When you picture something that you’re expecting to happen, it never turns out that way, no matter how unspecific the image you had in mind. Actually, I’d go so far as to say that anticipating the future in a specific way ensures that it won’t occur that way. I sort of knew this by the time I got the call from James, sometime in the first half of 2020, to invite me to come out to Tucson for the fourth and last recording session of Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You - and so I was, to some extent, able to suppress any fantasizing, speculating, projecting, etc as to what the session would be like and how I would fit into it. I limited my anticipation to a very ambiguous but powerful joy at the prospect of getting a chance to do something I was deeply wanting to do and, admittedly, I indulged my ego in a few trips around the self-congratulation race course, too.
The last time I had the privilege of recording with Big Thief was for their second album Capacity, at a studio on the upper west side of Manhattan. Buck and I had spent a part of a summer working on that studio, exposing the century-old floor joists in the ceiling and doing some rude trigonometry to get the drywall to sit nicely in the irregular spaces in-between. I can remember, dawn, meeting up on Vanderbilt wherever had the good coffee for the sweet hour-or-so bike ride to work and seeing that guy coming down the avenue and thinking ‘wow, my friend’.
We spent two days trying overdubs and a few takes of songs - a version of “Capacity” that didn’t make the album and a version of “Mary” that did.
In the years since that session, I witnessed the world getting wise to the words and melodies of the rare and true bard Adrianne and to the mystical chemistry between these four people - James, Max, Buck, Adrianne - who work to present her songs. I hesitate to use this often-abused word ‘mystical’ but I believe it is the right word and I’ll try to use it correctly here.
**
This is written prior to the release of DNWMIBIY. I imagine a few aspects of this record will get memed-out in the press; the fact that it contains 20 songs; the quadratic recording sessions in the Catskills, Topanga Canyon, the Colorado Rockies, and Tucson; that it is the first Big Thief album produced by a member of the band, James, and the first produced by someone other than Andrew Sarlo. Maybe they will talk about the dramatic shifts in sonic-style and arrangement from song to song. Sometimes, people say a band has “found their sound”. I don’t know if this is a good thing. By contrast, Big Thief is a band about finding sound. On the level of Adrianne finding words and melody, on the level of the band as a whole creating architecture based on her designs, the sound of this band is about discovery. There are so many kinds of sounds that can make a band alluring, and almost all of them can be imitated, fabricated to some degree; even love gets gamed, ad nauseum. But the sound of discovery can’t be falsified because it is based on mystery and experience, and because it is always varying and personal.
And because there is actual risk involved. Discovery is chancy.
***
Maybe 2017, NYC - Persistent memory of sitting in the dumpling shop, the one on Essex called North Dumpling, and it’s a raining memory, which may not be accurate but that’s how it felt, how the memory feels, and it’s Adrianne and Buck sitting there across the table. This place had the good veggie dumplings, kind of rare. The vibe this evening is serious. This memory stands out because the vibe is serious. As distinct from sad or depressing or dismal. It occurs to me that this is a kind of rare vibe to share - seriousness. It’s awesome. Having fun and sharing joy is great. But sharing in the seriousness of life is really just as good. What has happened is that they’ve just come from the office of some record label and the person there whose job it is to determine a band’s artistic/commercial potential has given them the verdict - “No” : I don’t remember the specifics, but the thrust of the guys reasoning was that he didn’t feel the band offered anything distinct in the way of personality, that, oh yeah, they “were not doing anything new”. We can savor, for a minute, the now-obvious fact that this is the wrongest guy of 2017. In the dumpling shop that night, this was already clear. Something was cauterizing, solidifying…
I’m getting to the point now; there is a fear of seriousness, ever since rock and roll and the death of patrician cool. Seriousness is one of those flavors that a band can easily forge, like a signature, and commodify; and we’ve all seen endless parody of false seriousness, grist for the irony mill, and maybe that’s why the culture is wary of it. So much fake seriousness. If you’re getting serious, better watch out, someone might mistake it for a joke. But a true seriousness of purpose: it’s exhilarating and frightening and honestly hilarious, open-chested slack-jawed guffawing hilarious. No inner sneer, no silent judge. Good pure awe. Big Thief does not hide their seriousness and they don’t boast of it either. I love that about them.
I’m thinking about this photograph of the band - It looks pretty hot out, a few of them are kinda draped over this concrete thing, and it has this really sexy exhaustion element, of a group of people who had been through a journey or were in the midst of one. I hadn’t seen any of them in person for a while and it kinda shocked me, how much they seemed changed by experience in such a short bit of time. Every encounter I’ve chanced into with this band proves and out-proves a paradox, and maybe this is where the mystic element gets active, in this paradox: the music is a distinct thing, separate from its creators, but also completely continuous with them. See what I mean: there are few bands, few musicians who are able to embody this paradox, because their music, or their band, remains distinct from the people who manifest it: they get together and do the band, they do the songs. Sometimes it is very convincing, but I think everyone listening (or ‘watching’ as we have all inexplicably begun to say ) can feel the difference, even if they can’t hear it. Big Thief feels like a covenant of honesty, and this can be felt from any angle - playing their record, being present for a show, going into their studio, looking at a photograph.
****
driving through the Tucson mountain range with Buck, my car doesn’t go very fast but it handles sharp turns in it’s own wild and ponderous way, and there are probably 20 chicken thighs on the center console that Buck grilled immediately prior to departure, like the coals were still smoldering when we left, a mug of BBQ sauce to dunk them (the chicken) in, which is what we are doing on the drive to get somewhere before 5pm and we are late. Buck has a flagrant disregard for time in a line, which I am pretty sure he learned from Adrianne. They are masters of presence, all of them. They do things to time that are magic: you’ve got to leave in ten minutes and Buck starts casually BBQing 12lbs of chicken wings. And, ultimately, you are not late despite all known laws of physics. This mastery can be felt in their music, big time. Frequently, the idea of time comes up out of the four sides of DNWMIBIY. Fractured time and resuscitated time.
like a dream. this album is like Big Thief dreaming. chronologically it is their fifth album, but currently I like to think of it as one that has been growing and fermenting throughout the band's lifespan. a record from the subconscious. there is a dream-logic to it. in contrast to the past records, the environment is changing throughout every song, sometimes abruptly or even violently, akin to a sudden impossible shift of perspective, of time or place while dreaming, which is perfectly acceptable to the dreamer. the first song on the record - “Change” - says everything about what comes next; and the album becomes the journey that that song is describing. I think Adrianne has something in common with another master in the field of words, Cormack McCarthy, in this respect: she can get out of the way of her own power as a writer in order to tell a story. She is capable of writing into the stars in a way that is sheer talent and makes a listener think “that sounds like so much fun”, and yet when there is a story to be told, she finds her footing back on earth in a flash, whereas a lot of writers with only a measure of that talent get their horizons tangled and often can’t return to the ground, or get back into the stars.
from “Change”, the album erupts with deceptive lava-like quickness, seems so slow and then you are engulfed. there are fragments of songs, there are vast songs - like “Sparrow”, a song that nearly frightens me in it’s core-jangling lucidity, like the feeling i get when i look at the painting “Poppies” by Wojciech Weiss - songs that seem to expand to contain the entire album.
*****
sitting with Max in the backyard of the house, doing a breathing exercise. He is the kind of guy who can easily influence you to do the thing you want to do but won’t let yourself, for whatever ego reasons. He is immensely lovable, speaks in languages as he invents them… the story is Buck and Adrianne ran into Max on the street when they were looking for a bass player. He’s supposed to be there.
They’re all supposed to be there. Like they have always existed, together. It’s a really wonderful thing to experience. You don’t have to have an opinion about fate or freewill; it’s just, some things seem a little more inevitable than other things. Suddenly the session is over, everyone has left except Adrianne and Noah, her younger brother (who charms the record in the form of a jaw harp on “Spud Infinity”)… there’s a piano in my car that wasn’t there to begin with …. the feeling of having gone through something but only experiencing it after the occurrence. Scott McMicken, who engineered the Tucson recordings in his fantastic home studio, confirms that it all went by in a moment.
We took a hike around dusk in the Catalina Foothills. James tells me about camping there in the first days of the pandemic, hiking up to the ridge to get service in order to keep up the weekly band meeting, ritualized and natural like a family dinner, and he says that it was pretty obvious in that conversation, they would make this album, this year.
-Mat Davidson, Oct 2021, Austin Texas
