotional concentration, head tilted to one side, eyes closed and lips pouting, words flowing out of the right side of her mouth.

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).

“When I say infinity, I mean NOW": Adrianne Lenker and Bob Dylan

Big Thief at Bristol Academy, 27/02/22
Big Thief at Shepherd’s Bush Empire, 02/03/22-05/03/22
Adrianne Lenker at EartH, 06/03/22

“The new album by @BigThiefMusic is a revelation,” tweeted Dwight from The Office this weekend. “Can I have permission to compare Adrianne Lenker to Bob Dylan?” Permission granted: the parallels are inescapable – and thickening.

When I followed Big Thief on tour in 2020 (not that I like to go on about it), I wrote:

I leave muttering something about Lenker being the only New Dylan since Dylan. You know in ‘Love Minus Zero’ when he sings, “My love, she speaks like silence”, or ‘Visions of Johanna – “The ghost of ‘lectricity howls in the bones of her face” – well no-one writes like that. But Lenker does. Not like Dylan, exactly – because what’s special about that? – but prolifically singular, with his perfect abstract specificity. “Your eyes were like machinery,” she sings in ‘Mary’. “Your hands were making artefacts in the corner of my mind.”

Perhaps the most exhilarating aspect of seeing either artist live, though, is that their songs are never finished: they’re in a constant state of flux, developed organically through being played to an audience. How a song sounds on record is just how it happened to sound at the point it was recorded. Or in the words of Dylan at the Free Trade Hall, “It used to go like that, and now it goes like this…” Take the title track of Big Thief’s latest, for example. Lenker introduced it in a whispered, half-written version at an Islington church in 2019. Last month it debuted on record: a wispy rendering so delicate that you feel if you breathed on it, it might blow away. By the time the band takes to the stage at Bristol, it has become a chugging, unremitting post-punk song, with a jagged, slashing guitar riff.

Or listen to ‘Not’, included among Obama’s songs of 2019, and essentially the band’s anthem nowadays. Reviewing the following year’s tour, I called it “an explosion of cathartic anguish … a list song that exalts through endless negation”, but there was release there: a rush of respite in Lenker’s breakaway guitar solo. This tour, there is no release. The support band back then was ITHACA, a London thrash metal group, and a sign that Lenker’s interest in getting heavier was getting heavy. ‘Not’ ends now in an unforgiving squall that’s directed entirely inwards. The flurry of squealing, arrhythmic high notes whistling from Lenker’s guitar feel like clues to an emotion, not the emotion itself. In Bristol, the song becomes a 15-minute freakout. On the second London night, Lenker towers above the crowd during the solo, her face tortured beneath the lights, purging something. The next evening her dress starts coming down during the guitar break, like a stress dream for the ages. She doesn’t quite cut her losses, but let’s say that she doesn’t extend the communication with her muse.

I love this picture because you can hear it.

Another interesting comparison with Dylan is how Lenker’s persona appears to be ageing in reverse. Dylan wrote ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ at 21, junked his political ideals in favour of creative ones with ‘My Back Pages’ at 23, and by 27 was writing throwaway country ditties. “Oh me oh my,” he sang that year. “Love that country pie.” By comparison, Lenker was a late starter: she didn’t put out ‘Indiana’, ‘I Still Hear You’ and ‘Steamboat’ until she was 22. But the three records (!) she released in 2014 feel like the crystallisation of late style: simple, pared-down, timeless. They are an old man’s songs. Perhaps her life has been back to front in a way: she married young, then caught up on her ‘freedom’ later.

Five years after that flurry of standards, Lenker would introduce a strange new tune called ‘Spud Infinity’, which mixes abstract cosmic imagery with twee nonsense poetry and sounds like what people who don’t like Big Thief think Big Thief sound like. Over time it has become a clarion call (and a merchandising opportunity: there is a long-sleeved ‘Spud Infinity’ t-shirt; I’m wearing it right now), and morphed from an ethereal poem into a wobbleboard-inflected album track and then a sing-along anthem. Appending an intro and outro centred around the words ‘lah-di-dah’, like an alt-folk Annie Hall, Lenker now takes a transparent on-stage delight in the song’s passages of trivial incoherence, as if Dylan had spliced bits of ‘Motorpsycho Nightmare’ into ‘Chimes of Freedom’.

That love of language for language’s sake is another parallel, surprisingly rare among songwriters. Think of the DA Pennebaker footage of Dylan in England in 1966, where he’s outside that cornershop, repeatedly re-arranging the words in his mouth, taking simple joy in the possibilities of a sentence. I was reminded of that before Lenker’s solo show at EartH last night, when she performed her customary, gentle duty of asking people who want to talk during the support act to do so outside. “If any of you have any social obligations that need to be… expressed verbally,” she said, “please do them in the… outer realm.” Aside from the humility, it felt like pure Dylan, right down to the mid-sentence giggle. But more importantly, it was pure Lenker: the perfect choice of words, inevitably straddling the mundane and the eternal. The similarities run deeper, though: it isn't just the elegant synonymising that draws these two artists together, it's the very sound of their syllables. Both his "majestic belts of bolts" and her "meteor show at the motel" are as much in love with the tongue as with the picture.

And yet sometimes words aren't enough. In 'Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands', after close to 10 minutes of cryptic love verse, rock music's most important poet simply gives up on the idea that his lyrics could ever do justice to Sara Lowndes' spiritual and aesthetic beauty, and finally picks up his harp. It's among the most moving moments in the Dylan canon, and finds an echo in Lenker's guitar solos: with words, she builds a dam; with sound, she sweeps it away. Her 2020 colllection of improvised instrumentals hinted at an artist growing tired of chatter, and in the title track of her accompanying 'songs' (which, paradoxically, also provided the name of the new Big Thief record), she made the feeling overt: time to trade the metaphysical for the purely physical. "I don't wanna talk about anything," she sings. "I wanna kiss, kiss your eyes again/Wanna witness your eyes looking."

Perhaps the most prosaic point of comparison between the pair is how prolific they are. Dylan released the five albums spanning The Freewheelin’… to Highway 61 in just over two years, writing dozens of other masterpieces that have since turned up in the Bootleg series. Lenker put out two Big Thief albums in 2019, and two solo records (one comprising instrumental improvisations) in 2020, before penning a 20-song double-album released last month. My friend Jeff called it “her Blonde on Blonde”, and that’s spot on: it’s sprawling, unfocused, with whiplash turns of tone; incoherent, perhaps, but with incredible high points. During the first show that I saw on the official Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You tour, two weeks after the record’s release, she performed three newer songs before playing anything from the album, including two absolute all-timers: a rambling, Neil Young-ish number about a river (‘Forgiver’) complete with shredding solos, and a quiet one, ‘Wait a While’, written mostly on the ferry across from the Dublin gig.

Introducing it, she said it was to comfort the heartbroken, and it seems that she has had her own heart broken. If these shows have seen her between-songs chatter become more natural – spotlighting a sense of comic timing that was always present in her lyrics but previously buried beneath sheer awkwardness – they have also suggested that she is Working Through Some Shit. The climax of ‘Flower of Blood’ sees her assaulting the bridge of her guitar, bending it to within a point of snapping as the track ascends into pure metal; ‘Not’ is purpled with rage, ‘Shoulders’ flecked with spit. It can’t just be down to entering the world of ITHACA, though one wonders how the ambient support act KMRU might influence Big Thief’s next moves: the Bristol show is dominated by strange and extended atonal intros. The next night it’s mostly the new album, then the one after that is as close to a greatest hits show as this band ever gets.

The recent country music influence is largely (and somewhat thankfully) absent. Dylan’s dalliances with the genre have usually been tinged with embarrassment, especially at first: the acknowledgement, perhaps, that this is a small Minnesotan boy playing dress-up. And that’s how Big Thief have tentatively approached country too. If there’s a cringier moment in their career so far than Adrianne’s cry of “That’s my grandma!” during the new album’s square dance number, ‘Red Moon’, then it must have escaped me. I really struggle to understand the point of pastiche in music: it feels like a dollop of self-satisfaction where the heart should be. The band’s other country tune, ‘Blue Lightning’ – a cousin of Evan Dando’s impeccable ‘Being Around’ – is also hampered by its affectations, though Lenker’s preference for playing the song as a lolloping, languid chronicle of offbeat admiration (rather than the country bop favoured by co-conspirator Buck Meek) helps a little.

On the second London night, when the band trips over ‘Little Things’, a song they’ve been struggling to render live, they ‘reset’ by watching Meek play a new number of his own, Lenker sitting down on the stage, bassist Max Oleachik lying on his back. It flows into the one of the most euphoric passages that I’ve ever witnessed at a gig: five full-band numbers of shimmering intensity – a rhapsodic, mounting ‘Mary’, ‘Black Diamonds’ reinvented in the Bunker Studio style – and, tossed in alongside, the sweet humanist sentiment of ‘Forgotten Eyes’ (the key refrain: “Everybody needs a home and deserves protection”). If the band’s essential duality – its capacity for quietness or ferocity – is another mid-‘60s Dylan trait (those being the two halves of his ’66 tour), it’s the spirit of the former, of the hiatus, that dominates Lenker’s heartstopping one-night-only show at EartH on Sunday night.

The first evening at Shepherd’s Bush, she makes her only concession to rock star ladder-climbing I’ve seen so far: playing the game for the three-songs-and-out photographers, striking a few poses, gently accentuating the facial mannerisms. There’s none of that at EartH, nor the breath-caught stillness of her full band solo spots. This is like she’s just picked up a guitar in a mutual mate’s flat and begun to cycle through new songs, cast-iron masterpieces (‘Indiana’, ‘cradle’) and deep cuts (‘Kerina’, an update of Dylan's 'Corrina, Corrina'), covering for flubs with self-deprecating quips, a genius in your front room.

She seems different there. But then she always does. Dylan once said, “I wake up in the morning and I'm one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else.” I’m certain that Lenker could relate. Her most popular song, ‘Paul’, is an ode to one of her alter-egos (“The last time I saw Paul, I was horrible and almost let him in,” she confides), and, most trivially, she always looks different. Last time she was rocking a Henry V pudding basin and then a long bob. This time she turns up shaven-headed, with a scar cut into one side. Across several nights, she’ll dye her hair blonde, and wear variously a vintage wedding dress, a Scarface t-shirt, a sweater that’s more holes than sweater, some sort of ornately-patterned kimono, and a see-through top (a bold choice, since there’s always the danger you’ll be upstaged by your own boobs). An enduringly enjoyable aspect of the Big Thief experience, too, is that the four members each look like they’re in different bands. Brian Epstein would shit.

Musically, though, they’re perfectly simpatico, their irregularities allowing them to effortlessly tessellate. For the most part, Meek plays a supporting role, sprinkling sounds into the mix, occasionally breaking out into an anti-solo dominated by the notes implied but not played. His cult status, or perhaps just the satisfying nature of his eight-letter Southern name, is defined by the fact that for every 10 fans shouting, “I love you, Adrianne,” there is one – always male – just yelling, “BUCK MEEK!” No pleasantries, just “BUCK MEEK!” That’s how you know you’re at a good show.

After playing a tormented new number, ‘Happy with You’ – halfway between an accusatory mantra and a Cranberries song, an impression not dispelled by Lenker’s hairdo – she says revealingly that you “don’t need to explain love”, before launching into ‘Certainty’, probably the best love song she has ever written. Like Dylan’s ‘I Want You’ or his late-period ‘Nettie Moore’, it’s built around a statement of perfect, direct economy (“My certainty is wild”), and there’s something so desperately affecting about seeing her perform it with Meek, when one knows their back story. They were married young, they broke up, they still write and play together, and they perform this almost as equals, both playing acoustics, voices entwined like brambles over a grave. They love each other. It’s complicated but it’s simple. Like the song.

Another guitar hero spotlighted at these shows is 80-year-old Tucker Zimmerman, a contemporary of Ralph McTell excavated from the footnotes of folk by an adoring Lenker, and summoned from his seclusion in the Belgian woods to open half of these shows. She takes the lead vocal on a version of his classic, ‘Slowin’ Down Love’, memorably describes his fingerpicking style as having “a danceband in his right hand”, and disappears at the start of his first show to find his songbook, which he’s left in the wings. He’s helped onto and off-stage each night by members of the main act. And that’s where there’s a key differences to Dylan: these people care about each other, their collaborators, their fans. You can accuse Dylan of many things but not of being a nice person.

There are marked disparities, too, when it comes to their limitations. “Geniuses steal”, of course (the ‘Nettie Moore’ chorus I mentioned was a direct lift), but Dylan has always stolen too much and too often. If Lenker has a shortcoming as a writer, it’s that her auteurism can lead to a repetition of imagery. I regard myself as one of the world’s premier Big Thief botherers: I turned up an hour before doors every night to get on the front row of six consecutive shows, and there are still a handful of their songs that I get mixed up because they essentially trade in the same pastoral imagery or Biblical allusion.

Yet there’s more to the reconfiguring of material than musical evolution. I wrote in a Guardian piece a couple of years back that it took seeing Big Thief live to reveal the secrets of some of their songs, as if they had meanings that could only be communicated in person. Hearing ‘Simulation Swarm’ live was a great musical experience, but hearing ‘Change’ was an emotional and intellectual one. That track had left me cold on record – another lilting trip to the bucolic well – but now that I understand it, I love it. As the perfect closer to the fifth and final show, it unfolded not as a retread but as a soothing antidote to the depressed stupor of ‘Terminal Paradise’, seeing the vastness of nature’s pattern, not the bitter poignancy of a single death. You know, like ‘Every Grain of Sand’.

Lenker has, in fact, only ever recorded one Dylan song, a version of ‘I Was Young When I Left Home’ for an obscure recording-studio project in 2015. It was among the first songs he ever wrote. Like him, she was so much older then. She’s younger than that now.