Adrianne Lenker Quotes

Adrianne Lenker is an American singer-songwriter and musician. She is best known as the lead vocalist and guitarist of the indie rock band Big Thief. Lenker's introspective lyrics and raw, emotive vocals have garnered critical acclaim, and she is regarded as one of the most talented and distinctive voices in contemporary indie music.

Everything is fleeting and passing and impermanent in life. Relationships, people, our finite physical forms... We let go of our childhoods, we let go of different parts of our body, we lose elasticity in our skin, and we lose hair and we lose teeth.

Yeah it's mostly driving and taking airplanes but I like the trains - they're probably my favorite mode of transportation. They're smooth, steady, and you've got a lot of room and can walk around.

I hadn't gone to high school. I left Minnesota, I ... -Adrianne Lenker

I hadn't gone to high school. I left Minnesota, I left home, I was on my own. I was seventeen.

Ingydar was the name of my great-aunt Becky's hors... -Adrianne Lenker

Ingydar was the name of my great-aunt Becky's horse, who passed away when I was a kid.

There's a fullness that happens when someone is focussed on you. For me, if I'm being fully looked at and paid attention to and seen, I'm filled up by that.

I feel like there's such ancient pain in us as humans. For instance, we come from this patriarchal lineage where women have been oppressed, and we're feeling, I think, collective pain from these energies being so out of balance.

Some people operate in complete fear that they're gonna lose their stuff and their money. That sounds like hell to me. And then I guess some people operate with hands open, and maybe empty, but at least striving for a deeper understanding of what it means to care.

I want everyone to feel very welcomed in the space of our music and our songs, it doesn't matter what you believe or think, I just want to cultivate a space of peace and to touch on these things that bind us as humans.

Well, whenever I visit New York it feels pretty romantic, so I sometimes think about coming back here. But then I wonder if it's just 'cause I'm visiting that it feels so good. But also, Minnesota. I could imagine myself finding a place in Minneapolis.

I'm committed to an honest expression, not necessa... -Adrianne Lenker

I'm committed to an honest expression, not necessarily a performance.

My dad was basically my manager from ages 13 to 16. I was on this train towards becoming a child pop star. Not that I would have necessarily become a star, but that was the goal.

We pop into existence and we know that we die and we know that we lose everyone that we love and we know we even lose our own bodies. And what a paradigm. What a mystery.

My parents divorced when I was 12, and leading up ... -Adrianne Lenker

My parents divorced when I was 12, and leading up to that it was... not without turbulence.

I don't like it when religions take it to the point where they discredit all other religions, because how could one sector of people have figured it out and know that that's it? But I do think that there's so much beauty in a lot of the stories or scriptures.

When I was born, my dad was playing music, so I'm pretty sure he was singing to me in the womb. I was born into music, in a way, because he was playing acoustic guitar. I was around an instrument growing up.

It's about surrendering to this feeling of utter fragility, and singing through the volatility of it all. The earth is unstable, and I'm part of the earth. I can feel it coursing through my own body. I feel the energy of everything, flickering. Let's just sing together.

With music, when you finish a record, you are entwined with it throughout your existence in a way which is both interesting and challenging because it's a living form, you have to come back to it.

So we're in this process of letting go of our own attachments to our physical forms and to the people we love, and... basically everything. Life is like this one big process of letting go.

Mostly I've just been stealing little moments for myself in order to write - in the bathroom at a hotel, or just slipping away for a half an hour. Amidst all of the touring, life has been happening.

When an audience takes to a song and it becomes older, in a way it changes it entirely. And then the journey just begins.

I'd gotten used to recording background vocals perfectly, doing 18 takes of them until they line up. Not recognizing the inherent beauty in each performance, but just making something good.

We all need ways of processing things. I think I was called to music because it was this thing that was always there for me that I could pour my heart into safely.

I can't really choose how I'm going to connect to music. I find it just has to hit a wave, and just wash over me and take me completely to some other space.

We lived in 14 different houses until I was 8, ren... -Adrianne Lenker

We lived in 14 different houses until I was 8, renting here and there.

Like, I'd rather tour maybe six months out of the ... -Adrianne Lenker

Like, I'd rather tour maybe six months out of the year, instead of nine.

I always said I got my music from my dad, but my mom had these cassettes - Bjoerk and the Cocteau Twins and the Talking Heads. That was her music, and she would just get so wild and free when she listened to it.

I think I'm learning how to release every day. Recognizing that everything you encounter, touch, or love can become part of you, and in essence never disappears, as long as you can recall it to memory or heart. It's all so connected that we lose everything, but also, we never lose anything.

I think that being alive is intense for most beings in some way. Even the process of being born is an intense one, and coming to see and understand and experience the physical world, and all that goes along with being a physical being, and experiencing all of these different forms of loss throughout life.

I'm attracted to wilderness in any sense. Which is why I'm attracted to New York in a way, because I feel like it's a wilderness of people and textures. Just like, there's so much life and richness here. And you can get lost in it.

When I first started out in the band, I had so man... -Adrianne Lenker

When I first started out in the band, I had so many walls up.

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