As part of their last three album cycles, Big Thief have opened up listeners to increasingly vast collections of their material, a living body of work that has often seen multiple versions of songs overlap between the discography of the band and that of singer/guitarist Adrianne Lenker. The year 2019 saw them release two full-length albums, and 2022’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You is a double album unto itself, immense at 20 songs spread across 80 minutes of music. Dragon… was widely praised as one of the best records of the year – it delivered beautiful, intimate arrangements while spanning a range of artistic styles, from familiar folk-rock all the way into sharp turns like ‘Blurred View’ that emerge unexpectedly, that one in particular channeling mid-90s trip-hop of all things. It’s a perpetually-unraveling treasure, and to see selections of it performed live only accentuates the impact of its songs.
Guitarist Buck Meek is pulling double-duty for this early 2023 tour, playing with Big Thief as usual but also opening the show with his own five-piece band. It’s a frigid evening courtesy of a looming polar vortex, and even under the stage lights he elects to keep his puffy red jacket on for more than half the set. While Lenker sings lead for Big Thief, Meek’s set is a reminder of how each of the four members is an equally important chamber in the tender but resilient heart that is the band; his clear love of traditional country and folk structures, including a mournful pedal steel, are on full display. Meek and Lenker have a longstanding collaboration as writers, and on a whim he looks to the side of the stage and asks her if she’d like to sing ‘Sam Bridges’, one of the first songs they ever wrote together, and she obliges.
The first song of Big Thief’s set comes from one of Lenker’s solo records – ‘ingydar’ is a quiet segue into the night, but it leads with subject matter that the band often explores, with Dragon… being no different in this respect. “Everything eats and is eaten, time is fed,” Lenker observes – this fixation on the passage of time and the nature of impermanence underpins a great deal of her lyricism. By the time the third song of the night rolls in, the dynamics have shifted considerably, and ‘Flower of Blood’ builds to its conclusion with Lenker hammering the frets at the near end of her guitar’s neck. ‘Terminal Paradise’, which elicits cheers of recognition from the crowd in its first few notes, has the distinction of being the only song of the set recorded by both Lenker and the full band, once on abysskiss and again on 2019’s UFOF, respectively. While drummer James Krivchenia can play with such fury, his contributions here are delicate and understated, and Meek and Lenker’s voices blend together, ascending ever higher in lines that once again chart the cyclical nature of life; death portrayed as a trail that leads to a blossoming flower.
Prior to starting ‘12,000 Lines’, the mentions of fruit in ‘ingydar’ earlier turn out to have been a bit of accidental foreshadowing, with one of the band’s crew emerging from backstage with blackberries as bassist Max Oleartchik switches to an upright bass for this song. Adrianne realizes in the moment that it’s the first time she’s ever eaten onstage – and is quick to jokingly clarify that “blackberry” refers to the fruit, not the (long-obsolete) phone brand. Oleartchik and Krivchenia add a stomping heft to ‘Dried Roses’, which followed by ‘Blue Lightning’ forms a couplet of some of the most directly folk-inspired songs from the latest album. But where ‘Dried Roses’ features a wealth of quotidian imagery, ‘Certainty’ aims its sights at a much more cosmic scale – Lenker sings of someone sleeping beside her “on a plane, in the future”, though the usage of “plane” here is something of a double entendre. This blending of the present and future, the mutability of time, is something that the band has revisited often – in ‘Orange’ she sang of a lover, “I mourn her death / as our legs are twisting in her bedroom”, a reminder that with enough objectivity it can be said that everything is happening all at once, joy and loss and everything in between.
At this point in the night, Lenker announces the next song is a new one – in the Big Thief extended canon this could mean any number of songs that float in the ether having yet to take form as recorded material, but this one is recent even among that cohort. ‘Vampire Empire’ is poised to be an instant classic for the band and one of the strongest songs from their next release, whenever that may appear. It’s fast and loud, recounting of passion interspersed with the equally volatile downsides of an imbalanced relationship: “You turn me inside out and then you want me outside in / you spin me all around and then you ask me not to spin” best describing the unsolvable paradox of this “falling” empire. Lenker’s perfectly-assembled chorus comes out rapid-fire, and at the end of each line her voice shoots up into falsetto for just one syllable to further accentuate the whiplash. The final chorus gives way to an unhinged scream, and even on her acoustic guitar Lenker shreds the strings while kneeling on the ground.
‘Not’, which appears two songs later in the set, started out much the same way as ‘Vampire Empire’: something the band played well before its release on Two Hands that gathered a reputation among fans through a series of YouTube videos, Instagram posts, and the like. Coincidentally, both songs also play with the notion of ambiguity once again, in these cases with regards to gender. ‘Not’, with its whirlwind of negated imagery, builds to another massive solo, this time electric, and Lenker comes to the fore of the stage in the lengthy conclusion of the song which lurches back to full force just when it appears to be slowing down for the first time. She jokes that she should have another blackberry as a reward for conquering a fear, saying she’s “naturally shy” and not usually inclined to play at the very edge of the crowd.
The night’s most joyous moment is arguably next in the penultimate song of the band’s main set, when Lenker invites her brother Noah to the stage to provide the frog-like twang of the jaw harp on ‘Spud Infinity’. They play the song a bit faster than its recorded version, and there are big cheers from the crowd for the mentions of garlic bread and potato knishes. In less culinary terms, the song is one of the band’s most humanistic statements despite its playfulness – “one peculiar organism aren’t we all together?” Lenker posits as she references a “celestial… extraterrestrial” side of the self that grinds against that oneness, separating people from each other and even themselves. The song’s name has also spawned a particularly adorable series of merch featuring a little anthropomorphic potato with cowboy accoutrements and an eye mask in the shape of a lemniscate.
The band close their main set with another newer track, ‘Happy with You’, whose titular refrain is repeated often; then after the briefest of breaks they return for a final pair of songs, beginning with ‘Masterpiece’, a treat for all, but especially for the person who shouted, “Play ‘Masterpiece’!” in a lull earlier in the night. They close with ‘Change’, which is in fact the first song from Dragon…, possibly an intentional inversion. ‘Change’ explores a notion that has been the object of many philosophical texts and lyrics for as long as such things have existed, but even with such a well-documented topic, Lenker’s writing and the resounding group harmonies elevate age-old questions. Circling back to the ever-fertile ground of making and unmaking, she asks, would it really be worth living forever as everything passed by? Can we understand happiness without sadness as a contrast? Death was a trail in ‘Terminal Paradise’, here it’s a door to the unknown, symbolized by the vastness of space, the depths of the sea, or – on a much smaller but equally-unknowable and equally-final scale, like a suitcase.
Of a partner who’s moved on, Lenker wonders aloud, “Could I set everything free?” and accept their happiness with another? The question is not answered directly; as she said in ‘Masterpiece’, “There’s only so much letting go you can ask someone to do.” Those two songs were recorded roughly six years apart, but in the band’s performance they’re woven together at the end of the night, almost inseparable. It’s in this beautiful, bittersweet weaving together of past, present, and future that Big Thief’s music truly presents itself in totality.
