Adrianne Lenker is tender as ever on ‘Free Treasure’
Adrianne Lenker has a tight grip on a certain sect of music fans. While Big Thief have always been beloved by their cultish fan base, it feels like TikTok especially has taken Lenker and levelled her up to a God-like status, desperately trying to make a deity outside of the pop world. In the same realm as Boygenius or Joni Mitchell, her vulnerability has been cashed in by fans and turned into solid gold. It seems like as long as she is bearing her soul, she can do no wrong to them.
“Just when I thought I couldn’t feel more, I feel a little more,” Lenker sings on her latest offering, ‘Free Treasure’, grappling with her own fountain of output. Soaring on top of an intricately layered instrumental and her now signature guitar picking style, the tender love song gets an equally tender sound. Mellow harmonies feel almost hymn-like as the relatively simple and storytelling lyrics feel like a kind of gospel.
In short, it’s beautiful. But there is something about Lenker where as she hits new dizzy heights of her notoriety, she could sing anything and make it so. To some, that’s laziness, as her songs always appear somewhat half-formed and loose. But to others, the spontaneity that seems to run through her sharply emotional, introspective and observational work is a gateway to the heart.
At the start of the year, as Lenker ran a songwriting class online, the app that made her big seemed suddenly packed with not only disciples of her music but now students of it. Hundreds took to TikTok to share Lenker-style drafts of sparsely beautiful, folk-tinged and specifically emotive works where tiny feelings were blown into big metaphors, or day-to-day moments became heavy with feelings. I couldn’t help but like them all.
By now, Lenker’s name has become a stand in to describe a specific sound and style. For those that love it, she’s a God, she’s a leader, she’s a teacher and she’s incredible. For those that don’t, there won’t really be a change of opinion as her songs always wander down her path that now so many thousands follow her down too. ‘Free Treasure’ is beautiful and sweet and moving. Does it reinvent the wheel? No. But it seems that for her cult, she did.
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