walking upstream…
Big Thief
sourcesWikipedia2 · The Ringer
Adrianne Lenker and Buck Meek started out as a duo, trading verses on Brooklyn stages after meeting at a show in Boston, before bassist Max Oleartchik and drummer James Krivchenia rounded the lineup into a full band in 2015. What followed has been dizzyingly prolific and hard to pin down: 2016's 'Masterpiece' and 2017's 'Capacity' set unflinching, plainspoken songs about family, memory, and violence over ragged, live-wire indie-rock arrangements, while the twin 2019 albums 'U.F.O.F.' and 'Two Hands' pulled the band toward whisper and noise within the same breath, sometimes the same song. 'Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You' (2022) widened the frame further, folding folk, skronk, and Americana into one restless, shape-shifting double album and confirming Lenker as one of her generation's most searching lyricists.
the sound in question
2016
MasterpieceBig Thief
walk the tributaries ↓
Joni Mitchell1970s · Folk / Folk rock / Jazz / Pop
Asked in a Vice interview about writing songs where the music itself carries an emotional charge, Lenker pointed straight to Mitchell: 'she's one of my favourites... Joni is actually so masterful with it.' What she singles out is the way Mitchell's music 'mirrors and enhances the words' rather than just accompanying them — verses that read like plain, novelistic observation of a room full of people, set to melodies that bend exactly where the feeling does.
listen: upstream & heresource: Vice ↗
1974
People's PartiesJoni Mitchell
2017
Mythological BeautyBig Thief
listen forCompare 'People's Parties,' Mitchell's darting character sketch of a crowded room she'd rather not be performing in, with 'Mythological Beauty,' Lenker's own plainspoken family narrative — both trust unadorned, conversational detail to do the emotional work, over guitar that shifts mood as quietly as the lyric does.
Elliott Smith1990s · Indie folk / Lo-fi / Indie rock
Lenker has said she first heard Elliott Smith's 'Either/Or' as a teenager, through a boyfriend, and told Pitchfork it 'just inspired me and blew my mind and still does' — praising 'the poetry on that record and also just the sonic quality. It's so organic and raw but somehow also so soothing,' even as it 'brings me into introspection' that isn't always comfortable. That mix of hushed, close-mic'd intimacy and unresolved unease threads through Big Thief's quietest material.
listen: upstream & heresource: Far Out Magazine ↗
1997
Between the BarsElliott Smith
2016
PaulBig Thief
listen forPlay 'Between the Bars' next to 'Paul': both keep the arrangement to barely more than a whispered, double-tracked voice and a gently fingerpicked guitar, letting a plain, almost conversational vocal delivery carry lyrics that turn steadily more unsettled the closer you listen.
Neil Young1970s · Folk rock / Country rock / Rock
Lenker has named Neil Young alongside Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen as artists she reveres for pushing through a 'breadth of material throughout the years, into old age,' following their own curiosity 'even through some weird phases when people were like, I don't know what they're doing.' Beyond that stated admiration, critics have repeatedly heard Young and Crazy Horse in Big Thief's own noisier turns — a high, plaintive vocal yelp riding over guitar that abandons the song's structure entirely and just howls.
listen: upstream & here
1969
Cowgirl in the SandNeil Young
2019
NotBig Thief
listen forSet 'Cowgirl in the Sand' against 'Not': both let a simple chord vamp dissolve into an extended, deliberately ragged electric guitar excursion that keeps climbing well past where a tidier song would have cut to the chorus, noise standing in for resolution.