Early in 2022, my friend Chris Thiessen told me I should listen to the new Big Thief record.
“I’ve never heard of them, but I’ll give it a try!” I said. “What’s the record called?”
Chris responded, “Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You.”
…and that was when my initial judgment set in.
I mean seriously, what kind of name is that? I looked it up and found that this album was 20 songs and 80 minutes long. Everything about it screamed pretentious, over-indulgent, and navel-gazing. But that night I found myself alone in the kitchen making dinner, so I grabbed my AirPods and gave it a shot. It was around the time I first heard the line “What’s it gonna take to free the celestial body?”—which quirkily rhymes the word “free” with the first syllable “ce-“ of “celestial”—that I realized I was a goner and this was my new favorite record. And I still had 17 tracks to go!
Sometimes our tastes absolutely must be offended for us to get anywhere new at all, both in art and in life. Whether by nature or nurture or some combination of both, I had grown to overly cherish a few specific values in songwriting: sparseness, clarity, a sense of inevitable forward momentum.
Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You is as verbose, vague, repetitive, and messy as its title. It bounces around between Gillian Welch-style, bare-bones Appalachian country songs; distortion-heavy, post-rock jams; poetic, lyrical musings; and everything in between. It can’t decide what it wants to be.
But they’re having so much fun.
And that fun—that overwhelming impression of unbridled joy—is captured in the weirdly prominent and persistent jaw harp on “Spud Infinity” (an instrument that, I kid you not, literally goes boing). It’s in all the extra bars that seem to surround each song with ample padding. It’s in the band’s rebellious choice to end four lines in a row with the word “apple” in “Sparrow” (a fantastic commentary on Genesis 3 for any theology nerds reading, by the way). It’s inescapable on “Little Things,” a song that I never want to end every time it comes on.
The more I read interviews with Adrianne Lenker (the band’s lead singer and songwriter), the more I learn that all these traits were intentional choices, and they weren’t always easy to make or to enact. The band’s vision for this album was for it to be as uncynical, unfiltered, and unedited as possible. They kept in some wonky stuff—mistakes, weird choices, loose performances, jaw harps—because that’s what makes them who they are. Adrianne Lenker chose to relinquish her fear as a songwriter, letting go of worries about being “profound” or “complex” enough in favor of childlike questioning. Sometimes that thread leads to heart-wrenching simplicity (like in “Change”) and other times it sounds like humor (like in “Spud Infinity”).
More than anything, it’s an album that carries with it a fresh air of possibility not unlike the first days of fall—which is why I’m returning to it now. When I first listened to it, I was moved by its unadorned insights and wanted nothing more than to emulate it, to make contact with that raw creative voice I carry with me.
But the song I’m sharing today isn’t from that record. Dragon New Warm Mountain is too untouchable, I could never do any of those songs justice. I wanted to cover something by Adrianne Lenker, just for the joy of getting inside her mind, and it turned out that her song “Anything” was just the ticket for me to do that.
I kind of know what the words mean. And then I most certainly don’t at all. I kind of know what Adrianne is doing on guitar…but what you’ll see here is really just a guess. (Please, oh please, watch this stirring live performance and you’ll understand). But this is the whole point: Adrianne Lenker’s songwriting has put me back in touch with that awareness that all art is an approximation, a gesture. No song is an exact portrayal or depiction. Instead, we as listeners pick up on allusions and insinuations both melodic and lyrical, which lead our imaginations into an array of distinct-but-related new places. In Adrianne’s own words, that’s what makes it “a little bit magic.”
This statement: "Sometimes our tastes absolutely must be offended for us to get anywhere new at all, both in art and in life." So insightful.
Giving the Big Thief album a listen. Aspects are reminding me of later Mewithoutyou at times. Highly recommend if you’re not familiar.
Thanks for sharing Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You as well as your version of Adrianne Lenker’s other song. I seem to need a break from my normal patterns just when you post here and this has been a good at the right time again.