Big Thief

Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You is a sprawling double-LP exploring the deepest elements and possibilities of Big Thief. To truly dig into all that the music of Adrianne Lenker, Max Oleartchik, Buck Meek, and James Krivchenia desired in 2020, the band decided to write and record a rambling account of growth as individuals, musicians, and chosen family over 4 distinct recording sessions. The album was produced by drummer James Krivchenia who initially pitched the recording concept for DNWMIBIY back in late 2019. He wanted to answer the question, “How do we encapsulate the different aspects of Adrianne’s songwriting as well as the different aspects of the band onto a single record? How do we maintain focus while recording and yet allow ourselves the freedom to explore dozens of songs without getting lost in the process?” The process that Krivchenia came up with was this: loosely dividing up the material along aesthetic and thematic lines into four distinct sessions with 4 different engineers in 4 different locations. Each session would focus on a handful of the songs without worry about how they fit with the other sessions. The focus throughout the process would be on creation and exploration, leaving the editing and judgement part of the album process until the end in the hopes that a perspective would be found through the process that could not have existed before it. In Upstate New York, Topanga Canyon, The Rocky Mountains, and Tucson, Arizona, Big Thief spent 5 months in creation and came out with 45 completed songs. The most resonant of this material was edited down into the 20 tracks that make up DNWMIBIY.

In an attempt to ease back into life as Big Thief after a long stretch of Covid-19 related isolation, the band decided to meet up for their first session in the woods of upstate New York. The home studio of mutual friend and songwriter Sam Evian seemed like a perfect place to start the process, recording on an 8-track tape machine with Evian at the knobs. It took a while for the band to spiritually realign and for the first week of working in the studio, nothing felt right. It was with the freshly penned song “12,000 Lines,” a stunning track that fulfills Adrianne’s dream to go back in time and record a classic love song from woman to woman, that everything first fell into place. After a few un-inspired takes the band decided to take an ice-cold dip in the creek behind the house before running back to record in wet swimsuits. That cool water blessing stayed with Big Thief through the rest of the summer and many more intuitive, recording rituals followed. At one point the power went out in the studio after a prolonged lightning storm. On the third consecutive day of no electricity, Adrianne and Buck finished writing “Certainty” and knew it needed to be captured immediately. Sam had the idea to power a cassette 4 track tape machine with his minivan and Thief recorded the song live and acoustic, surrounded by candles. Max ran his bass through a Bluetooth speaker. The resulting track is bursting with that immediate energetic power of acceptance. The band celebrated with pancakes on a camp stove. Perhaps one of the most effective of the Upstate session gems is “Sparrow,” a slow, biblical dirge, in which Big Thief add a surreal-feminist, too-deep-to-sum-up-in-an-a-bio perspective to the story of Adam and Eve, rhyming apple with apple with apple, to hypnotic effect.

The next session in Topanga Canyon, California was to be a completely different kind of experience. In the experimental soundscape-friendly hands of engineer Shawn Everett, the band intended to explore their bombastic desires and lay down some sonic revelry. Everett delighted in the freedom and was encouraged to muck with the tone and shape the sounds. After finishing a take of “Little Things” the band ran into the booth and could hardly recognize what they heard in the playback — Guitars like a stampede of elephants, drums pounding through outer-space, Adrianne’s words diving into the listener’s ear and echoing around the skull a while. Several of the songs from this session lyrically explore the areas of Lenker’s thought process that she describes as “Unabashedly as psychedelic as I naturally think.” The prepared acoustic guitars and huge stomp beat of “Time Escaping” create a matching, otherworldly backdrop for the subconscious dream of timeless, infinite mystery. “I feel like my deepest, dorkiest, best self singing lyrics like… ‘Silent river pouring backward eternally, through the phase and touch of entropy, old age, and the beginner.’ I think about those kinds of things way more than like ‘Are they gonna break my heart or not.” On DNWMIBIY single “Simulation Swarm,” Adrianne dishes more of this emotional dream-world poetry before slipping into one of the greatest lead guitar riffs in Big Thief history.

The third session, high in the Colorado Rockies, was set up to be a more traditional Big Thief recording experience, working with UFOF and Two Hands engineer Dom Monks. The deep trust between Monks and the band glows on the Colorado selections. Monks’ attentiveness to song energies and reverence for the first take has become a huge part of the magic of Thief’s recent output. One afternoon in the castle-like studio, the band was running through a brand new song “Change” for the first time. Right when they thought it might be time to do a take, Monks came out of the booth to let them know that he’d taped the practice and it was perfect as it was. This is the same method that Monks had previously used to capture the fledgling perfection of UFOF’s “Cattails.” The property that housed this dreamy studio was vast and beautiful, resting on the moon-like edge of the tree line at 10,000 feet. There was a tower near the studio where one could go to look out across the forest, and one day the band heard someone playing flute beautifully from within. They soon met the pony-tailed wizard responsible for the sound. His name was Richard Hardy. He had played on countless records over the past 30 years including several with Carole King. They invited him to sit in on some songs, and his inspired fluting brings a lot of love to the tearfully wholesome track “No Reason.”

The final session, in hot-as-heaven Tucson Arizona, took place in the home studio of Scott McMicken of Dr. Dog. The several months of recording had caught up to Big Thief at this point so, in order to bring in some new energy, they invited long-time friend Mat Davidson of Twain to join. This was the first time that Big Thief had ever brought in a 5th instrumentalist for such a significant contribution. His fiddle and vocals weave a heavy presence throughout the Tucson tracks. Notably on the smokin’, upbeat roadhouse celebration “Red Moon” and the longtime live staple “Spud Infinity.” The joyful, last hurrah energy of the songs recorded with Scott are a definite heart center for Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You. “Spud Infinity,” with its John Prine smiling words and bouncy jaw-harp, played by Adrianne’s little brother Noah Lenker, perfectly illustrates this new direction. If the album’s main through-line is its free-play, anything-is-possible energy, then this environment was the perfect spot to conclude its creation — filling the messy living room with laughter, letting the fire blaze in the backyard, and ripping spontaneous, extended jams as trains whistled outside.

All 4 of these sessions, in their varied states of fidelity, style, and mood, when viewed together as one album seem to stand for a more honest, zoomed-out picture of lived experience than would be possible on a traditional, 12 song record. This was exactly what the band hoped would be the outcome of this kind of massive experiment. The attempt to capture something deeper, wider, and full of mystery, points to the inherent spirit of Big Thief. Traces of this open-hearted, non-dogmatic faith can be felt through previous albums, but here on Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You lives the strongest testament to its existence. The subject matter of the album is as vast and sophisticated as its sonic qualities, but all of it remains centered by its inner-child, fantasy lens. One that allows world-weary, full-grown adults to float away together into a dream about something called “Magic.” When Max’s mom asked on a phone call what it feels like to be back together with the band playing music for the first time in a year, he described to the best of abilities: “Well it’s like, we’re a band, we talk, we have different dynamics, we do the breaths, and then we go on stage and suddenly it feels like we are now on a dragon. And we can’t really talk because we have to steer this dragon.” In the words of Adrianne “One of the things that bonds us together as a band is pure magic. I think we all have the same guide and none of us have ever spoken what it is because we couldn’t name it, but somehow, we are all going for the same thing, and when we hit it… we all know it’s it, but none of us to this day, or maybe ever, will be able to articulate in words what the ‘it’ is. Something about it is magic to me.”