“When I was a kid, we moved pretty much every year. There was a period of time when I lived in the same house for about four years — that was the longest.”
This was Adrianne Lenker’s response to Relix Magazine when asked to explain Bright Future’s opener, “Real House.” She continues, divulging that “I’m discovering that concept of what a real house is in that song.” The entirety of Bright Future plays like an ode to the home — brimming with warmth, sun-bleached piano playing out to crisp air the way morning dew clings to the leaves, golden daylight sloughing off of stringed instruments. Bright Futures is four walls and a roof, candlelit by a certain sadness to further illuminate the beauty of the world we reside in; homecoming at its finest.
This motif of home is most obvious in the opener, but there are echoes of it throughout Bright Future. When Lenker sings “And you showed me a place / I’ll find even when I’m old” on “Sadness as a Gift,” and “You’re cooking dinner / It’s gettin’ around half-past-ten” on “Free Treasure,” she paints a picture of the tranquil domicile, an image threaded through the entirety of the album. Even the instrumentation is reminiscent of this domesticity, stripped-down piano and gentle strings winding beneath the raw emotion of Lenker’s voice, a Stevie Nicks-esque quiver that fans of Big Thief are well-acquainted with. Lenker’s idea of home extends far beyond the physical confines of a house; it’s finding a home in another person, or finding peace within her mind. A real home, according to Lenker, is “more so about my body, my mind and my spirit than it is about anything else — feeling at home in the house of my body and then also feeling at home on Earth.”
Despite the raw atmosphere Bright Future creates with its “straight to tape” approach, there is a level of precision governing the album; Lenker is delicate, threading and weaving tension into the tapestry of her work. Utilizing this bitterness, Lenker asks us to sit with musical discomfort, mirroring the general theme of finding beauty within the discomfort of the real world. This is overt on “Donut Seam,” pairing the horrors of day-to-day life with lofty guitar chords and a chorus that asks if “Don’t it seem like a good time for swimming?” in the face of climate change’s devastation. At the end of “Sadness is a Gift,” a more subtle sonic discordance arises; the layers of twangy strings taper off at the end of the track in the form of an unanswered question, hanging over the closing lyrics like a ghost. Bright Future is littered with these minute hints of being haunted by something fraught and bitter, a specter that can’t be shaken, but Lenker entwines this dissonance with so much care that it almost feels natural.
Bright Future is beautiful and melancholy, rife with a pain that lingers like the frost in the air at the first brush of winter. Lenker creates a home in every chord and haunts it with every hint of tension, washing each track in a level of sophistication that makes it clear that she’s lived the lyricism.
She says it best: “We’ve been down here for a while.”
Daily Arts Writer Amaya Choudhury can be reached at amayach@umich.edu.