Adrianne Lenker played the Shubert – 11/13
Singer/songwriter and Big Thief leader Adrianne Lenker brought her solo tour to town for the second of two nights at the Shubert.
__________
I like telling the story of the first time I saw Adrianne Lenker perform, because I didn’t even realize it’d happened until years later.
Way back in 2014, a band had hired me to cover their set at the Harvard Mayfair, and in the course of the afternoon I wandered around snapping some miscellaneous images of other goings on. Club Passim – the mainstay Harvard Square folk venue – hosted an outdoor showcase that must’ve drawn my ear, because I recorded a few images of Lenker and future Big Thief bandmate Buck Meek performing on the sidewalk, to basically no one. It took me eight years to run across those photos again by chance and connect the dots.
More than 10 years out from that day in Harvard Square, Lenker is certainly no longer an unassuming busker. She’d spend the next decade packing the nearby Sinclair, first with Big Thief and later on her own, before moving on to festival headliners and huge theatre shows. Sometime soon after that afternoon, people started listening.
What made last Wednesday’s appearance at the downtown Shubert all the more remarkable, then, was how much it still felt like a performance of an intimate, conversational nature – despite the room packing all 1,600 seats for a second consecutive night. Seated at center stage with just a pair of guitars, Lenker spent much of the evening beckoning a willing audience on a dive into her solo and Big Thief catalogs, digging for deep cuts and unreleased songs. The tone was freewheeling, verging on scattered amid asides and tuning breaks, but always snapped back to focus at the start of each spellbinding song. Lenker’s lyricism can be at once mystic, mysterious and devastatingly direct, and she could’ve spent the whole show employing little else and still kept us hooked.
Still, later in the night, collaborators Nick Hakim and Josefin Runsteen did join the mix on piano and violin to add a subtle but effective expansion of palette for what might be considered the “hits” portion of the set – a handful of highlights from 2020’s songs and this year’s widely-acclaimed Bright Future that came alive with the accompaniment. Things wrapped up earlier than the 20-plus songs of the previous night, but Lenker’s adoring fanbase seemed plenty contented with however she wanted the evening to go. No more empty sidewalks these days.
Scroll below for a few photos from the night, including an opening set from Suzanne Vallie.
