Adrianne Lenker at Mission Ballroom in Denver
Three people. That’s the musical entirety of Adrianne Lenker’s touring party. The Big Thief singer-songwriter, promoting her excellent new album, Bright Future, believes in traveling light, bringing along her opener, Staci Foster (who is also Lenker’s partner), and jaw harp player Noah Lenker (who is also her brother). And that’s all it took for a spellbinding night of music at Denver’s Mission Ballroom.
Staci Foster set the tone for the evening with a set of acoustic tunes detailing her roots in Texas and time in Colorado (she has ties to Fort Collins and Durango). From opener “287” to songs about being raised as a country girl to a tune about strawberry pie that was about…more than dessert, Foster provided a pleasant country-folk counter to Lenker’s indie-rock background (Lenker came out to join Foster for a tune, doing nothing more ornate than sitting next to her on the floor and singing with her partner).
Lenker came out – solo – to a sold-out house of nearly 4,000 armed with only her voice and a couple of acoustic guitars. She dove right into the sad stuff – “Real House,” the lead track off Bright Future, details a somewhat dysfunctional family who finally comes together to say goodbye to the family’s dog (sounds of sniffles were audible across the crowd). Turns out, this was the early, emotional low of the evening. Largely staying away from the sadder numbers on her record, she chose to take the title Bright Future to heart, including dedicating her “Free Treasure” and Big Thief’s “Born for Loving You” (concluding with a taste of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You”) to Foster. “Treasure,” in particular, is maybe the warmest song Lenker’s written – just simple images of a life almost too good to be real: “You’re cooking dinner/It’s gettin’ around half past ten/I haven’t smelled food so good/Since I don’t know where/And I don’t know when.” That kind of quiet happiness extended out to the audience, as Lenker remarked between songs, “You wouldn’t know it was 2024 with your attention span for tuning” (Mission, an otherwise amazing Denver venue that seems talky-er than most, was wonderfully, blissfully silent for most for most of the evening).
Lenker also threw a number of Big Thief favorites into her set, including a stripped-down take on the oh-so-addictive “Little Things” (from 2022’s Dragon Warm Mountain I Believe in You), punctuated with yelps, and the fizzy crowd favorite “Spud Infinity” (also from Dragon), which featured brother Noah and brought out the dancers at the seated show (and still the only rock song to rhyme “finish” with “knish”). For her encore, she dipped into her solo catalog with the spare chiller “Indiana” (from 2014’s Hours Were the Birds), and the sleepy love song “anything” (from 2020’s songs), where Lenker wants nothing more on Earth than her partner – “I don’t wanna talk about anything/I wanna kiss, kiss your eyes again.” It was that way for us in the crowd, too – we didn’t want pyrotechnics or costume changes or any other pop star stuff, just a few more quiet, perfectly beautiful songs.
Read our review of Bright Future here: https://americanahighways.org/2024/03/20/review-adrienne-lenker-bright-future/
Check out Adrianne Lenker tour dates here: https://www.adriannelenker.com/tour
Go here to purchase Bright Future: https://store.bigthief.net/collections/adrianne-lenker
