When Adrianne Lenker was 5, a railroad spike fell from the beginnings of a makeshift treehouse in her family’s Niswah, Minnesota yard, landing on her head and almost killing her. This moment moves into focus on “Mythological Beauty,” the lead single from her folk-rock band Big Thief’s gorgeous sophomore album, Capacity, out June 9 via Saddle Creek. But where other songwriters would let the vivid details of such childhood trauma take the lead, 25-year-old Lenker calmly examines the memory from her mom’s perspective. She imagines how it must have felt to be a young mother of three rushing to the hospital with a dishrag to your child’s cracked skull, wondering how life ended up like this and if there’s any turning back. Lenker often writes from this familial point of view on the new album. “I’m not quite sure if I’m writing the songs from myself to my future child, or to my inner child, or from my mother to me,” she tells me.
That Lenker can be as open-hearted and empathetic as she is, in light of all she has gone through, should be considered a gift to listeners. Even more striking is the timing. Speaking with Lenker three times over the last eight months, it becomes clear that she’s constantly processing her past, proverbially sorting through old photographs and going through as many bad memories as good ones in her songs. Her complicated history extends far beyond skull fractures, beginning with her birth into a cult and subsequent years of upheaval as her family extricated themselves from religion. From there, her early life became all about songwriting, thanks to her musician father. By the time she was 13, she was on track to become a child pop star—but ultimately it’s not what Lenker wanted. She walked away but never left music behind. Though Big Thief has just started to gain real momentum, following the Brooklyn quartet’s promising debut Masterpiecelast year, Lenker’s years of musical experience and quiet strength show in her work.
Compiled over the course of our ambling conversations, here is Adrianne Lenker’s story, in her own words:
I was born into a religious cult in Indianapolis, straight up. They had an apartment complex in this one area, and there were all these rules. My parents met through church and got married really shortly after, when they were both searching for connection and meaning, just like everyone is when they’re 20.
They both carried heavy burdens from their childhoods and were growing up as they were raising us. And the church wasn’t like, “Hey, come join our cult”—they just made them feel like part of a community, beckoned them in with this warmth and acceptance. Then it revealed itself for what it was, and thank God my parents were just like, “We’re out of here.” I was only there until I was 4, but there was a lot of residual debris—I was coming out of what felt like a cloud of judgment and control for another four years.
At that point we lived out of our big blue van. I remember staying with all kinds of characters for a while, all around the Midwest. We stayed in Coon Rapids [Minnesota] in a tiny apartment with this Russian family: two parents and their five little kids, then three of us kids and my parents in a two bedroom. We stayed with these two women who were living this Amish lifestyle, so my sister and I had to wear dresses and scarves around our heads. I remember when my dad said we could wear pants—I was so stoked because I was a tomboy. I went straight into wearing long, baggy shorts and backwards hats.
We lived in 14 different houses until I was 8, renting here and there. My dad suddenly had this realization about the religious stuff. He felt like he’d been deceived and he was almost throwing religion off himself. It was like this pendulum that had swung all the way to one side with being repressed and pent up, so it just had to go to the other. My parents became very open, and it was a traumatic shift. We went from not celebrating any holidays to having our first Christmas and Halloween when I was 8 or 9.
At that point my parents bought a house [in the Minneapolis suburbs], but right before we bought the house, my dad was like, “We’re selling everything and moving into a bus, this is what God is telling us to do.” So, we sold all of it. And then, sure enough, that wasn’t what we were supposed to do. When we moved into the house, we just didn’t have anything, only lawn chairs in the living room, blankets and pillows to sleep on.
The first song I wrote, when I was 8, was about feeling really angry—like the weight of everything on my shoulders. That’s something I’ve always tended to do. I’m the oldest of three and I still do it. It was like, “The pile of things I got to do stacks up to the sun. I'm angry at the world. I just want this feeling to be gone. I'm not sure that I can take it anymore.” Then the chorus was like, “That's just the way life is sometimes.” My first few songs were about that—always thinking about life from outside of it. A lot of my perspective had to do with my dad because he was always having philosophical discussions with me, asking questions and encouraging me to ask questions.
He’s a songwriter and he would spend so many nights getting in these trances on the guitar or piano where he wouldn’t want to stop. That meditation—where the most important thing was following the path of inspiration and getting everything you can before it disappears—really seeped into me. He would always talk about the muse and how it will visit you if you put your soul in a certain state. On some level he was consciously giving me this tool for healing, but I’m not sure if he realized that it would become my main form of survival.
When I was little, he taught me everything he knew—basic chords but also chords and melodies that aren’t typical to learn in your first stages of playing guitar. He also had this way of recognizing his own shortcomings and bringing in teachers. My sister, brother, and I all took voice lessons, and we all practiced karate. He always wanted me to be independent and fearless. He taught me the tools to never be alone in any place, how to read people intuitively. When I was 12, he would put me on a bus to Minneapolis, and I would transfer in St. Paul and take another bus to go hang out with this musician and stay-at-home dad, who would show me records and work on songwriting with me. My dad would also take me to open mic nights, and I would play bars when I was 12.
My dad was basically my manager from ages 13 to 16. I was on this train towards becoming a child pop star. Not that I would have necessarily become a star, but that was the goal. It wasn’t my goal, though, which I learned after making a couple records with producers and professional adult musicians. I just didn’t know what my vision was at 13. Look at anybody’s work that they did between 12 and 20: You can see yourself growing up. It was like if you took a kid’s art project and put thousands of dollars behind it and said, “This is solidified.” It was frustrating for anyone who was part of it. I didn’t have a label or anything. My dad’s super resourceful and a really passionate speaker. He would just present my music and get people who believed in it on board, so there were a handful of people who funded these two albums I did between 13 and 16. But one of the biggest investors was definitely my dad, even though we were definitely broke throughout.
My parents started separating when I was 12, and I moved into an apartment with my dad [in downtown Minneapolis], while my siblings were mostly at my mom’s house. I went to school through eighth grade, but I had a really hard time in school socially. My dad agreed to set me up with two tutors [instead of high school], and I met with them a couple times a week to study for my GED. I got my GED when I was 16, and I was just doing music full time. But there was a turning point around then where things got really tough with my dad.
I left and stayed with a friend. I cut my hair. It was the first time that I asserted myself as an individual and decided to remove myself from the situation. And then I began working with this guy Jeff Arundel, who took me under his wing and reminded me that nothing’s at stake. I was so stressed. I’d had people who’d invested in my music and been made aware of that pressure constantly, even though I didn’t really like the music that much. That’s right when I started getting into Elliott Smith and Iron & Wine, and I wanted to move into a more stripped-down sound. I also wanted to go to school again and be around peers.
I heard about this five-week summer program at Berklee [School of Music] and went on a scholarship when I was 17. It’s an expensive school and we didn’t have the money, so I had this crazy motivation when I went for the summer program. I made an appointment with the Dean of Admissions and went up there with my guitar to play him a song. I told him that I didn’t know music theory but that I wanted to go there. And he felt something from the song.
After I went home, I got a call from him that Susan Tedeschi [of the Tedeschi Trucks Band] was doing a series of concerts to raise money for one student to get a full ride to Berklee. I ended up getting it, going to Berklee, and being one of like two girls in the guitar department while I was there. There was this running joke around school that if you were a girl, people would just ask you all the time, “So you’re here for vocals, yeah?” So it was super cool to be supported by this shredding female guitar badass. Not to focus on her gender, but it was just really encouraging to see a woman doing something that you mostly see guys doing. I hadn’t even thought about it until that point.
At Berklee I just kept at what I was doing and formed a band. It felt good to be away from home, to make my own decisions and not have this looming idea of a career over my head. I really developed a lot as a writer while I was there.
The summer [after I graduated] I moved to New York. I met Buck [Meek, Big Thief guitarist and her chief collaborator dating back to Buck and Anne] on the day I moved there, at this corner market Mr. Kiwi. Technically we had already played a show together in Boston, so we recognized each other but weren’t sure from where. I didn’t know anyone in the city, and he was like, “Well, I’ve been here for a little while, I ride my bike everywhere, I can show you how to get around the city.” We just explored, and eventually we started to play songs together. We decided to buy that white conversion van and go on tour, just make that our whole lives. We didn’t make a band just to make a band—we waited for the right people to come. Basically, right when I got to New York, the universe was like, “Here you go—here’s the beginning of your band.” If anything had been altered, everything could be different.