![]() ![]() She had just ordered a twin mattress, a portable woodstove, and new linens. The rest of the band-the guitarist Buck Meek, the bassist Max Oleartchik, and the drummer James Krivchenia-had since left, but Lenker stuck around to renovate the trailer. Lenker had spent the past few weeks recording with Big Thief at a home studio in the Catskill Mountains, run by the musicians Sam Owens and Hannah Cohen. ![]() “Nice to meet you-let’s talk about death.” “Is it too early for this?” Lenker joked. Our conversation drifted toward the Zen idea of impermanence. The sun refracted against the surface of the creek until the water turned black. The exhaustion and sorrow of the spring had left everyone feeling precarious. Moving can be disorienting-all that sorting and boxing and tossing out forces a kind of self-reckoning-and for Lenker the experience was only intensified by the ongoing anxiety of the coronavirus pandemic, which made imagining any sort of future feel optimistic, if not naïve. For the next couple of months, at least, the trailer would be home. She was preparing to haul a vintage camping trailer across the country to Topanga Canyon, on the west side of Los Angeles, where her band, Big Thief, was planning to meet up. The day before, Lenker, who is twenty-nine, had packed up the Brooklyn apartment she’d been sharing with two roommates. In late August, the singer, songwriter, and guitarist Adrianne Lenker stood beside a creek in upstate New York, watching the water move. ![]() Good work music.This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. That, and on the ‘Here is What Is’ album, I play Where Will I be? and Duo Glide over and over. It was after Mullen was struggling with the changes that were going on at the time, and you see Mullen mouth the words ‘THANK YOU!’ with a huge grin on his face, and it’s just, I don’t know, a great sense of camaraderie. I also remember seeing Daniel Lanois in ‘From the Sky Down’ - the U2 documentary about making Achtung Baby - and there’s this great moment where he’s eating a banana in the control room (I don’t know why I remember that detail) and he’s watching Larry Mullen playing a drum track and signalling a great thumbs-up in time with what he was bashing out. This one, track #5, titled ‘Beauty’, is a real gem. I stumbled back across Daniel Lanois’s beautiful album from a while ago - ‘Here is What is’ - and had totally forgotten Brian Eno’s talking parts between songs. You made many of us want to be writers, and as merely one, I can’t thank you enough. Salinger as a character, and Salinger was still alive! Never let them say you didn’t have heart. It’s a hell of a thing to be missed, but even better not gone at all you even wrote J.D. I remember Silas Ermineskin and Frank Fencepost, from the stories you gave us, too. Without looking in the book at all, I remember a sky of robin’s-egg-blue. You taught me a theory of get-colour-down-onto-the-page. Some might say the writing was too lyrical, too strange or overwrought…but forget that, forget that, because to me, you taught me imagery. I remember the crowded carriages, and me, in Iowa in there – a whole damn state, and its cornfields, in a single suburban train. It was a gift and I remember the cold tunnels of the underground railway, and the pressure of wind from Town Hall, and Martin Place. This is the small letter I should have sent you when you were alive, and I was eighteen, reading your glorious masterpiece, Shoeless Joe, on the train, to and from university, in the winter of 1994.
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