Bright Future: how does Adrianne Lenker rewrite her past?
The prolific folk artist’s latest album is a rich revisiting of memory in all its forms, for both her and her fanbase.
Bright Future, Adrianne Lenker’s new solo album, took me by surprise. I pressed play on the first track, “Real House,” to hear muted piano chords, creaking wood, and slow breaths. Lenker takes us into memories of her mother, ambiguously stitching together flashes of memories to create a portrait of lost childhood innocence and pain. This memory reverberates into the present as Lenker sings, “I’m 31 and I don’t feel strong/Your love is all I want.” Hearing these lines for the first time, I was struck by Lenker's ability to weave her history into the future.
When Adrianne Lenker announced the release of Bright Future, I found myself feeling increasingly sentimental. In high school, I tracked her rise through her YouTube videos, learned a few of her acoustic songs on my guitar, and eventually went to several of her concerts with friends. To put it simply, I was a fangirl. Having followed her other artistic project—Big Thief—I have seen Lenker’s identity as an artist constantly evolve toward new creative openings. Her newest songs mark a merging of these two distinctive voices, bringing together ambitious instrumentation, folksy experimentation, and her distinctive warmth. As I enter my third year of college, Lenker’s Bright Future urges me to take a closer look at the past, as if to collapse the distance between who I am now and who I was then. After 10 years of releasing music, Lenker encourages us to slow down and appreciate the gift of aging and changing.
Released as a single ahead of the album, “Sadness as a Gift” shows Lenker’s newfound voice on full display. Lenker sings, “Leaning on the windowsill/You could write me someday and I think you will/We could see sadness as a gift/And still feel too heavy to hold.” An Adrianne Lenker breakup song leaves no room for anger or resentment, instead taking the loss of a relationship in stride and pinpointing how this severed connection continues to hold deep importance in her life. I first heard this track as an unreleased song at a Big Thief concert I went to in April of 2022, on the cusp of graduating high school. At that time, I expected myself to undergo a shift to an adult version of myself as soon as I arrived in college. Two years later, I admit that I am still waiting patiently for such a moment. As Lenker frames it, growth is nonlinear and often more painful than anticipated. In “Sadness” specifically, Lenker moves forward while holding on to the bittersweetness of the past.
On the following few tracks, Lenker leaps toward lyrical contradiction while weaving her musings with a soundscape of voices and fingerpicking. On “Fool,” an upbeat staccato beat opens a song where Lenker wonders about her future with her partner. The melody repeats and rewinds as Lenker goes over the thoughts in her head, but concludes by accepting the uncertainty of such a future.
While so many elements of Bright Future reveal a departure from previous styles, the middle of the album is rich with familiarity. The signature sensitivity infused into her vocals and steady fingerpicking on “No Machine” and “Free Treasure” recalls earlier classics of Lenker’s discography. These are songs that have already grown old and familiar for me, particularly on my walks around Hyde Park. When I find myself overwhelmed, I turn to Lenker’s discography. On “No Machine,” she sings, “No surprise, the wound lives in your eyes/the diamond shines like a needle in the desert.” Such rich metaphors remind me of Big Thief’s 2022 album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You but are grounded with unfettered honesty that read more like a page from Lenker’s diary than a group project.
“Free Treasure” guides us through scenes of nature and routine that, as the title suggests, are valuable moments and experiences that cost nothing. Recently, I’ve been on the hunt for love songs that pertain to friendship specifically. While Lenker is often referencing romantic relationships, to me, Bright Future lends itself to any kind of intimacy.
Perhaps the most experimental song on the album, “Evol” requires more than one listen to truly understand, using mirrored language to ascertain the contradictory qualities of love. Lenker’s wordplay demands a closer look into the oppositional giving and taking of intimacy hidden in moments and spoken language. As an example, she sings, “Words back, words backwards are lethal/Time spells emit, who can see it?” Without the lyric sheet on hand, the cyclical quality of lyrics paired with the repeated ups and downs of her piano playing feels like a spell being cast.
Lenker’s recordings are intuitive and present, welcoming me into the recording studio as if I were a member of the band. This philosophy is carefully imbued into her instrumentation and storytelling, making for one of her most cohesive projects thus far. Recorded with her sound engineer Phillip Weinrobe, Bright Future was created completely on analog tape. Sounds of wind chimes, trees, birds, and breath are not filtered out, functioning instead as background instruments to the music itself. In her live performances, Lenker lets her intuition guide her as she plays, making intentional choices to change lyrics, dynamics, and even melodies. As a surprise to many listeners, Lenker included a reimagined “Vampire Empire”, a song originally released as a single with her band last August, on the album. The rereleased version heard on “Bright Future” is jagged, overlapping, and constraining, as Lenker’s vocals battle for attention with a guitar, violin, and piano melody. By comparison, the studio version opens with a warm and building instrumental backing, and the song continues to build tension into Lenker’s voice.
In making these palpable changes, Lenker embraces the life of a song as something that can and will inevitably evolve. In late June, I was lucky enough to hear her perform at the Chicago Theatre, where she played both new and old music. She opened with a few of her earliest releases, which immediately brought me back to early high school days when I had just discovered her music. Yet even in revisiting her older self, she infused new sensibilities with her older storytelling. She changed melodies and slowed down her voice. To me, it no longer felt as if she was running out of breath trying to hold on to each note. She spoke briefly between songs about how the music she puts out is not about herself, but about the community it ends up joining.
How might I revisit ‘old songs’ in the same way? I don’t mean this literally, but I want to take a page from Lenker’s book and look at the past as something that can be revisited and revised. How can I stop dismissing a younger version of myself for my mistakes and missteps? How can I learn from things my younger self may have even done better? Like Lenker, I want to include the noise and the uncertainty of the past as I move forward.
Even as Bright Future leaps around time and space ambitiously, Lenker’s methods of recording and collaborating follow her subject matters of aging and evolving. In the first few seconds of “Already Lost”, we can hear each tape starting as musicians warm up and mutter words like, “yup” and “ready?” before Lenker commands the beginning by counting “1, 2, 3, 4.” By leaving these distinctive sounds in, Lenker lets us hear the act of recording as it plays out in real-time. “Already Lost” is a love song about uncertainty and desire in all its forms, whether it be seeing someone familiar in a new light, or the way the seasons seem to be changing before her eyes. In a few lines, she asks: “Why do leaves turn yellow and fall? Who absorbs it all? Who absorbs it all?” Lenker provides no definitive answer or closing, turning a simple and upbeat folksy tune into something a bit more existential. It feels like fall in Chicago all over again. The air is crisp with nostalgia as I press play on “Already Lost” and walk around. I’m trying to hold on to this time of year, but things keep moving faster than I’d expect them to. Yet, Lenker’s uncertainty reveals a tender way to tease out new experiences from the old—each moment spent with familiar faces is worth more than we give it credit for.
“Cell Phone Says” is Lenker’s way of collapsing the distance between her and someone else across the seasons. Lenker tracks these changes with intent and care, hoping to find comfort in the routine while she calls a loved one. The gentle vocals are sandwiched between a repeated guitar melody, going in circles until an abrupt stop. Each lyric is elongated as if Lenker is trying to savor every last note. She sings, “So together we take the call/ and we hold the line through the static sprawl/Though the distance we travel are expanding still/we meet in dreams by the Lilac River.”
Lenker’s wild affection toward the present moment becomes ever so potent on “Donut Seam”, using apocalyptic metaphors to hone in on the smaller moments of togetherness. As Nick Hakim’s voice echoes the chorus over Lenker’s opening chords, Lenker proposes a simple question as the world around her falls apart: “This whole world is dying/Don’t it seem like a good time for swimming/Before all the water disappears?” Scales merge and collapse in Lenker’s lyrics, creating ambiguous symbolism between an ending relationship and ecological destruction. “Donut Seam” echoes the planetary levels of instability of “Not,” from her second studio album with Big Thief. Yet, Lenker urges us to search for comfort amongst impending doom.
Normally, music simply accompanies my tasks, whether I’m doing laundry, cooking, writing, exercising, or riding the CTA. Bright Future is not music to accompany a task, but music for rethinking how to listen. Listening, the way Lenker defines it, is not a passive experience to wash through you, but rather a difficult act of understanding yourself. Each song is revelatory and new, like a live concert set, forcing me to sit in place and fall into the music. Lenker asks me to slow down and appreciate change and uncertainty by looking into myself, not away from myself. While there is no definitive guidebook for heading towards the unknown, Lenker’s Bright Future gives me an open ended answer that I will hold with me through songs.
edited by Camille Cypher.
album artwork believed to belong to either the publisher of the work or the artist.