ADRIANNE LENKER with Twain
On Bright Future, Adrianne Lenker, a songwriter known for turns of phrase and currents of rhyme, says it plainly, "You have my heart // I want it back." Documented with analog precision, what began as an experiment in collaboration, became proof Adrianne's heart did return, full to the brim, daring her into the unknown.
During the high vibrance of autumn, 2022, the Big Thief band member got lucky. Everyone could come. Three musical friends, "Some of my favorite people," had space in their busy touring schedules to join her at the forest-hidden, analog studio, Double Infinity. The musicians were known to Adrianne but newer to each other. "I had no idea what the outcome would be," she recalls. The result? "It was magical," she says. Adrianne's musical risk became Bright Future, the studio's first album, a 12-track telling of a journeyed heart.
Bright Future's co-producer and engineer, Philip Weinrobe, prepared the studio. He has been Adrianne's partner on previous solo albums, but this was something new. Adrianne did not intend to make an album. They would instead explore the songs with no expectations. Even with an open outcome, from the start, Phil wanted to capture the sessions with the purest, technical honesty. He rolled onto Double Infinity's old cherry wood floors an Otari 1/2 inch 8-Track and Studer console.
To fill the air of the 150 year-old main room, Adrianne wanted piano, guitar, and violin. Mat Davidson plays them all. "I've known Mat a long time," she says, "It doesn't matter what instrument, his spirit just pours through." At 17, Adrianne met Nick Hakim. She trusted her friend of 15 years to bring his sensitivity to the piano. "The way Nick would hold my songs, he would put every ounce of love." Adrianne first met Josefin Runsteen in an Italian castle, and sought the classically trained violinist and percussionist's "magnetic and contagious" energy. "She has such fire." In addition to instrumentation, they made a chorus, adding carefully measured vocal harmonies. The sessions impressed and enchanted Adrianne. "I think the thing these people have in common, they are some of the best listeners I know musically. They have extreme presence."
They worked morning through afternoon. "It was daytime energy," Adrianne says, "Evening, we ate dinner and hungout by the fireplace, sat in the living room playing records. Not always talking to each other, but being near each other. Lots of walks in the woods. The truest sense of hanging out. It was so refreshing."
The shelter and ease of the woodland Double Infinity studio is an element of the recordings. "It felt like everyone's nervous systems released," she says. "Once we were IN the song, somehow we just knew. No one stopped a take. We didn't listen back. I only listened after everybody else left." As a result, Bright Future has the best qualities of thoughtful engineering with the spontaneous swim of a field recording. There are details to savor, fingertips on strings, felt pads nodding in the piano, the harmonies a few steps back, all smoothly laid to tape. It comes together to allow Adrianne's songs to be as they are, unarmored and light-footed.
The lyrics of Bright Future let roam the contradictions of love's promise and pains. The same heart that admits on "No Machine," "I don't know what I'd do without you," sings luminously into a darkness, "Love spells Evol backwards people" on the cinematic "Evol." When Adrianne calls for her heart's return, she may be speaking to a lover, or the past, perhaps all of creation. Her strategy, track after track, is to cast musical beauty to reel her heart home.
The past is first to arrive on Bright Future with a song of childhood. Though as it begins, we are embraced by the present. The opening seconds of "Real House" establish the dimensions of Double Infinity's welcoming room as droplets of piano land glossily, a violin bow dabbles, and players settling in their chairs. The engineering offers the sensation even the air is audible, transporting the waveforms of Adrianne's careful remembrances. "I'm a child humming into the clarity of black space where stars shine like tears on the night's face." She steadily sings to her mother the tide pools of early memories, dipping finally into the day her mother, at last, allowed herself tears. "Your love is all I want."
"Sadness As A Gift" tells us time is catching up. The aliveness of Adrianne's voice keeps her poetry aloft. She sings in a circle completed by guitar, piano, violin, and all voices. "The seasons go so fast // Thinking that this one was going to last // Maybe the question was too much to ask."
With bent, plucked, and trembling strings, "Fool" chases its tail for answers with softened beach glass geometry. "If I were him, would you be my family too?" she asks an indecisive lover who wishes to live two lives at once. Adrianne finds no advice. A course is needed. Any direction will do. "Just say what it is that you want." It is the doldrums sailors fear. "What more can I possibly say?"
"No Machine" tells us adoration takes it all, even our sense of direction. "I don't know where I'd go without you." Chiming finger picking, harmonies, and simmering strings travel to the salt-sprayed point. "To the ocean of your love I am a river."
Delicate, sturdied by harmonies with guitars paired shoulder-to-shoulder, "Free Treasure" takes us home. Here we have the best cooking, a warm fire, understanding, and "Love without measure." It is a road-worn traveler's paradise. And free to whomever lays it all down. "Just when I thought I couldn't feel more, I feel a little more."
The heart of the album, "Evol" studies love in a mirror. Words are reversed. Kiss is Ssik. Meaning appears and goes out of frame. "Words are lethal." Epiphany is close on the high notes. Weightlessly, voices and violin repeat Adrianne's summiting melody. She accepts what she sees. "The giver takes // The taker gives."
Adrianne lights every candle on "Ruined," the finale. She tours scenes from a love affair, or a holy quest. Small moments dazzle. There is a bed, a fern leaning towards a basement window, a time where one future ends and rescue by another is still beyond sight. Glimmering, galactic swells surround the bare piano, which insists on paving ahead. Adrianne unfolds her ballad as nature would, relentlessly till full bloom. "So much coming through // Every hour too // Can't get enough of you // You come around, I'm ruined." Ruined or reborn, she is asking for more.
Admirers of Adrianne's solo music and Big Thief will find on Bright Future her reliable talent captured in stunning, magnetic clarity. In the company of parlor instruments, Adrianne's modern melodic and lyrical inventions create new traditions. Her vocal flights at times outwit gravity, then land, guiding along an earthly path. The wholeness of the unspliced recordings preserve a time of musical friendship during a golden season.
Although they recorded for only some days, in Adrianne's recollection, "It felt like we were together forever." - Suzanne Vallie
Twain
https://twain.band
Have you ever...
...faced an impossible question, to be answered at once by a kaleidoscope of wind, diffusing your bewilderment into thousands of spinning bulbs?
...awoken to hear the person sleeping beside you speaking a language they do not speak in their waking life?
?
...felt your legs possessed, to throw you across the room in shapes?
?
...lost your heart, only to find it on the bank of a cold spring, in the hands of a filling station attendant, or in the dust swimming through the light of your bedroom window?
?Have you ever listened to Twain?
"A lonely day, I went outside to smoke awhile,
and think about a picture in a book:
He was laying in the grass in his suit,
as the angler posed in pursuit of the fish"
?For the past decade or so, Mt. Davidson has cultivated his songs and sounds, attempting to create a bridge, a meeting place, between the terrestrial and the mystic. He is a ponderous and delicate sort of creature, short and vaguely leonine, who has spent most of his young life abiding in the midlands of transcendence.
"Oh to be there, the smell of her hair,
the deer swimming through the watery woods,
life won't last long for those who hate it,
for those who love it, it lingers on like a dream"
?Following its quiet self-release in 2014, his fifth and most recent LP, Life Labors in the Choir, has steadily gained devoted listeners throughout the globe and continues to blossom today. The album describes a marked evolution in an alluring yet strange and hesitant discography. Progressing from the bashfully childlike sounds of 2005's Madeline, (now lost), through self-constructed garage multi-track tangles of Sleeping Tree (2007) and Almanack (2008), we hear the progress of a young man struggling to free himself from the shackles of depression and neurosis. In 2010's Love is All Around, a distinct breakthrough can be felt in the form of a question that challenges the foundation of the doubt and fear running through the early music. This sudden evolution is in no small part owing to the addition of two musicians - Peter Pezzimenti (drums and vibes) and Ken Woodward (basses) - and a sound engineer - Adrian Olsen. The music really began to breathe.
?"Free'd from doubt, my cigarette went out,
the sun came out and warmed up the house,
oh to be fainting into that painting,
as I wrap up the tune and bring it to you"
This fall, Twain will release a new record of songs - Rare Feeling - on Keeled Scales Records (Austin, TX). These recordings have been gently fermenting for an extended period of time, and are now ready for consumption. The foundation of the record was captured in a tool shed by the great magi-bard, S. McMicken (Dr. Dog), using ancient and secret methods of time distortion. The resultant reels were then brought to Richmond VA, where master engineer and sound-seeker Adrian Olsen guided the songs into completion. As with the previous LP, the band has labored to present a purely AAA analog disc, and is eager for you to experience the special magnetic warmth that results from the process. (We once again are indebted to the mysterious and mighty Paul Gold of Salt Mastering for his kind attention).
If you would like to hear some music, please head over to twain.band.
(Lyrics from "Freed from Doubt", from Rare Feeling)
~~~~~~~~~
It was early March 2020 and the Big Thief tour had just been cut short, so I flew from Europe to NYC. It just so happened that there was a little cabin available for rent right next door to Zoe and Brian in the mountains in Western MA. So I grabbed my truck and drove out to the country. As I settled into the cabin over the course of a month, I grew really connected to the space itself. 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 . I got a hankering to capture it, so I called my friend Phil and asked "How'd you like to get outta the city and make a record that sounds like the inside of an acoustic guitar?" Phil said "100%" and by the grace of some of our dear friends, we were able to gather the materials needed. Brendan lent us about 45 tape machines. Eli lent us a binaural head (which looked remarkably like Phil), and Shahzad lent us a pile of XLR cables. I drove into the city at 5am on the 20th of April, scooped up Phil and then we filled my truck to the brim as we stopped and gathered the gear along the way back to Massachusetts.
We unloaded all of the equipment into the small cabin and began setting up. Unfortunately, one of the first things that happened was the unstable electricity fried four of our tape machines, including the Otari 8 track. Bill tried to fix it at his shop in Sturbridge, but it was beyond repair.
After almost three weeks of setup and troubleshooting, the studio finally was operating -- although the only functioning tape recorder we had was Phil's battery powered Sony Walkman. We felt at peace with the idea that we might just be recording the whole record on cassette tape, but that would have meant no overdubs, so I'm grateful for the rescue Otari 8 Track that Brendan was able to dig out of storage and deliver to us right before we had lost all hope.
I had a handful of songs that I was planning on recording, but by the time Phil arrived I was on a whole new level of heartsick and the songs were flying through my ears. I was basically lying in the dirt half the time. We went with the flow. A lot of the focus was on getting nourishment from our meals. We cooked directly on the woodstove, and we went on walks to the creek every day to bathe.
Nine of these songs were written freshly during the recording session. We began and closed each day with an improvised acoustic guitar instrumental, and we made a collage of our favorite pieces, which became the first side of the instrumentals album.
I'm grateful that this music has come into existence. These songs have helped me heal. I hope that at least in some small way this music can be a friend to you.
show less
On Bright Future, Adrianne Lenker, a songwriter known for turns of phrase and currents of rhyme, says it plainly, "You have my heart // I want it back." Documented with analog precision, what began as an experiment in collaboration, became proof Adrianne's heart did return, full to the brim, daring her into the unknown.
During the high vibrance of autumn, 2022, the Big Thief band member got lucky. Everyone could come. Three musical friends, "Some of my favorite people," had space in their busy touring schedules to join her at the forest-hidden, analog studio, Double Infinity. The musicians were known to Adrianne but newer to each other. "I had no idea what the outcome would be," she recalls. The result? "It was magical," she says. Adrianne's musical risk became Bright Future, the studio's first album, a 12-track telling of a journeyed heart.
Bright Future's co-producer and engineer, Philip Weinrobe, prepared the studio. He has been Adrianne's partner on previous solo albums, but this was something new. Adrianne did not intend to make an album. They would instead explore the songs with no expectations. Even with an open outcome, from the start, Phil wanted to capture the sessions with the purest, technical honesty. He rolled onto Double Infinity's old cherry wood floors an Otari 1/2 inch 8-Track and Studer console.
To fill the air of the 150 year-old main room, Adrianne wanted piano, guitar, and violin. Mat Davidson plays them all. "I've known Mat a long time," she says, "It doesn't matter what instrument, his spirit just pours through." At 17, Adrianne met Nick Hakim. She trusted her friend of 15 years to bring his sensitivity to the piano. "The way Nick would hold my songs, he would put every ounce of love." Adrianne first met Josefin Runsteen in an Italian castle, and sought the classically trained violinist and percussionist's "magnetic and contagious" energy. "She has such fire." In addition to instrumentation, they made a chorus, adding carefully measured vocal harmonies. The sessions impressed and enchanted Adrianne. "I think the thing these people have in common, they are some of the best listeners I know musically. They have extreme presence."
They worked morning through afternoon. "It was daytime energy," Adrianne says, "Evening, we ate dinner and hungout by the fireplace, sat in the living room playing records. Not always talking to each other, but being near each other. Lots of walks in the woods. The truest sense of hanging out. It was so refreshing."
The shelter and ease of the woodland Double Infinity studio is an element of the recordings. "It felt like everyone's nervous systems released," she says. "Once we were IN the song, somehow we just knew. No one stopped a take. We didn't listen back. I only listened after everybody else left." As a result, Bright Future has the best qualities of thoughtful engineering with the spontaneous swim of a field recording. There are details to savor, fingertips on strings, felt pads nodding in the piano, the harmonies a few steps back, all smoothly laid to tape. It comes together to allow Adrianne's songs to be as they are, unarmored and light-footed.
The lyrics of Bright Future let roam the contradictions of love's promise and pains. The same heart that admits on "No Machine," "I don't know what I'd do without you," sings luminously into a darkness, "Love spells Evol backwards people" on the cinematic "Evol." When Adrianne calls for her heart's return, she may be speaking to a lover, or the past, perhaps all of creation. Her strategy, track after track, is to cast musical beauty to reel her heart home.
The past is first to arrive on Bright Future with a song of childhood. Though as it begins, we are embraced by the present. The opening seconds of "Real House" establish the dimensions of Double Infinity's welcoming room as droplets of piano land glossily, a violin bow dabbles, and players settling in their chairs. The engineering offers the sensation even the air is audible, transporting the waveforms of Adrianne's careful remembrances. "I'm a child humming into the clarity of black space where stars shine like tears on the night's face." She steadily sings to her mother the tide pools of early memories, dipping finally into the day her mother, at last, allowed herself tears. "Your love is all I want."
"Sadness As A Gift" tells us time is catching up. The aliveness of Adrianne's voice keeps her poetry aloft. She sings in a circle completed by guitar, piano, violin, and all voices. "The seasons go so fast // Thinking that this one was going to last // Maybe the question was too much to ask."
With bent, plucked, and trembling strings, "Fool" chases its tail for answers with softened beach glass geometry. "If I were him, would you be my family too?" she asks an indecisive lover who wishes to live two lives at once. Adrianne finds no advice. A course is needed. Any direction will do. "Just say what it is that you want." It is the doldrums sailors fear. "What more can I possibly say?"
"No Machine" tells us adoration takes it all, even our sense of direction. "I don't know where I'd go without you." Chiming finger picking, harmonies, and simmering strings travel to the salt-sprayed point. "To the ocean of your love I am a river."
Delicate, sturdied by harmonies with guitars paired shoulder-to-shoulder, "Free Treasure" takes us home. Here we have the best cooking, a warm fire, understanding, and "Love without measure." It is a road-worn traveler's paradise. And free to whomever lays it all down. "Just when I thought I couldn't feel more, I feel a little more."
The heart of the album, "Evol" studies love in a mirror. Words are reversed. Kiss is Ssik. Meaning appears and goes out of frame. "Words are lethal." Epiphany is close on the high notes. Weightlessly, voices and violin repeat Adrianne's summiting melody. She accepts what she sees. "The giver takes // The taker gives."
Adrianne lights every candle on "Ruined," the finale. She tours scenes from a love affair, or a holy quest. Small moments dazzle. There is a bed, a fern leaning towards a basement window, a time where one future ends and rescue by another is still beyond sight. Glimmering, galactic swells surround the bare piano, which insists on paving ahead. Adrianne unfolds her ballad as nature would, relentlessly till full bloom. "So much coming through // Every hour too // Can't get enough of you // You come around, I'm ruined." Ruined or reborn, she is asking for more.
Admirers of Adrianne's solo music and Big Thief will find on Bright Future her reliable talent captured in stunning, magnetic clarity. In the company of parlor instruments, Adrianne's modern melodic and lyrical inventions create new traditions. Her vocal flights at times outwit gravity, then land, guiding along an earthly path. The wholeness of the unspliced recordings preserve a time of musical friendship during a golden season.
Although they recorded for only some days, in Adrianne's recollection, "It felt like we were together forever." - Suzanne Vallie
Twain
https://twain.band
Have you ever...
...faced an impossible question, to be answered at once by a kaleidoscope of wind, diffusing your bewilderment into thousands of spinning bulbs?
...awoken to hear the person sleeping beside you speaking a language they do not speak in their waking life?
?
...felt your legs possessed, to throw you across the room in shapes?
?
...lost your heart, only to find it on the bank of a cold spring, in the hands of a filling station attendant, or in the dust swimming through the light of your bedroom window?
?Have you ever listened to Twain?
"A lonely day, I went outside to smoke awhile,
and think about a picture in a book:
He was laying in the grass in his suit,
as the angler posed in pursuit of the fish"
?For the past decade or so, Mt. Davidson has cultivated his songs and sounds, attempting to create a bridge, a meeting place, between the terrestrial and the mystic. He is a ponderous and delicate sort of creature, short and vaguely leonine, who has spent most of his young life abiding in the midlands of transcendence.
"Oh to be there, the smell of her hair,
the deer swimming through the watery woods,
life won't last long for those who hate it,
for those who love it, it lingers on like a dream"
?Following its quiet self-release in 2014, his fifth and most recent LP, Life Labors in the Choir, has steadily gained devoted listeners throughout the globe and continues to blossom today. The album describes a marked evolution in an alluring yet strange and hesitant discography. Progressing from the bashfully childlike sounds of 2005's Madeline, (now lost), through self-constructed garage multi-track tangles of Sleeping Tree (2007) and Almanack (2008), we hear the progress of a young man struggling to free himself from the shackles of depression and neurosis. In 2010's Love is All Around, a distinct breakthrough can be felt in the form of a question that challenges the foundation of the doubt and fear running through the early music. This sudden evolution is in no small part owing to the addition of two musicians - Peter Pezzimenti (drums and vibes) and Ken Woodward (basses) - and a sound engineer - Adrian Olsen. The music really began to breathe.
?"Free'd from doubt, my cigarette went out,
the sun came out and warmed up the house,
oh to be fainting into that painting,
as I wrap up the tune and bring it to you"
This fall, Twain will release a new record of songs - Rare Feeling - on Keeled Scales Records (Austin, TX). These recordings have been gently fermenting for an extended period of time, and are now ready for consumption. The foundation of the record was captured in a tool shed by the great magi-bard, S. McMicken (Dr. Dog), using ancient and secret methods of time distortion. The resultant reels were then brought to Richmond VA, where master engineer and sound-seeker Adrian Olsen guided the songs into completion. As with the previous LP, the band has labored to present a purely AAA analog disc, and is eager for you to experience the special magnetic warmth that results from the process. (We once again are indebted to the mysterious and mighty Paul Gold of Salt Mastering for his kind attention).
If you would like to hear some music, please head over to twain.band.
(Lyrics from "Freed from Doubt", from Rare Feeling)
~~~~~~~~~
It was early March 2020 and the Big Thief tour had just been cut short, so I flew from Europe to NYC. It just so happened that there was a little cabin available for rent right next door to Zoe and Brian in the mountains in Western MA. So I grabbed my truck and drove out to the country. As I settled into the cabin over the course of a month, I grew really connected to the space itself. 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 . I got a hankering to capture it, so I called my friend Phil and asked "How'd you like to get outta the city and make a record that sounds like the inside of an acoustic guitar?" Phil said "100%" and by the grace of some of our dear friends, we were able to gather the materials needed. Brendan lent us about 45 tape machines. Eli lent us a binaural head (which looked remarkably like Phil), and Shahzad lent us a pile of XLR cables. I drove into the city at 5am on the 20th of April, scooped up Phil and then we filled my truck to the brim as we stopped and gathered the gear along the way back to Massachusetts.
We unloaded all of the equipment into the small cabin and began setting up. Unfortunately, one of the first things that happened was the unstable electricity fried four of our tape machines, including the Otari 8 track. Bill tried to fix it at his shop in Sturbridge, but it was beyond repair.
After almost three weeks of setup and troubleshooting, the studio finally was operating -- although the only functioning tape recorder we had was Phil's battery powered Sony Walkman. We felt at peace with the idea that we might just be recording the whole record on cassette tape, but that would have meant no overdubs, so I'm grateful for the rescue Otari 8 Track that Brendan was able to dig out of storage and deliver to us right before we had lost all hope.
I had a handful of songs that I was planning on recording, but by the time Phil arrived I was on a whole new level of heartsick and the songs were flying through my ears. I was basically lying in the dirt half the time. We went with the flow. A lot of the focus was on getting nourishment from our meals. We cooked directly on the woodstove, and we went on walks to the creek every day to bathe.
Nine of these songs were written freshly during the recording session. We began and closed each day with an improvised acoustic guitar instrumental, and we made a collage of our favorite pieces, which became the first side of the instrumentals album.
I'm grateful that this music has come into existence. These songs have helped me heal. I hope that at least in some small way this music can be a friend to you.
ADRIANNE LENKER with Twain
On Bright Future, Adrianne Lenker, a songwriter known for turns of phrase and currents of rhyme, says it plainly, "You have my heart // I want it back." Documented with analog precision, what began as an experiment in collaboration, became proof Adrianne's heart did return, full to the brim, daring her into the unknown.
During the high vibrance of autumn, 2022, the Big Thief band member got lucky. Everyone could come. Three musical friends, "Some of my favorite people," had space in their busy touring schedules to join her at the forest-hidden, analog studio, Double Infinity. The musicians were known to Adrianne but newer to each other. "I had no idea what the outcome would be," she recalls. The result? "It was magical," she says. Adrianne's musical risk became Bright Future, the studio's first album, a 12-track telling of a journeyed heart.
Bright Future's co-producer and engineer, Philip Weinrobe, prepared the studio. He has been Adrianne's partner on previous solo albums, but this was something new. Adrianne did not intend to make an album. They would instead explore the songs with no expectations. Even with an open outcome, from the start, Phil wanted to capture the sessions with the purest, technical honesty. He rolled onto Double Infinity's old cherry wood floors an Otari 1/2 inch 8-Track and Studer console.
To fill the air of the 150 year-old main room, Adrianne wanted piano, guitar, and violin. Mat Davidson plays them all. "I've known Mat a long time," she says, "It doesn't matter what instrument, his spirit just pours through." At 17, Adrianne met Nick Hakim. She trusted her friend of 15 years to bring his sensitivity to the piano. "The way Nick would hold my songs, he would put every ounce of love." Adrianne first met Josefin Runsteen in an Italian castle, and sought the classically trained violinist and percussionist's "magnetic and contagious" energy. "She has such fire." In addition to instrumentation, they made a chorus, adding carefully measured vocal harmonies. The sessions impressed and enchanted Adrianne. "I think the thing these people have in common, they are some of the best listeners I know musically. They have extreme presence."
They worked morning through afternoon. "It was daytime energy," Adrianne says, "Evening, we ate dinner and hungout by the fireplace, sat in the living room playing records. Not always talking to each other, but being near each other. Lots of walks in the woods. The truest sense of hanging out. It was so refreshing."
The shelter and ease of the woodland Double Infinity studio is an element of the recordings. "It felt like everyone's nervous systems released," she says. "Once we were IN the song, somehow we just knew. No one stopped a take. We didn't listen back. I only listened after everybody else left." As a result, Bright Future has the best qualities of thoughtful engineering with the spontaneous swim of a field recording. There are details to savor, fingertips on strings, felt pads nodding in the piano, the harmonies a few steps back, all smoothly laid to tape. It comes together to allow Adrianne's songs to be as they are, unarmored and light-footed.
The lyrics of Bright Future let roam the contradictions of love's promise and pains. The same heart that admits on "No Machine," "I don't know what I'd do without you," sings luminously into a darkness, "Love spells Evol backwards people" on the cinematic "Evol." When Adrianne calls for her heart's return, she may be speaking to a lover, or the past, perhaps all of creation. Her strategy, track after track, is to cast musical beauty to reel her heart home.
The past is first to arrive on Bright Future with a song of childhood. Though as it begins, we are embraced by the present. The opening seconds of "Real House" establish the dimensions of Double Infinity's welcoming room as droplets of piano land glossily, a violin bow dabbles, and players settling in their chairs. The engineering offers the sensation even the air is audible, transporting the waveforms of Adrianne's careful remembrances. "I'm a child humming into the clarity of black space where stars shine like tears on the night's face." She steadily sings to her mother the tide pools of early memories, dipping finally into the day her mother, at last, allowed herself tears. "Your love is all I want."
"Sadness As A Gift" tells us time is catching up. The aliveness of Adrianne's voice keeps her poetry aloft. She sings in a circle completed by guitar, piano, violin, and all voices. "The seasons go so fast // Thinking that this one was going to last // Maybe the question was too much to ask."
With bent, plucked, and trembling strings, "Fool" chases its tail for answers with softened beach glass geometry. "If I were him, would you be my family too?" she asks an indecisive lover who wishes to live two lives at once. Adrianne finds no advice. A course is needed. Any direction will do. "Just say what it is that you want." It is the doldrums sailors fear. "What more can I possibly say?"
"No Machine" tells us adoration takes it all, even our sense of direction. "I don't know where I'd go without you." Chiming finger picking, harmonies, and simmering strings travel to the salt-sprayed point. "To the ocean of your love I am a river."
Delicate, sturdied by harmonies with guitars paired shoulder-to-shoulder, "Free Treasure" takes us home. Here we have the best cooking, a warm fire, understanding, and "Love without measure." It is a road-worn traveler's paradise. And free to whomever lays it all down. "Just when I thought I couldn't feel more, I feel a little more."
The heart of the album, "Evol" studies love in a mirror. Words are reversed. Kiss is Ssik. Meaning appears and goes out of frame. "Words are lethal." Epiphany is close on the high notes. Weightlessly, voices and violin repeat Adrianne's summiting melody. She accepts what she sees. "The giver takes // The taker gives."
Adrianne lights every candle on "Ruined," the finale. She tours scenes from a love affair, or a holy quest. Small moments dazzle. There is a bed, a fern leaning towards a basement window, a time where one future ends and rescue by another is still beyond sight. Glimmering, galactic swells surround the bare piano, which insists on paving ahead. Adrianne unfolds her ballad as nature would, relentlessly till full bloom. "So much coming through // Every hour too // Can't get enough of you // You come around, I'm ruined." Ruined or reborn, she is asking for more.
Admirers of Adrianne's solo music and Big Thief will find on Bright Future her reliable talent captured in stunning, magnetic clarity. In the company of parlor instruments, Adrianne's modern melodic and lyrical inventions create new traditions. Her vocal flights at times outwit gravity, then land, guiding along an earthly path. The wholeness of the unspliced recordings preserve a time of musical friendship during a golden season.
Although they recorded for only some days, in Adrianne's recollection, "It felt like we were together forever." - Suzanne Vallie
Twain
https://twain.band
Have you ever...
...faced an impossible question, to be answered at once by a kaleidoscope of wind, diffusing your bewilderment into thousands of spinning bulbs?
...awoken to hear the person sleeping beside you speaking a language they do not speak in their waking life?
?
...felt your legs possessed, to throw you across the room in shapes?
?
...lost your heart, only to find it on the bank of a cold spring, in the hands of a filling station attendant, or in the dust swimming through the light of your bedroom window?
?Have you ever listened to Twain?
"A lonely day, I went outside to smoke awhile,
and think about a picture in a book:
He was laying in the grass in his suit,
as the angler posed in pursuit of the fish"
?For the past decade or so, Mt. Davidson has cultivated his songs and sounds, attempting to create a bridge, a meeting place, between the terrestrial and the mystic. He is a ponderous and delicate sort of creature, short and vaguely leonine, who has spent most of his young life abiding in the midlands of transcendence.
"Oh to be there, the smell of her hair,
the deer swimming through the watery woods,
life won't last long for those who hate it,
for those who love it, it lingers on like a dream"
?Following its quiet self-release in 2014, his fifth and most recent LP, Life Labors in the Choir, has steadily gained devoted listeners throughout the globe and continues to blossom today. The album describes a marked evolution in an alluring yet strange and hesitant discography. Progressing from the bashfully childlike sounds of 2005's Madeline, (now lost), through self-constructed garage multi-track tangles of Sleeping Tree (2007) and Almanack (2008), we hear the progress of a young man struggling to free himself from the shackles of depression and neurosis. In 2010's Love is All Around, a distinct breakthrough can be felt in the form of a question that challenges the foundation of the doubt and fear running through the early music. This sudden evolution is in no small part owing to the addition of two musicians - Peter Pezzimenti (drums and vibes) and Ken Woodward (basses) - and a sound engineer - Adrian Olsen. The music really began to breathe.
?"Free'd from doubt, my cigarette went out,
the sun came out and warmed up the house,
oh to be fainting into that painting,
as I wrap up the tune and bring it to you"
This fall, Twain will release a new record of songs - Rare Feeling - on Keeled Scales Records (Austin, TX). These recordings have been gently fermenting for an extended period of time, and are now ready for consumption. The foundation of the record was captured in a tool shed by the great magi-bard, S. McMicken (Dr. Dog), using ancient and secret methods of time distortion. The resultant reels were then brought to Richmond VA, where master engineer and sound-seeker Adrian Olsen guided the songs into completion. As with the previous LP, the band has labored to present a purely AAA analog disc, and is eager for you to experience the special magnetic warmth that results from the process. (We once again are indebted to the mysterious and mighty Paul Gold of Salt Mastering for his kind attention).
If you would like to hear some music, please head over to twain.band.
(Lyrics from "Freed from Doubt", from Rare Feeling)
~~~~~~~~~
It was early March 2020 and the Big Thief tour had just been cut short, so I flew from Europe to NYC. It just so happened that there was a little cabin available for rent right next door to Zoe and Brian in the mountains in Western MA. So I grabbed my truck and drove out to the country. As I settled into the cabin over the course of a month, I grew really connected to the space itself. 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 . I got a hankering to capture it, so I called my friend Phil and asked "How'd you like to get outta the city and make a record that sounds like the inside of an acoustic guitar?" Phil said "100%" and by the grace of some of our dear friends, we were able to gather the materials needed. Brendan lent us about 45 tape machines. Eli lent us a binaural head (which looked remarkably like Phil), and Shahzad lent us a pile of XLR cables. I drove into the city at 5am on the 20th of April, scooped up Phil and then we filled my truck to the brim as we stopped and gathered the gear along the way back to Massachusetts.
We unloaded all of the equipment into the small cabin and began setting up. Unfortunately, one of the first things that happened was the unstable electricity fried four of our tape machines, including the Otari 8 track. Bill tried to fix it at his shop in Sturbridge, but it was beyond repair.
After almost three weeks of setup and troubleshooting, the studio finally was operating -- although the only functioning tape recorder we had was Phil's battery powered Sony Walkman. We felt at peace with the idea that we might just be recording the whole record on cassette tape, but that would have meant no overdubs, so I'm grateful for the rescue Otari 8 Track that Brendan was able to dig out of storage and deliver to us right before we had lost all hope.
I had a handful of songs that I was planning on recording, but by the time Phil arrived I was on a whole new level of heartsick and the songs were flying through my ears. I was basically lying in the dirt half the time. We went with the flow. A lot of the focus was on getting nourishment from our meals. We cooked directly on the woodstove, and we went on walks to the creek every day to bathe.
Nine of these songs were written freshly during the recording session. We began and closed each day with an improvised acoustic guitar instrumental, and we made a collage of our favorite pieces, which became the first side of the instrumentals album.
I'm grateful that this music has come into existence. These songs have helped me heal. I hope that at least in some small way this music can be a friend to you.
read more
On Bright Future, Adrianne Lenker, a songwriter known for turns of phrase and currents of rhyme, says it plainly, "You have my heart // I want it back." Documented with analog precision, what began as an experiment in collaboration, became proof Adrianne's heart did return, full to the brim, daring her into the unknown.
During the high vibrance of autumn, 2022, the Big Thief band member got lucky. Everyone could come. Three musical friends, "Some of my favorite people," had space in their busy touring schedules to join her at the forest-hidden, analog studio, Double Infinity. The musicians were known to Adrianne but newer to each other. "I had no idea what the outcome would be," she recalls. The result? "It was magical," she says. Adrianne's musical risk became Bright Future, the studio's first album, a 12-track telling of a journeyed heart.
Bright Future's co-producer and engineer, Philip Weinrobe, prepared the studio. He has been Adrianne's partner on previous solo albums, but this was something new. Adrianne did not intend to make an album. They would instead explore the songs with no expectations. Even with an open outcome, from the start, Phil wanted to capture the sessions with the purest, technical honesty. He rolled onto Double Infinity's old cherry wood floors an Otari 1/2 inch 8-Track and Studer console.
To fill the air of the 150 year-old main room, Adrianne wanted piano, guitar, and violin. Mat Davidson plays them all. "I've known Mat a long time," she says, "It doesn't matter what instrument, his spirit just pours through." At 17, Adrianne met Nick Hakim. She trusted her friend of 15 years to bring his sensitivity to the piano. "The way Nick would hold my songs, he would put every ounce of love." Adrianne first met Josefin Runsteen in an Italian castle, and sought the classically trained violinist and percussionist's "magnetic and contagious" energy. "She has such fire." In addition to instrumentation, they made a chorus, adding carefully measured vocal harmonies. The sessions impressed and enchanted Adrianne. "I think the thing these people have in common, they are some of the best listeners I know musically. They have extreme presence."
They worked morning through afternoon. "It was daytime energy," Adrianne says, "Evening, we ate dinner and hungout by the fireplace, sat in the living room playing records. Not always talking to each other, but being near each other. Lots of walks in the woods. The truest sense of hanging out. It was so refreshing."
The shelter and ease of the woodland Double Infinity studio is an element of the recordings. "It felt like everyone's nervous systems released," she says. "Once we were IN the song, somehow we just knew. No one stopped a take. We didn't listen back. I only listened after everybody else left." As a result, Bright Future has the best qualities of thoughtful engineering with the spontaneous swim of a field recording. There are details to savor, fingertips on strings, felt pads nodding in the piano, the harmonies a few steps back, all smoothly laid to tape. It comes together to allow Adrianne's songs to be as they are, unarmored and light-footed.
The lyrics of Bright Future let roam the contradictions of love's promise and pains. The same heart that admits on "No Machine," "I don't know what I'd do without you," sings luminously into a darkness, "Love spells Evol backwards people" on the cinematic "Evol." When Adrianne calls for her heart's return, she may be speaking to a lover, or the past, perhaps all of creation. Her strategy, track after track, is to cast musical beauty to reel her heart home.
The past is first to arrive on Bright Future with a song of childhood. Though as it begins, we are embraced by the present. The opening seconds of "Real House" establish the dimensions of Double Infinity's welcoming room as droplets of piano land glossily, a violin bow dabbles, and players settling in their chairs. The engineering offers the sensation even the air is audible, transporting the waveforms of Adrianne's careful remembrances. "I'm a child humming into the clarity of black space where stars shine like tears on the night's face." She steadily sings to her mother the tide pools of early memories, dipping finally into the day her mother, at last, allowed herself tears. "Your love is all I want."
"Sadness As A Gift" tells us time is catching up. The aliveness of Adrianne's voice keeps her poetry aloft. She sings in a circle completed by guitar, piano, violin, and all voices. "The seasons go so fast // Thinking that this one was going to last // Maybe the question was too much to ask."
With bent, plucked, and trembling strings, "Fool" chases its tail for answers with softened beach glass geometry. "If I were him, would you be my family too?" she asks an indecisive lover who wishes to live two lives at once. Adrianne finds no advice. A course is needed. Any direction will do. "Just say what it is that you want." It is the doldrums sailors fear. "What more can I possibly say?"
"No Machine" tells us adoration takes it all, even our sense of direction. "I don't know where I'd go without you." Chiming finger picking, harmonies, and simmering strings travel to the salt-sprayed point. "To the ocean of your love I am a river."
Delicate, sturdied by harmonies with guitars paired shoulder-to-shoulder, "Free Treasure" takes us home. Here we have the best cooking, a warm fire, understanding, and "Love without measure." It is a road-worn traveler's paradise. And free to whomever lays it all down. "Just when I thought I couldn't feel more, I feel a little more."
The heart of the album, "Evol" studies love in a mirror. Words are reversed. Kiss is Ssik. Meaning appears and goes out of frame. "Words are lethal." Epiphany is close on the high notes. Weightlessly, voices and violin repeat Adrianne's summiting melody. She accepts what she sees. "The giver takes // The taker gives."
Adrianne lights every candle on "Ruined," the finale. She tours scenes from a love affair, or a holy quest. Small moments dazzle. There is a bed, a fern leaning towards a basement window, a time where one future ends and rescue by another is still beyond sight. Glimmering, galactic swells surround the bare piano, which insists on paving ahead. Adrianne unfolds her ballad as nature would, relentlessly till full bloom. "So much coming through // Every hour too // Can't get enough of you // You come around, I'm ruined." Ruined or reborn, she is asking for more.
Admirers of Adrianne's solo music and Big Thief will find on Bright Future her reliable talent captured in stunning, magnetic clarity. In the company of parlor instruments, Adrianne's modern melodic and lyrical inventions create new traditions. Her vocal flights at times outwit gravity, then land, guiding along an earthly path. The wholeness of the unspliced recordings preserve a time of musical friendship during a golden season.
Although they recorded for only some days, in Adrianne's recollection, "It felt like we were together forever." - Suzanne Vallie
Twain
https://twain.band
Have you ever...
...faced an impossible question, to be answered at once by a kaleidoscope of wind, diffusing your bewilderment into thousands of spinning bulbs?
...awoken to hear the person sleeping beside you speaking a language they do not speak in their waking life?
?
...felt your legs possessed, to throw you across the room in shapes?
?
...lost your heart, only to find it on the bank of a cold spring, in the hands of a filling station attendant, or in the dust swimming through the light of your bedroom window?
?Have you ever listened to Twain?
"A lonely day, I went outside to smoke awhile,
and think about a picture in a book:
He was laying in the grass in his suit,
as the angler posed in pursuit of the fish"
?For the past decade or so, Mt. Davidson has cultivated his songs and sounds, attempting to create a bridge, a meeting place, between the terrestrial and the mystic. He is a ponderous and delicate sort of creature, short and vaguely leonine, who has spent most of his young life abiding in the midlands of transcendence.
"Oh to be there, the smell of her hair,
the deer swimming through the watery woods,
life won't last long for those who hate it,
for those who love it, it lingers on like a dream"
?Following its quiet self-release in 2014, his fifth and most recent LP, Life Labors in the Choir, has steadily gained devoted listeners throughout the globe and continues to blossom today. The album describes a marked evolution in an alluring yet strange and hesitant discography. Progressing from the bashfully childlike sounds of 2005's Madeline, (now lost), through self-constructed garage multi-track tangles of Sleeping Tree (2007) and Almanack (2008), we hear the progress of a young man struggling to free himself from the shackles of depression and neurosis. In 2010's Love is All Around, a distinct breakthrough can be felt in the form of a question that challenges the foundation of the doubt and fear running through the early music. This sudden evolution is in no small part owing to the addition of two musicians - Peter Pezzimenti (drums and vibes) and Ken Woodward (basses) - and a sound engineer - Adrian Olsen. The music really began to breathe.
?"Free'd from doubt, my cigarette went out,
the sun came out and warmed up the house,
oh to be fainting into that painting,
as I wrap up the tune and bring it to you"
This fall, Twain will release a new record of songs - Rare Feeling - on Keeled Scales Records (Austin, TX). These recordings have been gently fermenting for an extended period of time, and are now ready for consumption. The foundation of the record was captured in a tool shed by the great magi-bard, S. McMicken (Dr. Dog), using ancient and secret methods of time distortion. The resultant reels were then brought to Richmond VA, where master engineer and sound-seeker Adrian Olsen guided the songs into completion. As with the previous LP, the band has labored to present a purely AAA analog disc, and is eager for you to experience the special magnetic warmth that results from the process. (We once again are indebted to the mysterious and mighty Paul Gold of Salt Mastering for his kind attention).
If you would like to hear some music, please head over to twain.band.
(Lyrics from "Freed from Doubt", from Rare Feeling)
~~~~~~~~~
It was early March 2020 and the Big Thief tour had just been cut short, so I flew from Europe to NYC. It just so happened that there was a little cabin available for rent right next door to Zoe and Brian in the mountains in Western MA. So I grabbed my truck and drove out to the country. As I settled into the cabin over the course of a month, I grew really connected to the space itself. 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 . I got a hankering to capture it, so I called my friend Phil and asked "How'd you like to get outta the city and make a record that sounds like the inside of an acoustic guitar?" Phil said "100%" and by the grace of some of our dear friends, we were able to gather the materials needed. Brendan lent us about 45 tape machines. Eli lent us a binaural head (which looked remarkably like Phil), and Shahzad lent us a pile of XLR cables. I drove into the city at 5am on the 20th of April, scooped up Phil and then we filled my truck to the brim as we stopped and gathered the gear along the way back to Massachusetts.
We unloaded all of the equipment into the small cabin and began setting up. Unfortunately, one of the first things that happened was the unstable electricity fried four of our tape machines, including the Otari 8 track. Bill tried to fix it at his shop in Sturbridge, but it was beyond repair.
After almost three weeks of setup and troubleshooting, the studio finally was operating -- although the only functioning tape recorder we had was Phil's battery powered Sony Walkman. We felt at peace with the idea that we might just be recording the whole record on cassette tape, but that would have meant no overdubs, so I'm grateful for the rescue Otari 8 Track that Brendan was able to dig out of storage and deliver to us right before we had lost all hope.
I had a handful of songs that I was planning on recording, but by the time Phil arrived I was on a whole new level of heartsick and the songs were flying through my ears. I was basically lying in the dirt half the time. We went with the flow. A lot of the focus was on getting nourishment from our meals. We cooked directly on the woodstove, and we went on walks to the creek every day to bathe.
Nine of these songs were written freshly during the recording session. We began and closed each day with an improvised acoustic guitar instrumental, and we made a collage of our favorite pieces, which became the first side of the instrumentals album.
I'm grateful that this music has come into existence. These songs have helped me heal. I hope that at least in some small way this music can be a friend to you.
show less
Date/Times:
Fox Theater - Oakland
36 Upcoming Events
1807 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, CA 94612
The Best Events
Every Week in Your Inbox
From Our Sponsors
UPCOMING EVENTS
Great suggestion! We'll be in touch.
Event reviewed successfully.