Adrianne Lenker’s Radical Honesty

 

In late August, the singer, songwriter, and guitarist Adrianne Lenker stood beside a creek in upstate New York, watching the water move. The day before, Lenker, who is twenty-nine, had packed up the Brooklyn apartment she’d been sharing with two roommates. She was preparing to haul a vintage camping trailer across the country to Topanga Canyon, on the west side of Los Angeles, where her band, Big Thief, was planning to meet up. For the next couple of months, at least, the trailer would be home.
 
Moving can be disorienting—all that sorting and boxing and tossing out forces a kind of self-reckoning—and for Lenker the experience was only intensified by the ongoing anxiety of the coronavirus pandemic, which made imagining any sort of future feel optimistic, if not naïve. The exhaustion and sorrow of the spring had left everyone feeling precarious. The sun refracted against the surface of the creek until the water turned black. Our conversation drifted toward the Zen idea of impermanence. “Is it too early for this?” Lenker joked. “Nice to meet you—let’s talk about death.”
 
Lenker had spent the past few weeks recording with Big Thief at a home studio in the Catskill Mountains, run by the musicians Sam Owens and Hannah Cohen. The rest of the band—the guitarist Buck Meek, the bassist Max Oleartchik, and the drummer James Krivchenia—had since left, but Lenker stuck around to renovate the trailer. She had just ordered a twin mattress, a portable woodstove, and new linens.
 
This month, Lenker will release two solo albums: “Songs,” a collection of tender, harmonically complex folk tunes, and “Instrumentals,” which is composed of a pair of slowly unfolding guitar pieces. She made the records simultaneously, at a remote cabin in New England, in the early, panicked days of both the pandemic and a breakup. Lenker is a quick and instinctive writer, and even under normal circumstances her songs are raw and unfussy—it can feel as if they were dug up whole, like a carrot from the garden. She sometimes speaks about writing as a kind of conjuring. “She gives a lot of significance to that moment where she’s holding the guitar,” Oleartchik told me. “I never really think of her, like, fucking around and playing riffs or something. It’s always this instrument of witchcraft. It’s always holy. She writes music from this place that’s very intuitive and fearless, and she has confidence that there’s some kind of spirit or force that she can listen to.”
 
Before Lenker vacated her apartment in New York, she had to paint over an illustration that her ex-girlfriend had drawn on the bedroom wall. Lenker took some solace from the idea that the image wouldn’t be erased, exactly—it remained, even if she couldn’t see it anymore. Lenker has been in romantic relationships with men and with women, and doesn’t feel any particular obligation to outline her sexuality in precise terms, though she is comfortable being called queer. “The fact that there’s still people against that kind of stuff makes the words necessary,” she told me. “But hopefully we move into a place where it’s, like, You’re what? Why are you saying what you are?”
 
The wounds from the breakup were still pretty tender. “There’s a fullness that happens when someone is focussed on you,” Lenker said. “For me, if I’m being fully looked at and paid attention to and seen, I’m filled up by that.” She continued, “Now there isn’t anyone to text; there are no love messages coming through. I feel so empty. There’s a song on the new record, ‘Zombie Girl,’ and the refrain is ‘Emptiness / Tell me about your nature.’ That’s a real question. I want to understand—what is this feeling of emptiness? Is that me? Am I just hollow and empty? Or is emptiness actually something beautiful?”
 
As we talked, Lenker teared up. I hadn’t yet had to idly watch someone cry from six feet away. As she wiped her cheeks, I crammed my hands in my pockets and mumbled something about how the worst and saddest thing about heartbreak is that it always ends.
 
Big Thief formed in Brooklyn in 2015, and quickly became one of the most acclaimed new bands of recent years, in part because of Lenker’s emotional transparency, and in part because of how her voice, which is delicate and craggy, complements the group’s bold use of dissonance and volume. In 2019, Big Thief was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album, but its work is more commonly described as folk rock, a characterization that, although accurate—the band is as indebted to visionary singer-songwriters such as Judee Sill and Vashti Bunyan as it is to Sonic Youth and Neil Young—feels too tame. Big Thief’s best songs begin quietly, and expand until it seems as though a major artery were about to burst. The results can be strange and thrilling. “Adrianne has that disorienting quality all real-deal types have, where she comes at her songs so sideways that it subverts the form,” Jeff Tweedy, the front man for Wilco, told me. “Sometimes you would swear it’s a mistake or misunderstanding of her own song—‘Why’d she start singing there?’—but it’s not, it’s a precise angle that only she seems to possess.”
 
The band grew out of a partnership between Lenker and Meek. They met at a show in Boston, where they had both been undergraduates, and then ran into each other at a bodega on the day Lenker moved to Brooklyn. “I was moving into a warehouse in Bushwick with ten other artists,” Lenker said. “I’m pretty sure it was illegal—there were beams separating the rooms, no windows, a cement floor.” She and Meek soon began performing as a duo.
 
“When we first started playing, we would just sit together,” Meek told me. “She had these really wild fingerpicking patterns that she had developed, and she would tune the guitar to so many different open tunings. I had this very syncopated, rhythmic structure—hers was much more liquid. And, somehow, these different rhythmic landscapes created something.”
 
Lenker got a job as a back waiter at a restaurant on the Upper West Side. “Five days a week, at one in the morning, I was biking all the way to Bushwick from Seventy-second and Columbus,” she recalled. “I was saving up for guitar amps, saving up for a guitar, saving up for a van.”
 
Meek and Lenker burned CDs of their music, wrapped them in paper bags, and wrote the track listings by hand. “Buck and I played coffee shops and back-yard barbecues and dive bars and birthday parties and shows for nobody for a couple of years,” Lenker said. In time, they fell in love, and, when she was twenty-four and Meek was twenty-eight, they got married.
 
There is footage of them busking in Washington Square Park in 2014, playing an early version of “Paul,” which eventually appeared on Big Thief’s début album, “Masterpiece.” The audience—a middle-aged man in billowing khakis and sunglasses, a tall guy talking on his cell phone—is gently uninterested in a New York City sort of way. Lenker and Meek share a microphone. “Paul” is a song about having a hard time loving another person. “I realized there was no one who could kiss away my shit,” Lenker sings, her voice resigned. Yet the desire to be fixed—to find relief through love—remains. “I’ve been burning for you, baby, since the moment I left,” she admits. The chorus is a mesmeric rush:
 
I’ll be your morning bright, good night, shadow machine
I’ll be your record player, baby, if you know what I mean
I’ll be a real tough cookie with the whiskey breath
I’ll be a killer and a thriller and the cause of our death
 
In the Catskills, between recording sessions, Lenker and her bandmates sometimes hiked into the woods to work on a tepeelike structure they had taken to calling a fort. There was no trail, and getting to it required climbing up the face of a small mountain, mostly by grabbing the trunks of saplings—a strategy any reasonable outdoorsperson would describe as inadvisable—and scrambling to find holds in large rocks. One afternoon, Lenker and I made our way there to sit on a boulder and talk. She darted uphill gracefully.
 

Lenker was born in Indianapolis in 1991, and brought up mostly in and around Minnesota. She has a younger sister, Zoë, and a younger brother, Noah. When Lenker was five, she was hit on the head by a railroad spike that fell out of a tree house in her family’s front yard. “Mythological Beauty,” a song from Big Thief’s second record, “Capacity,” is addressed to her terrified mother:
 
Blood gushing from my head
You held me in the back seat with a dishrag, soaking up blood with your eyes
I was just five and you were twenty-seven
Praying, “Don’t let my baby die”
 
Lenker’s parents married young, and joined a fringe religious sect before Lenker was born. She remembers the group as having “born-again-Christian, kind of cult vibes—a closed community. We lived in an apartment complex where the surrounding people were part of the same thing. There were a lot of rules. Honestly, I remember there being a lot of shame. My sister’s name was evil, because it wasn’t in the Bible. Certain shapes were evil, too, like the star. When we prayed, the Bible couldn’t touch the floor, and we prayed under blankets.” Her mother recalled that sometimes the group provided a chaperon if the family travelled out of state. (Lenker’s father disputes some of these details.)
 
Her parents left the sect when she was four, and for a short while they lived out of a van. “We were still quite religious until I was about eight or nine,” Lenker said. “Then I watched my parents take a dramatic turn and discard all religion.” She found the shift bewildering. “I just remember feeling, like, I’m not going to go along for this ride.” (Her father has since reconnected with his faith, and describes his time away from it as hedonistic.)
 
Lenker has spent much of her adulthood trying to unpack the experience, and is now quick to recognize troubling rhythms from her youth when they reëmerge in her adult relationships. “I sometimes equate intimacy with turbulence, which is familiar,” she said. “The journey that I’m currently on is just: how do I transmute some of these patterns of violence?”
 
Her ideas of home are constantly changing. “I don’t really think of Minnesota when I think of home,” she said. “I think of it as part of who I am. The thing that I come back to is that it’s my loved ones, and Earth. I feel really at home here, in this spot in the forest,” she said, looking around. “And it doesn’t feel like it’s anyone’s.”
 
Eventually, we climbed back down the mountain. Owens and Cohen had built a stone dam in the stream that snakes across their property, creating a little basin for swimming. The stream runs into the Esopus Creek, a sixty-five-mile tributary of the Hudson River which winds through the eastern Catskills and fills the Ashokan Reservoir. We walked barefoot over mossy bluestone. The water was clear and bracing. Lenker disrobed and dunked, letting out an ecstatic yelp.
 
While Lenker and the rest of Big Thief were working, they developed a habit of leaping into the water between takes. There’s something curative about a frigid plunge, the way it forces the old air from your lungs. “You come out screaming,” Oleartchik said. In 1702, Sir John Floyer published a treatise on the benefits of cold bathing, a practice that was then still mostly unknown to the English. “Cold baths act much on the Spirits, and preserve them from Evaporation, and render them Strong and Vigorous,” he wrote. It’s comforting to think that, even in our bleakest moments, there might still be a way to protect our Spirits from dissipating entirely.
 
As far back as Lenker can remember, she has liked to sing. Her voice is soft but substantial, and contains an airy tremble that sometimes resembles birdsong. On occasion, she lets it stretch and fracture. On “Not,” a deep and tumultuous song from Big Thief’s fourth album, “Two Hands,” Lenker sounds nearly feral: “Not the room / Not beginning / Not the crowd / Not winning,” she grunts. When the band performs the song in concert, she might start to scream.
 
Lenker began playing guitar when she was six, and discovered an affinity for the instrument. Her father started giving her lessons. “He’d be, like, Whoa—how do you already know that?” she said. “I was just eating it up.”
 
When Lenker was thirteen, her parents divorced. She dropped out of school and moved in with her father in Minneapolis. He was intent on managing—and, to a degree, monetizing—her nascent music career. “I think he wanted me to be famous, wanted me to be the best, wanted me to win that shit,” she said. Lenker did not share his exact ambitions. She made some recordings but felt disconnected from them. “The very first music I listened to, and then continued to listen to throughout that whole time, was by Pat Metheny and Michael Hedges—these guitar guys my dad loved,” she said. When she was fifteen, a boyfriend introduced her to Elliott Smith, whose tense and immediate folk songs provided a counterpoint to the more polished music her father had encouraged. “I was, like, Oh, my God, this is so good,” she recalled. “This is all I want to do. I don’t want to create these elaborate, pop-sounding productions.”
 

At sixteen, Lenker cut her hair short and briefly ran away from home. She got her G.E.D., and enrolled in a five-week summer program at the Berklee College of Music, in Boston. Toward the end of the summer, she made an appointment with Damien Bracken, the dean of admissions. “I went into his office and I said, ‘I don’t know any of this music theory, any of this stuff that is on your curriculum, but can I play you a song?’ ” She performed an original piece called “Far from Where I Started.” With the dean’s support, she applied for and received a full scholarship to Berklee, offered by the blues guitarist Susan Tedeschi. “I’ll never forget the image of, like, twenty-five boys shredding on guitars in the hallway, preparing for their auditions and exams,” she said. “I felt self-conscious that I didn’t know those things.” Lenker was still figuring out how to do ordinary chores, such as buying laundry detergent. “I hadn’t gone to high school. I left Minnesota, I left home, I was on my own,” she recalled. “I was seventeen.”
 
Despite the intensity of her training, virtuosity doesn’t resonate for Lenker as much as vulnerability does; she has always been more interested in making emotional connections. The pop singer Carly Rae Jepsen told me that she has been able to find enormous comfort in the way that Lenker sings about her life. “I came across ‘Paul’ while I was in Italy for a solo adventure trip,” Jepsen said. “The lyrics spoke to me like a journal entry would. She’s brilliantly confessional.”
 
In addition to the recordings that Lenker made as a teen-ager, her work with Meek, and the four records she has done with Big Thief, she has also released two solo albums: “Hours Were the Birds,” in 2014, and “Abysskiss,” in 2018. Lenker is curious about the mechanics of creative work—the spring from which songs appear—but finds that the process itself is more visceral and perceptive. “How does a song come into being at all? How does it form and organize itself into the pattern?” she said. “I never think, Oh, I want to make something that sounds like this. It’s just reaching for elements. I see the visual of translucent ribbons flowing in a riverlike way—they’re multicolored. And maybe there’s one specific color that I want to braid in, and they’re all flowing by, and maybe it’ll go by for a while with nothing of that color, and then, ‘Ah, there.’ ”
 
When I asked Meek to describe Lenker’s songwriting, he paused for forty-five seconds to gather his thoughts. “It’s as if she removes her conscious mind from the room,” he said finally. “She’ll hold her guitar, and she’ll start to speak in abstractions, or speak in complete nonsense—just sounds and shapes. Then she emerges from that space, and slowly the words start to form into syllables, and into the English language, and become a story, or a character, or a reflection of her own experience. But it has this really clear element of . . .” He thought about it. “Grace.”
 
One evening in early September, Lenker and I sat on opposite sides of Owens and Cohen’s kitchen table, snacking on figs and cheese. It was raining, and Lenker lit some candles. Her sister, Zoë, who was visiting for the week, was reading in a bedroom upstairs. Lenker showed me the room where she was staying, and the notebook where she had written most of the lyrics for “Songs.” There was a watercolor of a small cabin and a yellow sky propped up against a mirror, and a photograph of her grandmother by her bedside. Recently, she had acquired an electric pencil sharpener, which she demonstrated: “Isn’t that satisfying?” She picked up the acoustic Martin guitar she plays on the new albums. “I’ve had this since I was fourteen,” she said, strumming a chord.
 
Big Thief was on tour in Europe when covid-19 cases began to spike there. Minutes before the band was to take the stage in Copenhagen, the Danish government announced a ban on gatherings of more than a hundred people. The venue was already full. “We went out in the street and played some acoustic stuff, just four or five songs. Then we all had to make a snap decision about where we were going,” Lenker said.
 
“Suddenly, we’re all in this lobby of this hotel that’s basically empty, and the dude at reception is wearing black gloves, and there’s no more music,” Oleartchik recalled wistfully.
 
Lenker flew back to New York City and then headed north, to a cabin in the foothills of the Berkshires, in western Massachusetts. She was entranced by the sound of the space, which she described as “like the inside of an acoustic guitar.” She asked Philip Weinrobe, an engineer and the owner of Rivington 66, a recording studio on the Lower East Side, to help her make an album there. He agreed, and Lenker headed back to the city. “She left at, like, 5 a.m. to come pick me up in Brooklyn,” Weinrobe recalled. “The whole thing was structured around the space, which was very small, with exposed wooden beams. We could hear the bugs, we could hear the wind in the trees. The idea was to really lean super hard into that physical atmosphere, and to create a record that tried to mimic it. As soon as I got there, everything started to shift: my sense of time, my sense of self, the way I breathed the air.” He added, “There’s no plumbing in the cabin. You poop in a bucket.”
 
They used a binaural microphone to capture the sound of the room. “You really feel like you’re sitting in front of Adrianne singing,” Weinrobe said. “You can hear the birds go by, and you hear the squeak of the fingerboard, and the sound bouncing off the walls.”
 
Lenker’s lyrics often allude to nature, and she toggles between straightforward narratives and more imagistic lines. Her language reminds me, at times, of Joanna Newsom or Louise Erdrich—it’s mystical yet highly grounded in the physical world. On “Ingydar,” a new track, she sings:
 
His eyes are blueberries, video screens
Minneapolis schemes and the dried flowers
From books half read
The juice of dark cherries cover his chin
The dog walks in and the crow lies in his
Jaw like lead
 
Weinrobe’s grandmother died while they were recording, which meant that he and Lenker were both suffering a loss. “I wrote nine of those songs once we started the session,” Lenker said. “We would record them the same day that I wrote them. I was surprised at how much I was writing, because I was in so much pain. I was not in the part of the pain where I was just reflecting on it.” She added, “I feel as if my psyche was putting as many things together as I could from my relationship, as many beautiful things as I could, to preserve it into eternity.” One of the instrumental pieces, “Music for Indigo,” was originally written as a kind of offering—something for her former partner to listen to as she fell asleep at night.
 
Two years ago, in California, Lenker bought a used Toyota Land Cruiser with a multitone paint job and a manual transmission. She drove it back East and began fixing it up, sanding down the exterior and refinishing it in a bright, hopeful blue. (The first time I met Lenker, she was in the midst of expertly backing the truck down a winding driveway and across a narrow wood-plank bridge.) With some help from an uncle, she outfitted the back of the truck with a foldable sleeping pad, a cooler, and wooden drawers for tools, clothes, and supplies. It has enormous tires—“It can go up any kind of mountain road,” she said proudly—and a beaded medallion hanging from the rearview mirror. It would pull her trailer across the country.
 
Lenker and Meek divorced in 2018. They are now what Lenker describes as “deep friends.” They didn’t hide their marriage and its dissolution from the press, exactly, but they also didn’t speak about it publicly. “I feel like it made us stronger and closer,” Lenker said, of the breakup. “I feel like we sing together better now, and we write together more. A lot of our love is funnelled into the music, which is maybe the form it was always meant to have.”
 
Krivchenia joined the band shortly after Meek and Lenker got engaged. “I was suddenly plopped into observing the intimacy, the beauty, and the shortcomings of a relationship, 24/7,” he said. “It’s been amazing to see it evolve.” He added, “They broke up, and it was a whole huge year of a specific kind of stress for them, and for the band. We did some tours without Buck, when they just needed to not be together for a while.” Though less dramatic fissures have undone other bands, playing together seemed only to accelerate the healing process. “Adrianne is always writing about whatever’s going on in her life, and so when they were getting divorced she was writing about it,” Krivchenia said. “Buck was processing that in real time, onstage. Some nights I’d look over and be, like, ‘Oof, that’s a rough one to hear, man.’ But he was really supportive of it.”
 

After their separation, Meek moved to California and wrote a record, “Two Saviors,” which he will release in January. It’s got more twang and air than Big Thief’s albums—Meek is from Texas, and his solo work is infused with the pathos and mischief of Townes Van Zandt and Waylon Jennings. “I played a huge amount of shows on my own, learned to surf. And she did her own thing,” he said. “When we finally did come back together, we jumped right into a tour. The music felt more important than us. It felt like something we had to serve and set aside our fears for.”
 
Meek had been visiting his partner in the Netherlands, where the government had lifted coronavirus travel restrictions for people in committed relationships. A couple of weeks after we first spoke, he sent me a voice memo. “I think we sacrificed it all for the music,” he said, of his marriage to Lenker. “It was a vessel for our love and friendship. And then our love and friendship became a vessel for the music.” It was too hard, in the end, to nurture a new marriage and also be in a band. “We didn’t actually have a home for maybe four or five years,” he said. “There was no privacy whatsoever, because we were always on tour. There was a complete lack of personal time or space. And part of us knew this—we were aware that it was taking a toll on our relationship.”
 
In conversation, I found Lenker attentive and kind, and there were moments during our time together when the emotional maturity of the Big Thief universe—how patient and evolved the intra-band negotiations are; how careful the members are to preëmptively diffuse volatile situations; how they have even adopted the phrase “everything is optional” to avoid compromising their integrity—felt almost intimidating. Anyone who has survived an experience via the careful suppression or compartmentalization of emotion is likely to find Big Thief’s system of communication astounding. “If you don’t talk, you know, you’re gonna get to Kansas and you’re still gonna have feelings from Baltimore,” Oleartchik told me. The end result of all that talking, he said, was the sentimental (yet still radical) discovery that “it’s actually acceptable to be who you are to your friends.”
 
Kyle Jaster and Misha Handschumacher live down the road from the studio, on Atticus Farm, where they grow flowers and organic vegetables, and tend to a passel of free-range heritage pigs. They offered to let Lenker park her trailer in their driveway while she worked on it, and before long they became part of the renovation team. When I arrived there one afternoon, Jaster’s brother, Wyatt, was measuring and installing new plywood subfloors. The trailer was small, aluminum, and from 1966. The interior was painted cherry red, but Lenker had just picked out a new color, a mellow cream called Honeyed White. We began priming and repainting the cabinets, drawers, and trim. “I’m curious how this trip is going to feel,” Lenker said. “I’m excited about the freedom, but I haven’t really felt full of relief. I’ve found it almost burdensome: I don’t know where home is. I don’t know who I belong with.”
 
When it grew too dark to paint, we retreated to a fire pit in the back yard. Jaster and Handschumacher prepared supper—okra and carrots grilled over the fire, chicken legs, blackberries, homemade ice cream—as their two dogs sprinted in figure eights around our lawn chairs. At dusk, a large owl swooped along the tree line. Owens and Cohen came by with beer. At some point, Lenker ended up with a Cuban cigar. “This was my fantasy when I was a kid,” she said, taking a tentative puff and laughing. “I wore knee-length jean shorts, plaid shirts, and a backward baseball cap, and all I wanted to do was eat beef jerky, drive a tractor, and smoke cigars.” An outdoor speaker played Michael Hurley, Arthur Russell, Moondog, Lucinda Williams, Bill Callahan. Lenker talked about moving to Vermont this fall—maybe building a little cabin in a corner of some land that her sister was buying there.
 
I left shortly after midnight. On the drive home, I rolled the windows down and let my hair blow around. I played “Dragon Eyes,” the penultimate track on “Songs.” It’s musically spare, with acoustic guitar and just a bit of brushed percussion. The final verse implores:
 
Stars bloom
On a warm summer night
They have a clear view
Without the bedroom light
I just want a place with you
I just want a place
 
 
A few weeks later, I returned to the farm to toast the renovation of the trailer. It was a brisk mid-September evening, and leaves were starting to accumulate in corners. Jaster and Handschumacher set out platters of gumbo, corn bread, and succotash on a long picnic table in the back yard. We kept our coats on as we ate. After supper, Lenker stood in the door of the trailer, holding up a glass of bourbon, and offered sincere thanks to everyone who had helped her fix it up. The interior was complete—new hardwood floors, linen curtains hung on silver wire, a small dining table made from a maple tree on the farm. Lenker showed me the blue enamel coffee mug she’d placed in the cupboard (“Unbreakable!”), the books she’d lined up on a small shelf near her bed, the single cast-iron casserole dish she could use to cook in the woodstove. She still needed to buy a tire jack and some roadside flares, just in case. She was leaving in two days.
 
In “Letters on Cézanne,” Rilke describes autumn as “containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.” Lenker writes often about time and loss—how to cling to what we need and let go of everything else. For her, songwriting is a way of externalizing specific experiences or memories and pinning them in place, like a butterfly under glass. “I like my songs to be reminders of certain things that I don’t want to forget,” she told me. Once they’re captured, then in a sense she is free.
 
Adrianne Lenker’s Radical Honesty. By Amanda Petrusich. The New Yorker, October 12, 2020.
 
 

Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker has two distinct new albums, songs and instrumentals, coming out on October 23 via 4AD. Today, she’s shared something from songs called “dragon eyes.” Have a listen below. Both albums were recorded in April—after Big Thief’s tour was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic—in a cabin with engineer Philip Weinrobe. “I grew really connected to the space itself,” Lenker said in a press release. “The one room cabin felt like the inside of an acoustic guitar—it was such a joy to hear the notes reverberate in the space.”

Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker Shares New Song “dragon eyes”: Listen.
By Evan Minsker. Pitchfork, October 1, 2020. 

Dragon Eyes

Like a bear trap under autumn leaves, violence lurks beneath the surface of Adrianne Lenker’s music. That is particularly true of songs and instrumentals, a forthcoming pair of albums she recorded in April in a one-room cabin in Western Massachusetts, layering acoustic guitars on analog tape. Her melodies are so gorgeous, her voice so small and unassuming, it can be jarring to peer through the galaxy-like sweep of her fingerpicking and discover a glint of menace in her half-obscured lyrics.
 
As is often the case with Lenker’s songs, “anything” seems to be about a memory that won’t be buried yet refuses to reveal itself completely. Over an overdubbed shimmer of steel-string guitars, she thumbs through disjointed snapshots of seasons past. There’s a summer beach day, hazy with desire (“Skin still wet, still on my skin/Mango in your mouth, juice drippin’/Shoulder of your shirt sleeve slippin’”), and a Christmas eve with her lover’s family. But whatever happened here was not all good: That December memory unravels into grocery-store fights, a nasty dog bite, and a trip to the ER. And even that glance back at summer revelry feels ominous in the context of the song’s opening couplet: “Staring down the barrel of the hot sun/Shining with the sheen of a shotgun.”
 
But those fleeting glimpses of calamity disappear almost as soon as they flash out, while the song’s fragmentary verses lead to a chorus as unguarded and plain-spoken as anything Lenker has written. “I don’t wanna talk about anything/I don’t wanna talk about anything,” she sings; “I wanna kiss kiss your eyes again/Wanna witness your eyes lookin’.” Then she repeats a variation of the chorus’ opening line and concludes, “I wanna sleep in your car while you’re driving/Lay in your lap when I’m crying.” On the page, it might not look like much, but sung in Lenker’s high, lonesome voice, multi-tracked in quavering unison with herself, these lines are remarkable for their intimacy and vulnerability. For a song about distant and ambiguous memories, there’s something about “anything” that feels unusually alive. The way Lenker sings “kiss kiss your eyes again”—the subtle repetition, the unexpected pause at the end of the line—feels like she has taken the pulse of joy itself, capturing the cadence of a racing heart in a moment of stillness.

Adrianne Lenker : “anything”. By Philip Sherburne. Pitchfork ,September 3, 2020.
 

Anything

Personal Beauty by Renell Medrano

Photography is Renell Medrano’s primary mode of communication and has been since she was 14. “Honestly, photography has been everything I wanted to do since I was a kid. I use to steal my mom’s point-and-shoot and take it to school to document my friends. I just felt like that was my voice.” Now, at 27, the medium is her way of responding to the world. Blurring the lines between documentary and fashion, she’s using photography to connect, celebrate and rework the power dynamics in popular culture.

Medrano’s work is deeply personal. Informed by the people and places that have shaped her life, both past and present, she blends her unique take on beauty with real-life circumstances. The textural quality of her photographs recalls the loving gaze of Liz Johnson Artur’s Nineties documentation of black Britain, and the colour play of William Eggleston. Unlike her peers, she’s not interested in limiting her vision to the highlights reel. Flaws and imperfections inspire her. She’s thinking about spaces, intimacy and vulnerability – the stylings are secondary. Her truly unique work serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of telling our own stories.

Finding fame in an era of digital democratisation was a game-changer for Medrano, who has been publishing her work on Tumblr for years. “After graduating, I had that hunger and drive in me, so I just hustled. I would post my work all the time. Sharing to get the word out and have people see my work. In some ways, it was perfect timing for me. When everything started switching up, you could make your Instagram your entire portfolio.”

Medrano is part of a new generation of young black image-makers who create photos that straddle art and fashion with a broader set of intentions. Moving away from the traditional pursuit of glamour, they are telling stories of social and political inclusivity, advocating for a wider celebration of beauty and the self – a powerful antidote for a group previously marginalised in mainstream fashion and culture. “I don’t want us to get put in a category. It’s easy for publications and brands to now be like, ‘Let’s get a black photographer to shoot it so that they can get the exposure.’ I don’t agree with that. We’ve been amazing before this moment.” Self-determination has been both her secret weapon and a necessity for Medrano. In previous interviews, she’s shared the struggles she’s encountered while assisting, and how she felt alien being the only black girl on set. “I just used my inner resources. I’m so happy to be a part of what’s happening now. It’s amazing, breaking barriers every day.”

Growing up in the Bronx shaped Medrano and had a profound effect on her definition of beauty. “Growing up in urbanised communities, you wouldn’t think the people and places I was around were beautiful, but for me, I saw beauty in that rawness, and I take that everywhere with me.” Growing up surrounded by family and friends, she learnt that “self-love is self-acceptance”, an ethos she tries to share with the kids in her community. “I feel like people have this bad perception of the Bronx and I try and make it relatable to everybody. There are a lot of places like that, and I feel like we need to embrace them. I want the world to know there is beauty in everything, in all people.”

Untitled Youth, an intimate look at the lives of four teenage girls growing up in the Bronx, was her undergraduate thesis project at Parsons School of Design, where she earned her BFA in 2014. The series, which mirrors her uptown upbringing, was an immersive two-year project in which she documented all aspects of her subjects’ daily lives. Medrano imbues these regular girls with agency and strength, championing their ‘perfectly imperfect’ beauty to empower them and ensure they feel seen. She says that Parsons initially felt “far-fetched” for her “as it was so hard to get in. But I decided just to do it, and give it my all”. She tells me, “I even went to the enrolment office and made sure they knew I wanted to go there.” The series established Medrano as one to watch and won the New York Times Lens Blog Award.

It’s been a busy few years for Medrano, who has built up an incredible portfolio collaborating with Nike, Gucci and Jimmy Choo, shooting covers and creating album art for A$AP Ferg, H.E.R. and Chaka Khan. Today, she’s created a short film with music video director Thuan Tran as part of Peluca, her first ever solo show that opened at New York’s Milk Studios this September – the same venue that also hosted her thesis show. I’m curious if she ever worries about over-exposure? “We live in such a fast world. Everything is given to us so fast. It kinda scares me; I keep trying to slow it down,” she tells me. “It does create anxiety for people. Social media is just encouraging us to put so much out to stay relevant. I try not to let that pace define me or my work.” Being conscious of career longevity can often mean making difficult choices: “I think about what will we have left for later. I say no to a lot more now. Even when it’s a great opportunity, sometimes I say no, it can just be so much.”

For Medrano, creating energy and intimacy on demand is tough. “I honestly try and capture moments that mean something to me. Clients freak out sometimes, asking for mood boards. I get it. But you guys hire us; just let us do our thing. In documentary, whatever happens is what you get. I try and explain the vibe I’m going for but it’s on set that the magic happens for me.” I ask how she navigates busy sets. “My team get it,” she tells me. “They don’t hover behind my back. They walk off set and let it happen and then get excited to see the photos a week later.” Her approach is instinctual; she prefers not to direct. “I love to have my subject live in the space we are in and just let things happen. I think that’s why my work feels personal. It’s just about me and the subject.”

Five-years on from her graduate show at Milk Gallery, she returned this autumn with Peluca. Named after the Spanish term for ‘wig’, it’s an immersive exploration of the complex dynamics of wig culture and their recent shift into the mainstream. The 25-image show included the aforementioned collaboration with Tran; an extraordinarily sized wig installation by hairstylist, Evanie Frausto, and – the focal point – a ‘salon experience’ installation with set designer, Lauren Nikrooz, where a model got their hair done in front of the crowd. “Peluca came from me reflecting on my work and questioning the role hair and wigs play in my stories. When I was younger, I’d be in the salon two-to-three times a week surrounded by real women. Salons were always such a private and safe space for us. I feel like back in the day talking about wigs was not a thing. It would be looked down upon, so we were scared to embrace it.”

The show was a defining moment for Medrano, both personally and professionally. Tired of her images only existing on social media, the act of framing them and having her community come out and connect with the work was transformational. “I wanna inspire people and move people, not just with photos. This living thing had a real impact on people.” Personally, the show gave her purpose. “The energy was amazing on the opening. Kids need to see our community like that. I want to keep the community involved and create hope for them as well.”

Grit tempered by tenderness has made her a go-to for musicians. Medrano’s recent portraits of musician Dev Hynes (AKA Blood Orange) are both candid and disarming. Hynes sits casually in a pared-back studio wearing a variety of sculptural wigs that transform how we see him. “I’m very picky about the artists that I photograph. Dev is amazing, he trusts my eye. It was a small set, just the three of us, playing around with wigs. All my favourite shoots tend to happen when we are free. We feel each other’s energy. That’s how I usually do my best work.”

She continues: “I hate the word ‘celebrity’. We are all waiting to see them all glammed up in perfect light. I remember shooting Megan Thee Stallion and people at first were like, ‘This is not her.’ But I love how I took her from that element and brought her to the Bronx, somewhere she’s never been.” This is Medrano’s trademark, she shoots celebrities as regulars. She grounds them in reality, in places and spaces that feel familiar, lived-in and honest. The images she captures are intimate and authentic. Illusive moments where her subjects let go and reveal aspects of their interior personas. They are free to have fun, to nerd out, to inhabit the emotional space usually reserved for family and friends. “I treat my subjects all equally. Honestly, I don’t even ‘fan out’ anymore. In the beginning, I used to feel pressure, I was so nervous. But what I realised is that we are all the same and me not viewing their status changed everything. They know what they’re worth and who they are. I treat them as regulars because they are.”

For photographers, transitioning to being in front of the lens can be a challenging and disorientating encounter. When I ask Medrano about her experience shooting herself for the cover of this issue, she tells me: “I discovered it was interesting.” Aiming to capture the same vulnerability she achieves with her subjects, she explains, “At first I was super nervous, there are so many different ways of doing it. There wasn’t much prepping. I played around with wigs again to explore different aspects of my personality. I was a character that I am only in my head.”

As viewers of her work we experience a lot of Medrano’s inner emotions through her photographs, and in many ways, her creative work is a loving gift to the community who helped make her. With a history of greatness behind her, who knows what her next move will be. But one truth remains: she’s turbocharged and just getting started.

“Beauty in everything”: the deeply personal photography of Renell Medrano. By Gem Fletcher. Sleek  , February 18, 2020.

New York-based photographer Renell Medrano has long explored her hometown in her work. Previous series have seen the image-maker document teenage girls in the Bronx, where she was born (Untitled Youth, 2014, her Parsons thesis project), while Peluca, exhibited last year in New York, compiled imagery from Medrano’s editorial archive to explore the power of wigs. “I carry this very scenic backstory – growing up in the Bronx,” she told Antwaun Sargent in his 2019 book The New Black Vanguard. “I try to portray that in my images.”

For her most recent project, entitled Pampara, Medrano explored some of her family heritage further afield. Her parents are from the Dominican Republic, and having spent holidays there since she was a child, Medrano has long wanted to photograph the country. The series was commissioned by WePresent and will show in London today, marking Medrano’s first European exhibition.

“I wanted to go back and pay homage to my parents’ culture,” Medrano tells AnOther, “and shine a light on what is part of me: the people, the culture, the freedom and the innocence [in the Dominican Republic]. I thought, how come I have never photographed what is so special and a part of me?”

The series’ title, Pampara, is a Dominican saying that translates from Spanish to “it’s lit”. There is an undeniable energy to the warm, vivid portraits in the series, which capture people in San Cristóbal and Santiago, where Medrano’s father is from. “I let people come to me, and usually that’s how I work when it comes to documenting,” Medrano explains. “It was not about me finding subjects, it was more about what I connected to.” This approach meant that those she photographed ranged from her grandmother – “the photo of my grandma is my favourite; it makes me feel nostalgic as that was where I had my naps after playing all day long, as it was the only room that had air conditioning” – to children on the beach or playing in the street or women in their homes.

“My memories from spending time there as a child are of feeling liberated, my grandmother’s cooking, and the roosters waking me up in the morning,” Medrano says. The Caribbean nation has undoubtedly influenced her photography, explaining that “the people, the environment and the vulnerability are what I carry with me in my practice”. While previous projects have explored life in New York, returning to her parents’ home country for the first time since she was teenaged marks a renewed perspective and a homecoming for the Dominican American photographer.

Photographer Renell Medrano’s Vivid Portrait of the Dominican Republic. By Belle Hutton.  Another Magazine, February 18, 2020. 

At just 27, Dominican-American photographer Renell Medrano has built an enviable portfolio (recent subjects include Jay-Z and Solange). The new decade power credentials don’t end there: Medrano is backed by an impressive social-media following and real-life friendships with the figures at the centre of our virtual worlds – Bella, Kendall and Justine Skye are all friends. It could sound too good to be true, were it not for the fact that Medrano began putting in the groundwork aged 14, turning her point-and-shoot on the Bronx community she grew up alongside.

At 18, she enrolled on a photography course at NYC’s hallowed Parsons School of Design, where her talent for evoking a sense of vulnerability on film flourished. Outside class, Medrano quickly drew a slew of loyal devotee’s on Tumblr, thanks to her stream of unfiltered visual diary entries. “I used to post the work I was making by constantly shooting everything and everyone around me,” she tells Vogue.

During London Fashion Week autumn/winter ’20/’21, this rising star is set to unveil a deeply personal layer to her work with a debut solo exhibition that explores her Dominican heritage. Entitled Pampara (loosely translated from Spanish as ‘it’s lit’), the show is an unabashed ode to countless euphoric summers spent in the Dominican Republic. From her parents' birthplace, to discovering Santiago and San Cristobal with fresh eyes, Medrano talks to Vogue about the pride and passion within her images.

What inspired Pampara?

“I wanted people to feel connected to a place I’m connected to; it may not be a culture they’re familiar with, but culture is a worldwide language. I remember visits to the Dominican Republic, when I was younger, and hanging out with my cousins who were a few years older than me and neighbourhood friends. It was little things like that I enjoyed. Spending time there, sharing laughs, dancing and telling stories with new people was a freeing feeling.”

You spent childhood summers there, why was it important to go back to the DR now?

“I was so caught up with work, and I had to stop and think about what’s important. It just felt like the right time to go. The Dominican Republic is my parents’ home and I’m old enough now to understand why those visits were so special. My subjects were curious about what I was doing, and my camera, but speaking Spanish made them feel comfortable. Sometimes [that community] can feel as though people are trying to exploit them, but with my parents coming from there and me having spent time there, it felt authentic.”

Your images capture candid, vulnerable, moments. What was the thought process behind a few of them?

“The photo with balloons on the girls’ heads signifies the hair baubles all the young girls wore, so I had my stylist, Nathan Klein, exaggerate what I saw growing up. The girls represent a younger me. The two boys in the sand showed the vulnerable side of men in my culture, I felt like these two kids playing with each other looked to a fragile side [of masculinity]. I wanted to create moving images as well, to give sound and language, because stills would not be enough to capture the depth and essence of that country.”

Your grandmother is featured in the exhibition, what is the story behind this?

“My grandmother would often visit us in New York. She would babysit me and my siblings, so I was close to her. We would pray together before bed and when we woke up. One of my favourite images in the exhibition is of her on my parents' bed. I’ve never photographed her in a vulnerable way, she’s always been this tough cookie. I captured her image in their bedroom; I used to sneak in there when I was younger and take a nap when I was tired from playing out in the sun, so it felt special.”

What were your biggest challenges in visiting the DR to make Pampara?

“It was a lot to take in because it was my first time going there to shoot. It was overwhelming, I didn't know where to start. It felt like a week wasn’t enough. I want to make another trip to cover more ground. But I started roaming around and didn’t force anything. If I did run into something and I loved it, I’d try to return to it the following day. Next time, I think I’ll have a better sense of what I’m going back for.”

Inside photographer Renell Medrano’s euphoric debut solo show, Pampara. By Eni Subair. Vogue , February 18, 2020

Photographer Renell Medrano's first big break came through a photo series titled "Untitled Youth," in 2014. The project was a compelling look into the everyday lived experiences of four young friends over two years in the Bronx, where Medrano was born and brought up.

But for her latest series, she returned to the Dominican Republic, where her parents are from and where she used to spend summers as a child.

Titled "Pampara" (meaning "lit" in Spanish but open to multiple meanings such as "It's on!"), it captures the everyday reality of life on the Island nation, with images featuring young boys basking in the Caribbean sun whilst laying in the sand, a smiling woman wearing a t-shirt adorned with the words "Brown Barbie Babe" and a mother and child in color-matching outfits.

The 18 shots of the community inhabiting San Cristobal and Santiago are presented in her signature style, recognizable for its high-contrast colors and the unfiltered documentary-style portraits of its subjects.

Medrano's portfolio is already rich with famous names -- she did an IG-ready photo series of Kylie Jenner's Turks and Caicos vacation, photographed cover art for musicians including Justine Skye, H.E.R and A$AP Ferg, and has photographed Bella Hadid, Solange and Jay-Z, among others.

CNN Style spoke to her about her most personal series yet, which she told us "came to me authentically and naturally."

CNN: You used to take photos in the Dominican Republic, where your family is from, during the summer. What was different about shooting this collection of photos?

Renell Medrano: I was more focused and aware of my surroundings and what I wanted to photograph. Before, I'd be visiting family members and I was just living with it.

You feature a lot of women in this series. Was this a conscious decision?

It wasn't a conscious decision, but I did realize that when I was photographing women, especially the young females, I kind of saw myself within them. That could be a reason why I feature a lot of women throughout the series.

You also shoot for brands, musicians and fashion magazines where the production is more elaborate. How do you inject emotion and grab people when you don't have additional elements to dial up the energy of a photo?

I actually work better when it's not set up, when it's more candid. I also feel like that's how I got into photography in the first place -- I was always documenting what was around me. For some reason I tend to capture vulnerability in people, that's what's strong about my images.

Did anything surprise you about this experience?

Just how comfortable people were with me photographing them out there. Me shooting them reminded me of my childhood and my upbringing out in DR.

I'm curious about the shot of two girls standing by the pay phone with the yellow and green balloons in their hair.

The big balloons in their hair are an exaggerated form of the bobbles I used to wear when I was younger. I had a stylist enlarge them to make a statement about me and my culture -- the balloons represent my younger self.

The shot of the two girls playing cards also stood out, what can you tell us about this photograph?

Two girls playing cards was more candid. I was walking around the neighborhood and these two twins were playing cards but their look was just so androgynous which kind of drew me to them. I took the photo and the girl stared at me like that -- that's how the photo came about.

Who inspires you creatively?

The way I get my inspiration is really through Tumblr, I tend to use it as a moodboard. I've been on Tumblr for a very long time, it's how I got started and gained my following in the first place.

Do you feel a real sense of homecoming when you visit?

I did feel a sense of homecoming, I mean I always feel welcomed when I do go back to DR. Whether it's my family members seeing me -- I always get a lot of love when I got back, and it just feels liberating.

 Dominican American photographer Renell Medrano's most personal series yet. By Hena Sharma. CNN , February 19, 2020

It goes without saying that where you grew up – the colours, people, architecture, sounds, smells of a place – play a huge role in who you become as a person. But what about the family roots that are in your blood, and perhaps in tiny snippets of childhood memories, but not your upbringing? How far can they impact who you are as an individual, and the sort of work you make as a creative?

Photographer and director Renell Medrano was born and raised in the Bronx, New York – a place she’s spoken about fondly. “Growing up, I was always sitting in a salon with a few other females, Black, Hispanic, and we were always getting our hair done – that was like our sanctuary, that was like our safe space. It was a community,” she told Time magazine last year.

But for all her love of that community, Medrano has also long been fascinated by her family’s heritage and her roots as a Dominican-American. In order to pay homage to this heritage, turn the lens on rarely documented communities and provide a celebratory photographic love letter to her parents, Medrano decided to take a trip to the Dominican Republic. It was a journey that proved at once physical, spiritual and revelatory in terms of explaining aspects of her creative process.

The trip resulted in a new body of work, including 18 photographs and a short film co-directed with Thuan Tran, that is about to go on display in a London exhibition entitled Pampara, which takes its name from the Spanish translation for ‘it’s lit’.

The new pieces showcase Medrano’s return to her homeland-of-sorts, navigating the Dominican as both a largely unfamiliar geographical space and a site that’s had a profound impact on her perspective. Pampara, which was commissioned by the editorial arm of WeTransfer’s WePresent, narrates her return through her interactions with the area’s natural beauty, architectural peccadilloes, and more importantly the frequently larger-than-life personalities that inhabit it.

It’s these people that make Medrano’s images so captivating: whether her subjects are staring directly into the lens, or caught apparently off-guard, they demonstrate the photographer’s ongoing commitment to showcasing a sense of community and its importance in an age where such bonds are rapidly ebbing away.

In one image, a mother and daughter stand together in colour configurations that are so well matched to one another and their surroundings as to look like a meticulously structured, pastel toned editorial; in another, children peer curiously at the camera with an air of both “an’ wot?!” and barely concealed fascination. The rich shades of baby pink, yellow and sunwashed blue bring a sense of nostalgia and calm to the shots, as though Medrano has perhaps finally come ‘home’ in her immortalisation of a place that’s meant so much to her and her elders.

Acting as a personal visual storybook, the series demonstrates how a place that she might not have been wholly connected to in terms of her actual presence while growing up has had a deep impact on the way she works today: consider the vibrant colours she uses; the careful combinations of tones; sunlit streets that feel hot to even look at; and her witty knack for capturing bags of charisma in a static image.

There’s innocence in some photographs – two boys snoozily roll about in sand, apparently without a care in the world – and experience, too, with one photograph cropped to reveal just midriff tattoos and the proudly worn stretch marks that act as topographical markers of a life. The images act as a love letter of sorts to Medrano’s parents and their heritage; as well as an exploration of her roots, and the impact they have had on a more ambiguous level on her creative process today.

Medrano’s approach to photography acts as an exploration of geographical and social terrains, as well as a mirror of her emotional preoccupations. Her work showcases the possibilities for community and cohesion through art, via images that are both intimate and unapologetic.

“Pampara is me going back to my Dominican roots and exploring that in depth for the first time, my adult self returning to the culture and community I was surrounded by growing up,” says Medrano. “I wanted to pay homage to the loving energy and beauty of the Dominican way of life and let it shine for the world to see. My Dominican roots are embedded in my being and now I’m older I can see they are the reason why I shoot the way I do.”

Renell Medrano explores how heritage can shape the creative process. By Emily Gosling. Creative Review, February 18, 2020. 

At the opening night of photographer Renell Medrano’s show, Peluca, chopped cheese sandwiches and snow cones were passed around as a hair stylist sewed in a woman’s weave, the focal point of a single salon chair installation in the center of Milk Gallery that was part grooming, part performance art. The show, which draws its name from the Spanish word for “wig,” is a 25-image rumination on the complex dynamics of wig culture, but also functions as an homage to Medrano’s New York City roots, the vibrant environment and community that shaped the way she sees the world.

“Growing up, I was always sitting in a salon with a few other females, Black, Hispanic, and we were always getting our hair done — that was like our sanctuary, that was like our safe space,” she told TIME. “It was a community.”

The collection of images, which explore themes like the stigma and mainstreaming of wigs in society, range from an unflinching and intimate portrait of the musician Dev Hynes in a towering, tightly-curled wig to the picture that inspired the exhibit: a shot of a woman with a voluminous red mane, sitting in a car with an interior nearly the same shade as her hair. Medrano’s saturated photos all share the same calm intensity — rawness tempered by tenderness, an element that’s made her work the go-to for a new generation of creatives like Solange Knowles, Virgil Abloh and Tyler the Creator.

The 27-year-old Medrano picked up her first camera at 14, a point-and-shoot she borrowed from her mother that she would use to take pictures of her friends at school and during summers spent with her grandmother in the Dominican Republic. Later, as her love for photography grew, she would post her photos on Tumblr, where she would catalogue them according to “a vibe,” or the feeling they evoked, a process she still uses while selecting images for her Instagram account, which boasts nearly 300k followers.

In recent years, Medrano’s penchant for vibrant color and her ability to create intimate portraiture has made her a mainstay of the fashion and music space. She’s shot album covers for H.E.R., Justine Skye, and her partner, A$AP Ferg, as well as covers and editorials for magazines like Office, Wonderland, and The Fader.

She credits her eye and instinct to being born and raised in the Bronx, where she says she found that she learned to appreciate finding beauty in unconventional places and discovered that “beauty was the ugly.”

“Growing up in the Bronx is about embracing the ugly and making it beautiful,” she said. “Sometimes it’s not a top model that you see as my subject, but I try to embrace that everyone is beautiful.”

For Medrano, Peluca also holds a special personal nostalgia.

“It’s kind of funny because 5 years ago, I had my group exhibition show at Milk, for my thesis at Parsons, so it’s kind of cool to see how 5 years from now, I got my own solo show at Milk,” she said. “I remember thinking all I really care about is just taking photos and I’m still here and I’m still doing it.”

Renell Medrano’s Peluca Finds Beauty in Her Roots. By Cady Lang . Time , September 7, 2019.

More  :

Renell Mendrano Pampara. By Micha Frazer-Carroll. WePresent , 2020

Renell Medrano's year in photos.  By Ryan White.   i-D  , December 10   2019. 

Renell Medrano’s Photographs Capture The Power of Wigs. By Stephanie Eckhardt. W Magazine , September  14 , 2019

Website



Tumblr