‘Mythological Beauty’: Adrianne Lenker’s most heartbreaking lyric
Adrianne Lenker is not a “confessional songwriter” in the usual sense of that term. The very idea of any personal type of songwriting being equivalent to a “confession”, in fact, suggests the artist has something to answer for or look back on with regret or shame. As the magnetic frontwoman of Big Thief, Lenker’s songwriting is certainly cut from some dark chapters of her own life in many cases, but it also routinely blends the devastating with the mundane, the sacred and the scarred. It’s not a journal entry so much as a painting of a moment, with the listener placed in the scene and permitted to draw their own conclusions.
Both through her work with Big Thief and as a solo artist, Lenker has maintained a low public profile while simultaneously becoming one of the most revered forces in indie rock over the past decade, earning a devoted following and widespread critical acclaim for her raw, intimate recordings and soul-baring live shows.
As a lyricist, in particular, Lenker has produced no shortage of songs with characters, settings, choruses, and individual lines that have stuck like a dart and carried on in her listeners’ heads long afterwards. One song with a particular rich palette of memorable material—and that signified that Lenker was gonna be around for a long time to come—was the single ‘Mythological Beauty’ off Big Thief’s second album, 2017’s Capacity.
Clocking in at just under five minutes, ‘Mythological Beauty’ tells the story of a very real incident from Lenker’s childhood. When she was just five years old, a railroad spike fell from a treehouse and hit her in the head, resulting in a severe injury that required emergency surgery. The song doesn’t recount this event with melodrama or sentimentality. Instead, Lenker folds the hazy memory into a larger meditation on her relationship with her mother, looking back on the woman she knew then from the perspective that 20 years of time and maturity had now afforded her.
One line, in particular, from the song’s first verse, is oddly impactful in its blunt simplicity: “There is a child inside you / Who’s trying to raise a child in me.”
Or maybe it’s not as simple as it seems. The lyric works as an empathetic reassessment of the many challenges Lenker’s mother faced raising kids when she was, in many ways, still a kid herself, vaulted into motherhood at just 17 and giving birth to Adrianne at 21. When Lenker sings “a child in me”, though, it might be describing the five-year-old version of herself from the events of the song, or something more ongoing and permanent across time and memory—how the foundational relationships with our parents still affect how we navigate life and small tragedies long after we’ve left the nest.
The chorus of ‘Mythological Beauty’ is remarkable, as well, serving as a sort of open door of escape and acceptance for a young mother who didn’t have that option presented to her in reality…or maybe it’s the mother speaking to her daughter. As the listener, you can take your pick. “If you wanna leave / You just have to say / You’re all caught up inside / But you know the way.”
Part of the greatness of Lenker’s work is that she’s managed to turn the potentially frightening prospect of deep vulnerability into the actual prime ingredient of her music.
“The vulnerability of ‘going there’ is what makes it so beautiful,” Lenker told Stereogum back in 2017. “I feel like the band and I will essentially get naked on stage, and it can be scary, but mostly everyone in the audience gets naked too… In talking about the heavy things and looking at them and asking about the meaning, there is such a release. That can create a lot of feelings of joy and lightness actually.”
