Not long ago, Adrianne Lenker stood on the beach and considered getting mad at her dog. The Big Thief songwriter and vocalist had spent the day hiking with Oso, a tan and white creature with a curly tail and friendly eyes, and was running late for a recording session. When she called him to come to the car, he disobeyed: running around, greeting other dogs, evading her grasp. As she describes the situation over the phone from Northern California, it’s easy to imagine her frustration.
To bring me further into her mindset at the time, she dreams up a few hypotheticals, slipping into different voices for each passing thought. In one, she snaps at Oso in a pathetic growl—the angry dog-owner she vowed never to be. In another, she imagines Oso actively spiting her, voicing his mind’s running monologue. In yet another, she has a real talk with the dog, explaining her feelings as she would to a close friend who disappointed her. In actuality, she grabbed Oso while he was distracted and, as they walked back to the car in silence, she thought about what she could take away from the situation.
“You learn patience,” she explains. “You’re being gentle with a dog. And in doing so, you’re being gentle with yourself.” Lenker adopted Oso in New Mexico in 2020 and brought him to most of the sessions for Big Thief’s new album, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You. “He brought out everyone’s 10-year-olds,” she says, recalling her bandmates wrestling and playing fetch with the pup between takes. That childlike openness and curiosity is felt throughout Dragon, the quartet’s most expansive, free-ranging, and collaborative album to date.
Lenker describes an even, intuitive relationship with her bandmates: bassist Max Oleartchik, guitarist Buck Meek, and drummer James Krivchenia. It was Krivchenia who first proposed the idea of following up the group’s masterful 2019 LPs U.F.O.F. and Two Hands with a sprawling project that would span various recording sessions in different locales with different engineers. He wanted to capture the myriad sides of Lenker’s songwriting and the band’s sound that had been left out of their four previous, tightly sewn studio albums. And after working with producer Andrew Sarlo on those records, Krivchenia wanted to produce this one himself.
As with all decisions made among Big Thief, this was a mutual one—but it began with a formal proposal. While they were on tour in Europe in 2019, Krivchenia sat the band down by their hotel’s continental breakfast and read a printed-out speech. “He was standing up and pacing a little while he read it,” Lenker tells me, laughing. “It was so beautiful. There was not a moment’s hesitation. We were like, ‘Yes, of course this is what needs to happen.’”
Krivchenia is the group’s giggliest and most excitable member, often sounding as much a fan of the music as a guiding force behind it. He first met his bandmates when he engineered their debut album, 2016’s Masterpiece, becoming a member shortly after. Since then, they have learned to make their recordings feel as in-the-moment as possible. “Music sounds better when people play it together,” he explains on a separate call from Los Angeles. “We could touch it up, but then you’d just sound like everyone else who knows how to touch their music up. It’s really easy to do that—which is why a lot of music sucks ass.”
Inspired by the making of her 2020 solo album of improvised guitar performances, instrumentals, Lenker sought to document the band in motion, finding a wider definition of what their albums can offer. “We don’t need to be anything. If things sound weird, or funny, or bad, then that’s how it sounds,” she says. “I’m learning that we can’t not be Big Thief. Even if we’re trying something and it’s not working, what makes something us is just that we did it together.”
The sessions kicked off in summer 2020, following the band’s longest-ever break from performing together, and they immediately embraced a feeling of spontaneity. They favored first takes, capturing the spark of a song being written as it’s performed. “We had this huge energy source from just being hungry to play at all—and to see each other,” Lenker recalls. Meek says the timing of the pandemic actually dovetailed into Krivchenia’s plan, allowing them an indulgence that their fast-paced touring schedule rarely allowed: “It gave us an entire year to just travel the country, record all these songs, and kind of lose our minds a bit.”
This rangy process gave the band time to search for definitive versions of the works in progress that had been kicking around Lenker’s songbook. They tried out the title track at each of the recording sessions, and Meek advocated for a visceral rendition that featured the whole band screaming, filtered through an effect called the “dehumaniser,” to mimic the sound of dragons. In the end, the one that landed on the record is more open-hearted and mystical, featuring the sound of shattering icicles.
The album is marked by this kind of exploration: “Spud Infinity” is a punny country song accompanied by Lenker’s brother playing jaw harp; “Wake Me Up to Drive” is a droning, drum-machine-accompanied ode to road tripping; “No Reason” is a firepit singalong with a prominent flute solo running through it. “There’s an element of embracing what’s not cool about us,” Krevechnia says of the latter song. “When we’re real with ourselves, we’re a dorky group of people—which, in some ways, makes us cool too.”
As Big Thief have evolved into one of the more successful indie bands of the past decade, they’ve managed to maintain a united front. “Until everyone gives the OK, we don’t move forward on anything,” Lenker says. “It helps that we all have the same moral foundation.” As an example, Meek remembers getting an offer to play a branded private party that would have helped pay some medical bills a few years ago. Half of them were interested, but the other half was vehemently opposed. Ultimately, they all decided against it. “We could probably make a lot more money if we did stuff like that,” he concedes. “But we have to be careful with compromising our integrity.”
At a time when more eyes are on Big Thief than ever, a long-form statement like Dragon New Warm Mountain feels like a risk. But it also serves as a natural evolution of their guiding ethos: to remain restless, never staying in one place for too long. They talk about what sounds like another double album’s worth of outtakes left from the sessions—including some of Lenker’s favorites—along with ideas for the next band project and future solo albums. “There’s an element of danger that keeps us alive,” Meek says. “We’ve learned to push into that fear because it gives us life. And it keeps us moving.”
Below, Lenker delves further into the making of Dragon New Warm Mountain and her ongoing evolution as a songwriter.
Adrianne Lenker: I love humor in music, and it’s actually harder to do than you’d think. It takes a certain bird’s-eye view perspective to poke at the material and be like, “Look at this old crazy existence. Isn’t this ridiculous?” The stuff I find the funniest is also simultaneously sad and serious. John Prine is really good at that.
I also have a pretty dorky sense of humor. I love puns. My grandparents inspire my sense of humor a lot. There’s this song that didn’t make it on the record, and the beginning goes: [sings] “Cactus practice/Every day wake at 5:03/Greeting the hot sun of a gun/A condo in a succulent city/Wearing nobody’s pants/Just a sharp suit/Busy with the ants.” [laughs]
I used to think of “Spud Infinity” as purely a joke song, but as I played it, I realized it’s not. It’s serious. There’s playfulness in it: “Your elbows are on their own/Wandering like a rolling stone.” What part of our body do we live in? Maybe we live in our whole body, but it feels like we’re more in our head than our feet. So what the hell animates us? And where does it come from? There’s endless mystery in that we’re hurling through space, completely fucking everything up, but there’s also this incredible beauty to be found in every corner. I like humor because it feels like a survival skill. You have to have a sense of humor about yourself. Even being a band, it’s good medicine for us to not take ourselves too seriously.
I gotta feel something deep in my guts. It’s gotta make me cry, or feel like making love, or want to dance. I have to be able to hear it and be transported from wherever I am. It has to be strong. That’s my own gauge. I can’t sing anything that I don’t feel fully. It doesn’t even feel like a choice, honestly. I just can’t act. There’s so much lukewarm music. It’s hard for me to listen to music that doesn’t grab my heart and shake me.
I’m becoming more fearless. I definitely had a desire for things to be complex: Is this chord progression too simple? Is this lyric too simple? Is this cliche? Is this corny? I feel less of that noise in my head, and more of just, “This is what I want to sing.” In “Change,” I felt it was just straight-up my 7-year-old self writing it: “Change like the sky/Like the leaves/Like a butterfly.”
It’s the dance between my child self and my older, mother self, always in conversation. I’m just becoming more confident in myself and less worried about where my career will go, or how people will receive something. I’m learning how to be less critical of what I’m making as I’m making it.
I had been working on “Little Things” for a couple years. It felt like one of those seeds of a song that would never take shape. But then each time I would play it, I would get really inspired. It had such a nice energy; I just wished the words would come. Then when we had the session in Topanga with [engineer] Shawn [Everett], I just decided that I was going to write it. Sometimes I get surprised when I realize that I actually have the power to just choose to make something. I so often forget that and I’m like, “Gosh, I wish inspiration would strike!” And then I’ll just get determined. It came out in one go, probably in an hour. That same day, we were all playing it together as a band. It was like this big gust of wind blew through, and we were all riding it. It felt so fun and euphoric. What you hear [in that recording] is just us playing together. It’s still one of my favorites.
The live aspect can trip me out a little. It’s so many people looking at you, and you’re literally under a spotlight. Sometimes my own self-criticism is the loudest thing and it distorts the picture. I’ll finish a show and just be like, “Damn it, I wasn’t fully present and I let everyone down.” And then James will be like, “From where I was sitting, I looked into the crowd and saw multiple people crying.” And I’ll be like, “Wow really? I saw the two people who were looking at their phones.”
I struggle with self-criticism and negativity. But having my dog on tour has really helped with that. He’ll just be in the green room, and I’ll finish the show and come back and he’s so happy to see me. He doesn’t care how I played at all. He’s just an embodiment of love. And so it reminds me that my worth is not in being “Adrianne of Big Thief.” I’m just a human. And whatever the quality of this show is, it doesn’t determine my worth.
