It sounds like she's sitting on your bed playing just for you while it rains outside.
A profound, quiet intimacy that feels like a secret shared in a small wooden room.
Released in tandem with its instrumental companion 'instrumentals', 'songs' was born from the abrupt cancellation of Big Thief's 2020 tour. Adrianne Lenker retreated to a small cabin in Western Massachusetts, seeking to capture a sound she described as 'the inside of an acoustic guitar.' Working with engineer Phil Weinrobe, the duo utilized a purely analog setup, including a binaural head microphone to simulate human hearing. The recording process was famously difficult, involving power surges that destroyed several vintage tape machines. The resulting tracks are some of the most intimate in the modern folk canon, featuring heavy use of field recordings - most notably the rain on 'two reverse.' Critically, the album was hailed as a masterpiece of pandemic-era art, praised for its raw emotional honesty and its rejection of digital polish in favor of tactile, wooden resonance.
Put this on for
morning coffee steam rising while the woods are still greythat heavy silence after a breakup when the house feels too bigrainwater dripping from the eaves into a metal bucketbare feet on cold floorboards before the sun is updriving through a mountain pass with the windows up and the heater onreading a book by a single lamp while the wind rattles the glasswatching the first snowfall through a window that needs sealing
Moments worth waiting for
The sound of a heavy rainstorm bleeding into the microphones during the opening of 'two reverse'.
The gentle, rhythmic creak of a wooden chair that persists through the silence of 'anything'.
The way the guitar strings buzz and snap with tactile proximity on 'ingot', sounding inches from the ear.
Sounds like
2020s production with a 2020s soul
Sits beside
Pink Moon - Nick Drake, For Emma, Forever Ago - Bon Iver, The Creek Drank the Cradle - Iron & Wine, Seven Swans - Sufjan Stevens
Lyrical territory
nature, love_lost, self_examination
02Deviation
songs · vs · Adrianne Lenker
Artist
This Album
Vulnerable
Mood · ↑ +8% more than usual
On this album, vulnerable sits about 8% more prominent than across the rest of the artist's catalogue.
