She writes music from this place that’s very intuitive and fearless, and she has confidence that there’s some kind of spirit or force that she can listen to.”īefore Lenker vacated her apartment in New York, she had to paint over an illustration that her ex-girlfriend had drawn on the bedroom wall.

It’s always this instrument of witchcraft. “I never really think of her, like, fucking around and playing riffs or something. “She gives a lot of significance to that moment where she’s holding the guitar,” Oleartchik told me. She sometimes speaks about writing as a kind of conjuring. Lenker is a quick and instinctive writer, and even under normal circumstances her songs are raw and unfussy-it can feel as if they were dug up whole, like a carrot from the garden. She made the records simultaneously, at a remote cabin in New England, in the early, panicked days of both the pandemic and a breakup. This month, Lenker will release two solo albums: “Songs,” a collection of tender, harmonically complex folk tunes, and “Instrumentals,” which is composed of a pair of slowly unfolding guitar pieces. She had just ordered a twin mattress, a portable woodstove, and new linens.

The rest of the band-the guitarist Buck Meek, the bassist Max Oleartchik, and the drummer James Krivchenia-had since left, but Lenker stuck around to renovate the trailer. Lenker had spent the past few weeks recording with Big Thief at a home studio in the Catskill Mountains, run by the musicians Sam Owens and Hannah Cohen. “Nice to meet you-let’s talk about death.” “Is it too early for this?” Lenker joked. Our conversation drifted toward the Zen idea of impermanence. The sun refracted against the surface of the creek until the water turned black.

The exhaustion and sorrow of the spring had left everyone feeling precarious. Moving can be disorienting-all that sorting and boxing and tossing out forces a kind of self-reckoning-and for Lenker the experience was only intensified by the ongoing anxiety of the coronavirus pandemic, which made imagining any sort of future feel optimistic, if not naïve. For the next couple of months, at least, the trailer would be home. She was preparing to haul a vintage camping trailer across the country to Topanga Canyon, on the west side of Los Angeles, where her band, Big Thief, was planning to meet up. The day before, Lenker, who is twenty-nine, had packed up the Brooklyn apartment she’d been sharing with two roommates. In late August, the singer, songwriter, and guitarist Adrianne Lenker stood beside a creek in upstate New York, watching the water move.

Train of Thoughts by John C. Lenker Jr.