Adrianne Lenker of Big Thief will release her new solo album, Bright Future, on Friday, and ahead of that she performed a small club show at Music Hall of Williamsburg on Monday night (3/18) support from El Kempner of Palehound. Tickets for the show sold out nearly as soon as they went on sale, and when I arrived, before doors opened, there was already a line down the block, credit to Lenker’s growing popularity as a solo artist and recognition as one of the most important songwriters of her generation.
El, lead singer and songwriter of Palehound, opened the show. I had seen the band a few months ago at Bowery Ballroom, a riotous celebration of Palehoud’s great 2023 album Eye On The Bat, but this was a very different experience. El performed accompanied only by their acoustic guitar, and with their songs laid bare, their ability as a songwriter and guitarist really shone through. Palehound has recently been touring opening with Jason Isbell, a fitting bill as the two artists share the ability to lead a band and put on a great rock show, and are equally enthralling performing solo.
After El, Lenker took the stage and the first half of her set served to showcase songs off 2020’s fantasticsongs, including “dragon eyes,” “two reverse,” “zombie girl,” and “not a lot, just forever.” This ethereal love song was a highlight of the first half of the set, and the crowd sang along as a hauntingly beautiful chorus.
Even performing solo, Lenker is an orchestra onto herself. She plays the guitar like a piano, keeping time and underlining a song’s rhythm on the lower strings while tracing her vocals’ melodies on higher strings. Her guitar style is idiosyncratic, developed over years of accompanying herself, and she often performs songs in alternate tunings and using unexpected phrasings. This compliments her style as a songwriter. Her songs can all be identified as such, but song structure is seemingly more suggestion than a strict set of rules, and she is not afraid to veer off-road in pursuit of a melody or turn of phrase. Lenker’s songs, even upon first listen, have a familiarity to them, a lived-in quality. She is a masterful storyteller, and her lyrics, like her instrumentals, can be impressionistic, but it is the small, personal details that can grab and emotionally throttle you.
For the latter half of her set, Lenker was joined by collaborators Nick Hakim on piano and Mat Davidson on guitar and violin, two celebrated songwriters and multi-instrumentalists in their own right. As a trio they performed “Free Treasure,” “No Machine,” “Real House,” and “Sadness as a Gift” off her new album.. “Free Treasure,” Lenker’s latest single, was especially striking, an open-hearted song of devotion, which encapsulates both her growth as a writer as well as a performer. Live, Lenker puts so much into each song’s performance, and while the songs are played as composed on the record, they are performed with a certain rawness, as if she is uncovering each one for the first time and presenting them to us the audience with such care and love.
The crowd listened raptly and was fully engaged with the show, with the room pin quiet for the majority of night, save for the stifled sniffles from some in the crowd who could not help but be moved to tears. See pictures from the night by Emilio Herce, and a few attendee-taken videos, below.
Adrianne will be back in NYC for bigger shows on November 18 and 19 at Kings Theatre, and she plays Big Ears Festival this weekend.
