Live Show Review: Adrianne Lenker
Photo via NME
Entering the theatre at EartH Hackney, the space feels right for what I’m about to experience. It used to be a cinema – the last film shown there was Scarface in 1984 – and after that, the main auditorium was left derelict and locked up for 40 years. Renovated and reopened in 2018, the EartH Theatre kept its original Art Deco features: it’s wooden and worn; crumbling and decadent. As the hall fills up, everyone sits on the wooden steps, surrounded by coats and jackets, chatter, cans, and little plastic cups of wine.
We’re all there to see Adrianne Lenker: an American musician from Indiana, best known as the lead vocalist and guitarist of Big Thief. My friend is so in love with Adrianne that she’s almost in tears before the gig even begins – that is to say, Adrianne has this effect. Her open, honest, vulnerability is arresting, and the result is that people all over the world feel as though her songs have been written directly about their innermost emotions. As my tearful friend said to me after the gig, “she’s our Joni Mitchell”.
Lenker makes her first entrance onto stage to introduce her opener, Tucker Zimmerman, an 81-year-old American singer-songwriter who also happens to be her songwriting hero. Before leaving the stage, she makes a purposefully-worded request: if we have social obligations that require talking, we should take them to the outer realm (i.e. if you’re thinking of talking through this set – don’t). We enter a contract to respect the space, each other, and the music. Lenker later joins Zimmerman to play his song ‘Slowin’ Down Love’, which she tells us is one of her favourites. It’s mesmerising and beautiful, delicate and powerful. There’s warmth in the room, and between Tucker and Adrianne. I feel lucky to be there.
When Adrianne next takes to the stage, just her and her guitar, she’s not afraid to play with the intersections of tension and humour. She’s funny! As if playing with conventions of what a performer should be, she takes sips from multiple water bottles and cups of tea before she begins, and stretches our anticipation further as she tunes her guitar. Lenker’s exploratory use of alternative tunings, and the ease with which she shifts through these tunings on stage, becomes an intimate part of the performance itself. She starts her set with ‘two reverse’, the opening track on her latest album, and with this it feels like something new is beginning.
Throughout her performance, Lenker presents a quiet charm: she’ll stop herself by laughing “that’s not how the song goes”, before having us back under her magnetism within seconds. There’s a skill with which she breaks her own spell, and casts it again. As she begins to play ‘symbol’, she starts too fast, so she re-starts. There is no rush to this performance. She laughs at herself again as she sings, and says “what a weird song”. It’s these moments that are so endearing – her casual, humble relationship to the audience is unfailing, all while she holds the power to bring a whole auditorium to tears.
Despite the warmth of emotion and sound permeating within the walls of the venue, the space is actually pretty cold. After a while, Adrianne warms up her hands by cupping them together and breathing into the mic. She laughs, “did you ever do this as a kid?”, and does a Darth Vader impression. Someone shouts from the audience – “you are our father!” – the Freudian implications of which are up for debate. Lenker replies simply with “oh, wow”, which seems about right too.
For her last song, ‘anything’, she invites us to sing along if we want to. Sweet, soft audience participation ensues: we are singing to ourselves and to each other, basking in the beauty of the moment, and still wanting to hear Adrianne at the heart of it all.
At the end of the gig, the lights went up, and as I adjusted back to my physical surroundings, I looked around to see couples and friends holding each other, everywhere. Have you ever been in an old abandoned cinema full of people gently weeping? As I held my friends and cried, in front of us two strangers were holding one another – they had noticed each other crying alone and had come together. My friends and I sort of stood around aimlessly for a little while, unsure of how to approach the world post-Lenker. The natural conclusion was to go for a drink: we weren’t ready for the perfect night to end just yet.
