![]() ![]() ![]() Lenker’s lyrics inhabit moments of vivid life rendered beautifully. This loneliness is not claustrophobic or insecure, but comforting in its intimacy. Lenker’s voice is vulnerable, shaking and honest, performing both fast-moving poetic lines on “anything” and long drawn-out phrases on “come.” On the first side of the album, her voice is doubled or tripled, but in the final tracks, it is bare, left alone with the guitar. These sounds are so rich that Lenker doesn’t need a mythological story like Bon Iver -the characteristics of the album itself suggest both its isolation and its closeness to the world. It uses paintbrushes on guitar strings for rhythms, and the sound of wind chimes, tape machines and rain in the background of tracks. The sound design replicates the cabin: it’s idiosyncratic and enveloping. Songs like “my angel” and “come” leave you sitting with pensive guitar instrumentals for over a minute before the voice begins. Lenker described her one-room cabin as resembling “the inside of an acoustic guitar.” The guitar arrangements are intricate, churning and tinkering, and the listener feels right up against the strings. It’s an album so quiet that you can hear the creak of a wooden chair, the sliding of steel guitar strings and the drip of rain outside the window. The simply-named “ songs” by Adrianne Lenker was written in a one-room cabin as spring dawned in Western Massachusetts. It has an even barer production than “For Emma, Forever Ago,” creating a more spare atmosphere that gives the listener space to think and feel. There’s one album, though, that executes this balance of loneliness and peace even better. “It’s the sound of the unlocking and the lift away.” “This is not the sound of a new man or crispy realization,” he sings. In the track “Re: Stacks,” the aching lonesomeness of earlier songs is abandoned in favor of complex but comforting construction. You might expect it to come off as a cold echo, but it provides company, texture, and warmth.īy the end of the album, solitude becomes peace. It’s not that suffering is justified by the art that comes from it but that the music brings out textured feelings that help to process it.Īlthough the album was made in isolation, Vernon layers his voice so richly that the vocal track is a thick woven blanket, such as the opening harmonies of “The Wolves (Act I and II).” Even on tracks that would normally feature just a single melody track, like “Blindsided,” he multitracks multiple vocal layers, resulting in doubled and tripled falsetto voices. Still, myths have explaining power, which is what’s important: the album tells us that we want our loneliness to mean something.Īt the end of the song “The Wolves (Act I and II),” Vernon repeats the phrase, “someday my pain,” yearning for a purpose for his isolation. The escape to nature didn’t really exist. Vernon had some buddies over to record the horns on “For Emma,” and his dad’s hunting cabin had a TV. However, the problem with mythology is that it’s not true. In the album’s best-known song, the yearning “Skinny Love,” he sings, “My my my, staring at the sink of blood and crushed veneer.” On the opener “Flume,” the chorus goes, “Only love is all maroon / Gluey feathers on a flume / Sky is womb and she’s the moon.” The words are ethereal but fleshy, evoking the feeling of watching the viscera of nature right outside your cabin window. ![]() The lyrics are bizarre, filled with patchwork imagery of beauty and violence. It’s an album that perfectly captures a specific place and time its whole emotional tone is explained by that lonely winter in the woods. When you listen to the tracks, though, you understand why people tell the story. It gets repetitive and vaguely mythological: cultural narratives of the castaway, the hermit philosopher and the return to nature all collide into one perfect indie folk legend. With the materials he had on hand - a guitar, an old Macintosh computer, and a four-track recorder - he made an album titled ” For Emma, Forever Ago,” under the name Bon Iver.Īll contemporary reviews of the album start with that story. After weeks of drinking beer and chopping wood, he started to write music. So he drove through the night to his father’s hunting cabin, both “to take some time and do nothing” and process the painful failures of his life. Justin Vernon, a flannel-clad 25-year-old from Wisconsin, had his heart broken at the same time he contracted a string of diseases that left him bedridden for months. It’s a story that launched one of the biggest indie acts of the 21st century. This week, he covers two albums shaped by loneliness : Bon Iver’s “For Emma, Forever Ago” and Adrianne Lenker’s “songs.” In “Music that Makes You Feel,” columnist Sam Waddoups ’23 recommends albums that take the listener through a specific emotional journey. ![]()
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