In her in-between creative spurts away from Big Thief, Adrianne Lenker’s songwriting furthers its supernatural ability to hold the fraught nature of relationships, purpose, and the human experience with grace inside a song. She did so in the earthliest sense with 2021’s double album, songs and instrumentals, escaping into a cabin in the woods of the Berkshires of Western Mass. Armed with just an acoustic guitar, her music merged the solitude of her nettled surroundings, the hollows of her instrument, and the always-mystifying beauty of life revealed through her craft. Folk music often feels at home in such an intimate setting, but in Lenker’s hands, she discovers places hidden to the heart that until that very moment have not seen light. Her latest solo effort, Bright Future, Lenker goes even further inward — spiritually and physically, at that. Recording the effort inside a studio in collaboration with multi-instrumental parlor players Mat Jeferson, Nick Hakim and  Josefin Runsteen who adorn her plucked-and-spindled acoustic nylon with rustic piano, fiddle, violin, and timber percussion, the dozen tracks which make up its webbed journey venture from a scrapbook of prose that moves past to present, views scary movies as reminders of our mortality, visits ruins as a monument to a love (or is it evol?) that was, and sees sadness as a gift. Like the live-to-tape takes of the album’s recording session, these songs sound like the poetic living testament of someone who sews life’s seasons for meaning, even if in the shadow of melancholia, rather than letting them exist solely as memory in vain.

Highlights: “Real House”, “Sadness As A Gift”, “Fool”

Adrianne Lenker’s Bright Future is available now on 4AD.

Buy | Stream