With her ever-reliable, infuriating talent, Adrianne Lenker urges us to cherish and savour the heartbreak on her latest solo record. Bright Future took form in a forest-framed, 150-year-old New England studio. There, Adrianne Lenker retreated with fellow musicians Philip Weinrobe, Mat Davidson, and Nick Hakim to rehearse a collection of vignettes she’d been nurturing - songs ready to take flight.
Years ago, I had an art teacher take a ballpoint pen to my, undoubtedly mediocre, composition and write in green ink, in the empty space framing the subject, that I ought to utilise the whole page, that this space did not aid the piece. Regardless of whether this teacher was correct, Lenker acutely understands how best to use negative space on Bright Future – defining the boundaries of the music and mediating between tension and catharsis.
Nowhere is it better shown than in the record’s opening track, ‘Real House’, which is not so much a sonic thesis statement as a six-minute exploration into Lenker’s memory. With the past as her sole muse, she recollects how the surreal quality of childhood eventually gave way to the dull heartbreak of growing up. Chords float free, the instrumental liberated from defined tension and resolve, instead revelling in spaces between each word, giving Lenker’s writing time to glow.
The heartbreak alluded to throughout the record is not singular, nor is it expressly romantic in nature. Instead, Bright Future is a mosaic of the heartbreak we receive in exchange for, as Lenker sees it, a life well-lived. ‘Sadness As A Gift’ is Lenker at her most tender; she adorns her heartbreak with an air of gratitude and acceptance – grief as a measure of love.
‘Donut Seam’ examines love in the shadow of personal and global crises with the lyrics “This whole world is dying / Don’t it seem like a good time for swimming / Before all the water disappears” and “Now our love is dying / Don’t it seem like a good time for kissing? / One more kiss, one more kiss to last the years”.
Yet, the point isn’t the end of the world or the fact that we will eventually lose those we love most, it’s, as Lenker reiterates, the moments between now and then. Indeed, living in the moment, as they say, may not come naturally to us; we know that the impermanence does not strip us of happiness in the meantime – yet, when the time comes, we find ourselves brilliantly doomed: hopelessly in love with the conviction that we, and whatever we love, are entitled to infinity.
From the whirs of the tape machine to the murmuring of the musicians in the room around her, this record could be misconstrued as an appeal to our cultural nostalgia for and obsession with the analogue, yet, as so much of her work, it burns with undiluted sincerity. Aided by the precision and tenderness that only an Otari ½ inch 8-Track and Studer console could afford, Lenker and her fellow musicians document the music as it was, in that instant, on that day in all its mesmerising authenticity. Circumstance informs the music; the record teases that, recorded in a different space or at a different time, it wouldn’t be the same. Lenker captured what it meant to be her, before releasing it, a moth in her cupped hands, into the purple hues of dusk. Image courtesy of Debbie Hickey.
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