![]() ![]() A band with this level of togetherness is increasingly uncommon. They spend almost 100% of their lives together working towards a sound that they all agree upon. Big Thief’s advantage is their bond and loving center as a chosen family. ![]() The journey of a song from the stage to the record is often a difficult one. Sarlo teamed up with James Krivchenia to mix the album, where they sought to emphasize raw power and direct energy inherent in the takes. “I believe you can manifest something on the other side of the world just by using your power well.”Įngineer Dom Monks and producer Andrew Sarlo, who were both behind U.F.O.F., capture the live energy as instinctually and honestly as possible. When Adrianne sings “Please wake up,” she’s talking directly to the audience. Lyrics like “And the blood of the man who killed my mother with his hands is in me/ it’s in me/ in my veins” are genuine attempts to point the listener towards the very real dangers that face our mother planet. Abstractions of the personal hint at war, environmental destruction, and the traumas that fuel it. They explore the collective wounds of our Earth. These are political songs without political language. Lyrically this can be felt in the poetic blur of the internal and external. “Musically and lyrically, you can’t break it down much further than this. ![]() “Two Hands has the songs that I’m the most proud of I can imagine myself singing them when I’m old,” says Adrianne. Much of the album’s tracks (“The Toy”, “Those Girls”, “Shoulders”, “Not”, “Cut My Hair”) have been live staples for years. layered mysterious sounds and effects for levitation, Two Hands grounds itself on dried-out, cracked desert dirt.Īnybody who has borne witness to Big Thief in the wild will find songs they recognize here. All but two songs feature entirely live vocal takes, leaving Adrianne’s voice suspended above the mix in dry air, raw and vulnerable as ever. The songs were recorded live with almost no overdubs. Two Hands had to be completely different- an album about the Earth and the bones beneath it. The 105-degree weather boiled away any clinging memories of the green trees and wet air of the previous session. session, the southwestern Sonic Ranch studio was chosen for its vast desert location. In sharp contrast to the wet environment of the U.F.O.F. Now it was time to birth U.F.O.F.’s sister album -“the earth twin”- Two Hands. “the celestial twin”- days before in a cabin studio in the woods of Washington State. The band had only just finished work on their 3rd album, U.F.O.F. Adrianne Lenker, Buck Meek, Max Oleartchik, and James Krivchenia) set up their instruments as close together as possible to capture their most important collection of songs yet. ![]() Within Big Thief’s universe, it’s an alien landscape that feels instantly familiar.30 miles west of El Paso, surrounded by 3,000 acres of pecan orchards and only a stone’s throw from the Mexican border, the band Big Thief (a.k.a. In the chorus, she returns to the idea of a “simulation swarm/With the drone of fluorescence,” contrasting these cold, electronic-sounding things (is she singing about the internet?) with the warmth of human presence, arms enfolding another’s arms. Early in the song, as we’re still getting our bearings, she offers this dense tangle of images, making a frictionless glide from grace to menace: “A relief, beckon deep blue/Fettered in the magnet sun/Eat the gun as it feeds you/Spitting up the oxygen.” Against her bandmates’ deceptively simple backdrop she trots out her usual litany of horses and blood, pale trees and moonlit floors, and one name-Andy-held out like a talisman. It’s simultaneously cryptic and ultra-vivid, littered with crystalline visions, charged with animal spirits and intimations of violence. What hasn’t changed is Adrianne Lenker’s style of writing. The details are sharper, the shadows deeper. All the usual components of a Big Thief song are here, but it’s as if they’ve shifted in position, relative both to each other and to you. Against a shimmering backdrop of open-string acoustic strumming, James Krivchenia lays down an uncharacteristically minimalist drum pattern, all knife’s-edge hi-hats and bone-dry snares into the wide-open space suggested by those elements sails Max Oleartchik’s high-necked bass melody, which positively glows. The first thing that jumps out is the song’s dizzying crispness. ![]()
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