Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You is a celestial, American fairytale.
artwork by Melia Allan.
Somehow, Big Thief just keep getting better. After their twin 2019 albums, U.F.O.F. and Two Hands, catapulted them to the forefront of modern indie folk, the band aimed their ambitions even further upward. At the end of that year, the band’s drummer, James Krivchenia, pitched a concept so audacious that few other bands could hope to pull it off. Throughout 2020, Big Thief would engage in four distinct recording sessions at four different studios across the United States, with the goal of encapsulating as many aspects of the band as possible onto one album. After the pandemic interrupted their rigorous touring schedule and forced the band to recalibrate, Big Thief began their project in the woods of upstate New York. The remaining months of 2020 would take the band to Topanga Canyon, the Rocky Mountains, and Tucson, Arizona, where a cornucopian 45 songs were completed. The result of this experiment? Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, Big Thief’s sprawling new double album, whose 20 wondrous songs were themselves meticulously pared down from those 45 finished tracks.
Dragon is a supremely confident, self-assured statement from a band that masters every direction they wander down. But, despite the grandeur that will soon unfold, the album’s opening track, “Change,” begins rather unassumingly. Adrianne Lenker, the band’s principal songwriter, vocalist, and guitarist, gives the band her verbal cue to begin, and a sparse, steady drumbeat and dusty guitar seep into the track, which sounds as if time has eroded it down to its bare essentials. After some ruminations on the concept of change, Lenker asks:
Would you live forever, never die
While everything around passes?
Would you smile forever, never cry
While everything you know passes?
Whether consciously or not, Big Thief spend the rest of Dragon exploring these questions. They venture down many roads they’ve never traveled before, both literally, on their road trip across the U.S., and musically.
Steeped in tradition yet completely unburdened by it, the songs on this record dance between old-timey country (“Spud Infinity” and “Red Moon”), hushed folk fantasies (the title track), and campfire singalongs (“No Reason”). Elsewhere, their forays into electronica on “Wake Me up to Drive” and “Blurred View” feel just as organic as the songs that could have grown out of the windswept dirt in an old garden (“Change”). And the complex, squiggly guitar solos of “Simulation Swarm” and mutating cacophony of “Little Things” remind us that they still have no problems with rocking just as hard as any other indie rock band.
These genre experiments never feel contrived—it’s clear that these songs are all presented just as they were meant to be. They come neither from the desire to subvert nor adhere to any rule book of American folk, rock, and country music traditions. Instead, they sound the way they do because Big Thief is comfortable enough to not let their reverence of the storied history of these genres prevent them from playing around with them a little. They let a jaw harp bounce circles around a marching drum beat at the tail end of “Spud Infinity,” and shatter icicles at the end of the title track. James Krivchenia, who is also the primary producer of this album, clatters his kit through “Blurred View” like he’s auditioning for a Portishead drum sample. “Little Things” sounds like it was recorded in tornadic transit somewhere between Kansas and Oz. In the hands of a lesser band, these quirks might make the songs they belong to feel unfocused or self-indulgent, but because this is Big Thief, everything just feels right.
There’s a palpable sense of homespun electricity hovering in the space between every musical component of each and every one of Dragon’s 20 tracks. Big Thief doesn’t like to belabor things—most songs get captured on the first take, and by the time we’re lucky enough to hear them, they’re still buzzing with energy like fireflies in a glass jar. Moments of communal joy, like Lenker exclaiming “That’s my grandma!” in the middle of “Red Moon,” arise as a result of this band’s propensity to make music by simply going into a room and finding serendipity together. This energy is born out of the endless possibilities of the road trip that the album was recorded on, a shared experience in which your companions are the only thing that isn’t changing. You can tell how close-knit this band is—these songs feel loose and casual, but not sloppy or unstructured. They’re the creations of four old friends who, through years of touring and making music together, feel like family.
The biggest artistic leap that Big Thief take on Dragon is fueled by Lenker’s ever-evolving lyricism. Her 2020 solo album songs, which belongs to the same intimate canon of singer-songwriter albums as Springsteen’s Nebraska and Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago, already displayed immense growth, but the sweeping, cosmic breadth of her lyrics on Dragon is unparalleled. The elements frequently appear throughout the record, grounding its larger, existential themes in earthly simplicity: fires burn, rivers flow, winds howl, and topsoil is swept away. Simultaneously, Lenker reaches for the celestial: at least eight of the album’s songs mention heavenly bodies, and more still look up to the sky. In her search for answers to her questions of change and eternity, Lenker’s observations take on a wide-eyed profundity usually reserved for the whimsical musings of a child. Frogs joke, the wind sneezes, and winter’s snow becomes “cold tears of glitter” (“Promise Is a Pendulum”), the sun becomes a magnet (“Simulation Swarm”), and the atom becomes an empty vase (“The Only Place”).
After exploring everything from Biblical myths (“Sparrow”) to the other side of death (“Love Love Love”), Lenker ends “Blue Lightning,” the album’s final song, with this set of wishes:
I wanna be the shoelace that you tie
‘til the end will you be my friend?
I wanna be the mountain, kiss the sky
Yeah, I wanna be the vapor gets you high
Yeah, I wanna feel so happy that I cry
Yeah, I wanna be the shoelace that you tie
Yeah, I wanna live forever till I die
Lenker has found the answers to the questions she posed at the beginning of the record. She embraces tears, happiness, and yearns for the moments in which they collide. She wishes to live as if she is eternal, until she dies. Where her questions in “Change” were once surrounded by anxieties about everything fading away, her wishes are now enveloped by the warm comfort of unwavering companionship.
Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You is a fairytale. Its title is at once fantastic and resolute, conjuring images of mythical creatures and mystic mountains that suggest this time of tumultuous impermanence won’t kill our ability to dream. Its music and lyrics are a cosmic rearranging of American tradition, in which drum machines are allowed to share the stage with delicate fingerpicking, and the Earth and the cosmos are treated with the same sense of wondrous, reverent awe. Its creation reads like a legend I’ll pass on to my kids one day. Once upon a time, during a pandemic that made the world stand as still as a hurricane’s eye, four bandmates unmoored from their tour schedule road tripped around the country. They Waldened it in upstate New York, California dreamed in Topanga Canyon, baked in the infinite sun of the Sonoran Desert, and kissed the endless sky above the Colorado mountains. They created magic everywhere they went, and they turned it into an album.
Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You is out now via 4AD. Buy/stream it here.
edited by Nate Culbert, editor of Music You Need To Know.
artwork by Melia Allan.
album artwork believed to belong to either the publisher of the work or the artist.
