Standing at the back of GA at the Big Thief show in Portland, my mind wandered a little bit while the band let themselves jam. I don’t know Big Thief’s catalog super well, so a lot of the show was an experience of discovery for me. Adrienne Lenker’s crisp and strong, birdlike voice lifted above the crowd and I was able to hear everything she was singing, make out every word, and experience her storytelling first hand. Of the many things she made me think of, one of them was:
Songs used to get tossed around. People would know a few of them, hand them down, pass them around. Everyone at the bar would know the chorus and people would come up with their own funny verses, their own little twists. Songs traveled through musicians, down the road and on the wind. I’ve heard rumors that Homer might have been a handful of people instead of just one guy, everybody working from the same cloth of story. Even in the early 20th century, songwriting wasn’t necessarily the be-all-end-all. Blues and jazz and Americana artists tossed around the same standards. Big Thief didn’t even play any covers.
I have been having a shitty winter! I have been trying to write about it but getting to the end of an essay and realizing that I don’t have anything to say other than that I am not feeling creative or confident or like I have any friends and I have been binge watching Survivor and cooking myself huge dinners and not finishing my leftovers. Okay? January ‘23 was not my favorite month.
The clouds started breaking the other day, while I was working on a project with local-ish songwriter Ada Bonnevie. They invited me to interview them for a documentary project that they’re working on about their creative process with local photographer A. R. Clark.
Since moving to Portland, Ada has been one of my favorite local songwriters. In their sister’s basement apartment, we spent two days talking about life and collaboration, and the new crop of songs that they’ve written - Ada moved to Hungary with their partner last year. The Blood Moon Ep traces solitude, witchcraft, and romantic love across the back of a kitchen chair, looking out the window of a moving train.
Of all the songs on the list, the standout track for me is “Dirt,” which Ada also told me is a song that they’re especially proud of. The track is a love song to being alone and in transit, strung together by a haunting, wordless chorus of “ooohs.” It met me perfectly where I am at, at a crossroads I’ve been at so many times. “I used to think I had to thrash and scream/in order to be heard and to be seen/but now that I’ve gone ahead and tried it/all I want to do is sit still and be quiet.” Somehow Ada was able to weave that desire for silence into perfect, evocative sound.
Ada played the song for us before we all went about our days, and I walked from one side of Portland to the other in the bright, winter sunlight. It was warm out and I stopped at the bookstore, and at Reny’s, and got a bahn mi and coconut water for lunch.
Greg Tate wrote that music is the art form that all other art aspires to. I think the best thing a song can be is cinematic. Sweeping and grandiose, but also bitingly mundane and specific, oozing with tone.
That’s how I felt about Rosie Borden’s show the other day at Cocktail Mary. I had gone to the show because I wanted to do my duty as a regular and turn out for their first set of live music. Sitting at the back of the bar with my old buddy, the murmer of the bar went quiet when Rosie called us all to attention with an excited laugh. Within the first thirty seconds of her first song, our jaws were all on the ground. Rosie can tell a fucking story.
Her lyrics all tumble into each other, crashing into and running up against one another like tectonic plates, building new mountains. Her stories float perfectly between complicated feelings, about how loneliness can lead you to your inner child and make a small annoyance into a herculean hurdle, how feeling love can make you do all these crazy things that disguise you from yourself. The songwriter’s gift is that return to self, is coming back to that grounded place and turning it all into sound.
I listened to a few Big Thief songs before going to the show, just to get a little familiar, and obviously I was haunted by “Change,” a track from their newest record. I can’t resist a song about finding a new way to love somebody, or a breakup song performed by two ex-lovers still in the same band. But if this is a feeling I already know and love, then why would I listen to Change instead of “Winner takes it All,” by ABBA, or anything by Fleetwood Mac?
Hearing it performed live I was struck by how simple the whole thing is. “Change. Like the sky. Like the wind. Like a butterfly.” Analogies that have been made by hundreds of poets, hundreds of songwriters passing their tunes around with each other, but still Adrienne Lenker wanted to put things together for herself. To make sense of it. To me it feels pretty vulnerable. Because for a songwriter to really do something magical, they don’t have to tell us a story that we’ve never heard before. For people to keep flocking to songwriters, they just have to set up a row of dominos that we can knock down inside ourselves. See what we get out of it.
good luck out there!