Why Adrianne Lenker Plays Guitar To Survive

"I've been recorded and performing my whole life," says Adrianne Lenker. "But I always wanted to have a band, to just be in a band. And that took a while."

The 25-year-old songwriter started early: picking up a guitar at six ("in a motel room on the way from Minneapolis to Indianapolis, on a road trip with my dad"), writing songs at ten, issuing her first solo record, Stages Of The Sun, at 14. She finally found a band in 2013 after moving to New York, slowly attracting the other members of Big Thief to play around her. Their 2016 LP, Masterpiece, laces Lenker's folky songs in noisy indie-rock squall, its taut set of 12 tunes a 'debut' a lifetime in the making.

"We had the intention of making a record that felt like it was a complete work," Lenker says. "These are the [songs] that fit together the best, [that] are all speaking from a similar place. And a lot of them are call and response to each other, almost different sides of the same song, like 12 pieces of one question. Interstate is a response to Real Love. Humans is a response to Paul."

"I don't even know if they've heard. Actually, to be honest with you, I don't know how any of them have reacted."

The songs are united by their candour — "nothing at all in the record is fictional" — and by their use of proper names. There's cuts called Lorraine, Paul and Randy, and there's also a "Benny" and a "Liza" in the lyrics. How have these real-life humans felt about ending up in Big Thief's songs? "Hmm, I'm not sure," Lenker considers, with a chuckle. "I don't even know if they've heard. Actually, to be honest with you, I don't know how any of them have reacted."

Since Masterpiece's release, and the endless touring that's come thereafter, Lenker has started to feel as if these songs are no longer just hers. "I've felt really warmed by all the people who've come up to me, or to the band, and shared their personal experiences of the record, because [those stories] bring more life into the songs. We've been playing these songs, over and over, for a year-and-a-half. Some of them have held their identity, but there's others that've changed, and when we play them now, I feel that they've been shaped by other people, by the energy that audiences bring to them."

The endless tour that Big Thief are still in the middle of feels disorienting to Lenker. "There's so many faces, so much decay and beauty and life, all of this stuff happening," she says. "It's too much... like this wave that's washing over you."

But, playing music every night is, for her, equal parts living the dream and functional necessity. "It's always been the way that I process things," Lenker offers. "Sitting with my guitar every day is something that I feel like I need to do. It's a method of survival. It's not making music because I want to make music, or to make a career. It's just the way I cope with life. It's a medicine."