Adrianne Lenker is exactly the kind of songwriter who can make you sob in your car while you’re pretending it’s just allergies. Bright Future, her solo album, sounds like a sunbeam drifting through your grandmother’s dusty parlor — if your grandmother kept a dog scratching at the door, a sighing friend on the couch, and the ever-present threat of existential dread.
“I wanted it all to be there,” Lenker says of the creaks, breaths, and scratches that made it onto the record. “Like the listener’s just sitting right in the room with us.” It’s a trick that works. The piano sounds ancient, the guitars sound like ghosts, and the modern touches — like a song called Cell Phone Says — feel like tiny time bombs. “There’s something about an old melody with a new word like ‘cell phone’ that just gives it an edge,” she shrugs.
You can thank the morning for that edge. “Morning music is special,” she says dreamily. “Before your brain kicks in and starts shouting… you just wander in, pick up an instrument, and let the Dreamland dissolve into the Rising Sun.”
That dreaminess took root early. She still remembers the first film that broke her tiny brain: Deep Impact. “I was seven. I asked an adult, ‘Could that really happen?’ They said, ‘Yeah.’ I was terrified a comet would hit the Earth for years. Nighttime scared me for years!”
Sadness, naturally, is never far from her songs — but for Lenker, it’s less poison and more potion. “Sadness is a gift,” she says, sounding like your favorite grief counselor and your favorite heartbreak poet all at once. “Sadness is love. Every person we love will die — everything is impermanent — so to really love, you have to hold the sadness. It’s like this crystal, this jewel. It shows how deep your love is.”
This all filters into her songwriting classes too — yes, she teaches. “At first I thought it’d be a ten-minute class: you sit down, pray for a song, hope it comes. But then I realized, oh wait, I have actual tools!” Her big revelation, “You can never force the gift, but you can prepare yourself to receive it.”
She laughs off the idea that any of these songs are ever really finished. “They’re all just versions. Think of nursery rhymes — they exist outside the writer. They become everybody’s.” The same goes for the Big Thief cut Vampire Empire, reborn here as something more raw and personal: “It’s always just new in the moment,” she shrugs.
So, yeah — in a world full of instant noise and quick cuts, Adrianne Lenker wants you to sit in the quiet, scratch the door, and hold your sadness close. If that sounds like a puddle waiting to happen, you’re not alone.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the video below.
