Contemplating infinity, cross-country trips, and a towering double album with rock’s critical darlings, bigthiefmusic. justinmcurto reports
Max Olearchik, Buck Meek, Adrianne Lenker, and James Krivchenia. Photo: Alexa Viscius Something peculiar happens whenever Big Thief comes together to play music. It’s a unique synergy even the critically acclaimed quartet has a hard time explaining. “It’s, in some ways, very mysterious,” says bassist Max Oleartchik.
The day before the release of Dragon, the four members crowded onto a couch in a Connecticut home for a video call to talk about the album’s recording process and to try and explain what happens when they write songs as a unit. “That’s the miraculous part of this group: I can’t really imagine anyone else being in the band,” Lenker says. “How did we meet and how did this happen? None of us can articulate what we’re looking for, but we all know when it’s there.
Buck Meek: To me, it’s an artifact of us becoming more comfortable with ourselves and letting go. In the past, it felt like we always went in with much more limited time and a very clear intention to create something with a vision. Whereas this one just felt like we were being ourselves and putting our friendships first.
JK: We’re really sensitive to the environment that we record in, but it doesn’t have to be a perfect studio. It just has to be vibey. So that leaves room for a lot of places in the world. Setting ourselves up to react to things was the underlying key, I think, beneath all that. If we go to these different places with different people, we’re going to play differently.Max Oleartchik: We make sure to go out because otherwise we get the fever. Not COVID, just fever of recording.
That’s something that I feel like has always been under the surface of Big Thief but never really came all the way up. What brought it out? BM: It’s always been us. We’re always trying to bare our souls as much as we can. It’s just that as we grow older and have life experience, with love and loss, we are able to relinquish more and inhabit our own skin.
MO: I feel like the upside of doing that is that you keep exploring. The spirit is, Where next? What next? Who next? We just want to keep reaching out to what is unknown. And I feel like that curiosity is at the center of what we’re doing. To keep the wonder. MO: To me, that’s one of the greatest things that we have. We’re sitting in the studio and there’s this vibe about our band. I don’t like a certain note I did, and I pull it back and everyone’s looking at it. We do this to each other. I say, “Yeah, it’s right there, 1:36.” And then you can see that everyone’s about to just love this thing that you don’t love. To me, that is like a giant kiss on the soul. To experience these things where you’re like, “I don’t like that.
AL: Originally, I had a bunch of songs written that were all part of the next Big Thief album. And when COVID hit, I was like, “I want to record right now. I want to record in this little cabin.” I was planning on recording a lot of Big Thief songs. BM: Partly through the music, I think. The music served as a conduit to that, through that evolution.
AL: Because we’ve gone through breakups, all of us in a way. Me and Max had some breakups, me and James had some breakups.AL: We’ve all had to shed skins and go through letting go of things and then decide to keep going as a group.
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