AS Friday-evening rush hour honks to life in Manhattan, Adrianne Lenker is recounting some of her other favourite sounds. A going-away party buzzes in the record-label office downstairs, but it’s inaudible as the singer-songwriter mimics aqueous drips and trickles. A flowing river is more like a “big whisper”. She relishes a strong wind cutting through a wide swathe of trees, and when she drives, she often just likes listening to the sound of the car on the road. She has a special fondness for the quiet scrape of a handheld pencil sharpener. “I associate sounds with things that make me feel good in general, like a sharp pencil,” she says.
These tones are just as musical to Lenker’s ears as anything she could pluck from a guitar or a piano. More than miscellaneous albums, these other sounds help tether Lenker to the world around her. Lenker’s unique sensitivity to her environment has, paradoxically, resulted in lots of other noise in her life – her time is often in high demand from strangers because of the staggering body of songs she’s recorded on her own and at the front of the invigorating rock band, Big Thief.
In both cases, her signature has been her poignant lyrics and melodies that take uncommon twists. On her new album, , Lenker scoops even deeper into her spirit as she offers some of her most vulnerable material yet. The record opens with “Real House”, a stark and delicate piano number where Lenker sketches out a handful of autobiographical scenes. She’s written about her mother before in Big Thief’s “Mythological Beauty”, but “Real House” ripples forth with more detailed images of childhood dreams, a tense hospital stay and the death of a family dog. She nimbly skates a line of ambiguity between personal intimacy and confessionalism, an effort
