‘Not’: The allure of Big Thief’s most unexpectedly comforting song
According to Adrianne Lenker, Two Hands was the most accomplished Big Thief feat to date. “Musically and lyrically, you can’t break it down much further than this,” she once said, “It’s already bare-bones.” For many, therefore, the record is their best, and a more refined achievement than the just as stunning U.F.O.F. Within these delicate musings about life, love, loss, and hope, lies the iridescent ‘Not’.
What made Two Hands a notable achievement from the get-go wasn’t just its themes, it was also the sharp jilt towards more raw and authentic rock and folk aspects, which evoked a certain grittness that felt akin to a flower blossoming, with Lenker’s oftentimes desperate crooning feeling like an emotional outcry after seasons of wallowing in silence.
While U.F.O.F lingered somewhere in the abyss, hoisted by its own weightlessness somewhere just out of reach, Two Hands came to earth with a shattering confrontation, pulling in the varying degrees of earthly, humanistic experience in the fragments that make up the whole. As such, ‘Not’ provided the first real glimpse into this sudden change of sonic heart, its lyrics pushing against the limitations of alienation and isolation with deliberations about what it is or means to be.
While this flavour of dissociation might come at a discomfort for some, with lines that coast between all-too-real observations that make you feel too alive in a flattened, anticlimactic manner, Lenker’s vocals and the accompanying arrangements point towards something less complex and more simplistic in the song’s deeper intrigue, like the warm embrace of a good wallow when nothing else makes sense.
In other words, the song tackles the multifaceted nature of human existence in all its untidiness, centralising that we live in this messy world with constant thoughts and feelings, even when we don’t quite know what to make of them. To enhance the convoluted nature of it all, Lenker uses phrases with varying degrees of surrealism and abstraction, like “Nor your shimmery eye / Nor the wet of the dew” and “Not the planet / not spinning”, signalling the different facets within reach but beyond comprehension.
In a strange, almost paradoxical way, the song’s innate comfort stems from the arrangements at first, building around Lenker’s commanding vocal presence like growing flames, the kind ignited by a passion to stay alive, though grounded in the gravity of letting go and losing control. As a listener, therefore, the song takes the lead, guiding you by the hand into its darkly tempting realm, offering satisfaction without promising a better tomorrow.
However, it also pushes thought beyond immediate familiarity, mainly due to Lenker’s unexpected raspiness in certain places, which exudes a kind of underlying frustration less as a means of reaching for anything in particular and more as a way of exploring pure emotion without restraint. It’s a delicate balance that asks for nothing in return, reflecting emotions we’ve all felt in the crux of wanting to be left alone.
In many ways, this delicacy offers solace in ways that feel entirely tangible, rooted in everything Two Hands builds its world around. Its appeal also comes from a place of complete self-assuredness in a way U.F.O.F didn’t—and that is where the true comfort of ‘Not’ lies. It’s those nights spent feeling satisfied about knowing yourself and what you enjoy, free from the perils of expectation when people seem to be elsewhere, dabbling in unkempt desires you have no trouble sitting out of.
