Arriving two years after her band
Big Thief's Top 40 breakthrough,
Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You,
Bright Future finds a solo
Adrianne Lenker delving into a wide range of topics -- love, climate change, gratitude, overwhelm -- with her trademark intimate spin. While her previous solo outing,
songs and instrumentals, was recorded alone with engineer
Phil Weinrobe (who returns to co-produce here),
Lenker decided to expand her palette for
Bright Future while limiting it to mainly acoustic guitar, piano, and violin. To that end, she gathered with friends
Nick Hakim (piano, voice),
Josefin Runsteen (violin, voice), and
Dragon alum
Mat Davidson (guitars, piano, violin, voice) at Double Infinity, a remote analog studio in the New England woods. There, they recorded songs ranging from spare tracks to the semi-lively singalong "Sadness as a Gift," quirky electric-guitar song "Fool," howling acoustic jam "Vampire Empire" (a song previously recorded by
Big Thief), and campfire climate-catastrophe ditty "Donut Seam," which warmly reasons, "This whole world is dyin'/Don't it seem like a good time for swimmin'/Before all the water disappears?" To set the stage, though,
Lenker opens the album with "Real House," a hushed tearjerker of a walk down memory lane that remembers things like wanting to be an inventor, the first time she saw her mother cry, and contemplating "dying unprepared" after watching a scary film when she was seven. A showstopper at track one, it's essentially an a cappella performance, with a fragile-voiced, lilting
Lenker backed only by minimal piano chords and rare flecks of violin. The album is bookended by "Real House" and "Ruined," which leaves listeners on a similarly touching note. Nearly as whisper-quiet as the opener, it's a solo performance consisting of voice ("Can't get enough of you/You come around I'm ruined"), piano, and touches of mystical crystal. An arguable highlight among highlights along the way is the tender "Evol," one of
Lenker's "list songs" that, in this instance, plays with reversed words (teach, cheat; part, trap; kiss, sick; etc.). Having said that,
Bright Future is the type of no-filler album with enough variety and poignancy that each song is bound to be somebody's favorite. ~ Marcy Donelson
