The Star-Crossed Love Story of Bright Future
Adrianne Lenker’s latest record will shatter your heart and haphazardly (but lovingly) paste it back together time and time again.
by Sloane DiBari
As clichè as this sounds, being in love can be complicated. The highs are some of the most universally sought-after emotions, the kind of happiness that feels like it will only come once in a lifetime, that only increases in size and scale as you continue to feel it. But being misunderstood by the one you love — or misunderstanding them — is a special kind of agony, to say the least. Not to mention that all love must come to an end. When you fall in love with someone, you’re consenting to that full range of experiences — especially heartbreak and grief. Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker’s Bright Future is an exploration of that range with a strong sense of narrative, supported by cohesive yet eclectic instrumentation.
Bright Future opens with what might be Lenker’s sparsest track yet. “Real House” is built upon a minimalist piano instrumental, peppered with occasional whispers of strings. It features a simple, repetitive vocal melody that evokes a childlike desire for maternal affection. The confessional lyrics, addressed to Lenker’s mother, detail Lenker’s coming of age in an unstable environment, where her family moved around frequently. The final lines detail the first time Lenker saw her mother cry, when the family dog was put to sleep. This sets the stage for the love and loss to come in Lenker’s relationship while adding the depth of familial love to the album’s exploration of romantic love.
Interestingly, the bittersweet ending of the love story at the core of the album comes directly after the opener (shoutout to my girlfriend and her keen observational skills for pointing this out!). The aptly-titled “Sadness as a Gift” works with a less limited instrumental and vocal palette, adding backing vocals from Nick Hakim, Josefin Runsteen, and Mat Davidson, along with guitar and more prominent strings. It addresses Lenker’s ex-girlfriend, making peace with the fact that the relationship has ended. Lenker accepts that she and her ex will never have the same dynamic, but despite the pain of that fact, she remains optimistic and even open to the possibility that they could one day be on good terms at a distance: “You could write me someday, and I hope you will / We could see the sadness as a gift and still.” “Sadness as a Gift” is a perfect, ultimately satisfying conclusion to the album’s narrative, and while “Real House” flows into it seamlessly, one has to wonder why Lenker would choose to place it second in the tracklist when the rest of the story is told in a more traditional, linear way. It’s an odd choice to maintain the musical flow of the record while disrupting the narrative one.
The record can be broken down into narrative sections from there. Tracks 3-5 embody the honeymoon phase. In this section, Lenker and her girlfriend are very much in love and in a deeply established relationship: they cook meals together and float the possibility of getting married. There is again a strong undercurrent of familial love — after all, romantic love blurs into familial love at a certain point, and this is a core theme in much of Lenker’s catalog. Lenker expresses a level of confidence in the strength of their relationship, but also expresses uncertainty about a future without her girlfriend in “No Machine.” The uncertainty of “No Machine” is flanked by the domestic, idyllic scenes painted by “Fool” and “Free Treasure,” which steal listeners’ hearts with their sweet vocal melodies and tenderly plucked guitars before the tragedy to come in the later sections.
“Vampire Empire” — a solo reimagining of a Big Thief fan favorite — is where their relationship begins to fall apart. In what are arguably some of Lenker’s most evocative, clever lyrics, the track depicts codependency between two people who, despite the depth of their bond, fundamentally misunderstand each other: “You give me chills / I’ve had it with the drills / I am nothing, you are nothing, we are nothing with the pills / I’m empty till she fills / Alive until she kills / In her vampire empire I’m the fish and she’s my gills.” Love becomes “evil” in “Evol,” wherein Lenker speaks of the unfathomable sadness that comes with loving someone so deeply even though their loss is inevitable. “Candleflame” sorrowfully acknowledges that the relationship is keeping both parties stagnant: “When we’re together, only one thing moves / Everything else stays the same.” Then, “Already Lost” and “Cell Phone Says” confront, again, the irreconcilable rifts between Lenker and her girlfriend, and the way those rifts painfully contradict how established their relationship is.
“Donut Seam” acts as a kind of wistful release of tension before the devastation of the closing track. Lenker knows that the relationship is on its last legs, but longs to make the most of the vestiges of their love before they separate. “This whole world is dying / Don’t it seem like a good time for swimming / Before all the water disappears?” Lenker pleads, “Now our love is dying / Don’t it seem like a good time for kissing? / One more kiss, one more kiss to last the years.” Bright Future concludes with the gut-wrenching “Ruined,” in which Lenker utilizes her brilliant high range for the record’s peak of heartbreak. The tactfully strained vocals are backed by poignant piano chords and haunting ambient sounds, evoking the feeling of being alone in a large, dark room where the absence of another is acutely clear. While “Ruined” is an excellent closer, it does, again, leave me wishing that the record ended with “Sadness as a Gift,” which ties the loose ends of the narrative together in a much more emotionally satisfying way — but that might also be me being too much of a hopeless romantic to handle ending on such a desolate note.
Bright Future has stunningly beautiful acoustic, Appalachian-inspired instrumentation, but it succeeds primarily on Lenker’s gift for storytelling. The album is nothing short of a lyrical triumph, stirring the kind of complex range of strong emotions only being deeply in love can. I’d certainly miss the music itself, but with the one-of-a-kind strength of Lenker’s writing, I wouldn’t mind if her next creative project was a novel.