You could very well sum up their differing approaches to American roots music from how they were dressed. Both wore cowboy hats and both wore trousers, but Adrianne Lenker’s were faded denim, while Lainey Wilson went with shiny brown leather. Lenker, looking austere and speaking and singing softly, played music plucked from eternity, demanding you concentrate on her stillness. Wilson, on the other hand, was here to make the crowd feel good; a little melancholy on the big ballads, sure, but she’s an entertainer in the grand tradition of country music.
Wilson’s set was divided between bangers and ballads, and the best of them were very good
You might draw the conclusion that Wilson is the commercial powerhouse (the local ice cream parlour had even painted its window with the title of one of her breakthrough songs, ‘Country’s Cool Again’, alongside an image of her). But Lenker is quite the star: this was one of three sold-out Barbican shows – there was no choice but to squeeze in a matinée, too – and Big Thief, the band she fronts when not making solo albums, have quietly become something of a sensation, collecting Grammy nominations and headline slots at festivals.
I should confess that I had previously contrived not to pay any attention to Big Thief – or to Lenker. In a world filled with indie bands fiddling around with folk there seemed no need for another. But now I can see what I’d been missing.
Lenker’s Barbican performance was hushed and transfixing; she sat alone on stage for the first six songs, largely new ones, then was joined by pianist Nick Hakim and violinist Josefin Runsteen. Her voice is true, but there was something a tiny bit cracked and warped in it that introduced a hint of the Dylanesque – not the sneering and superiority, but the vulnerability of imperfection, the weathered quality. Sometimes her lyrics were so stark as to sound like diary entries – not quite at the level of Phil Elverum, whose songs about his wife’s death, recorded under the name Mount Eerie, are almost too painful to bear. The words might have seemed trite on the page, but sung they were radically honest.
‘Real House’, which concluded with the death of a family dog – the most hackneyed and sentimental trope in American music – was a tight, tense thread of childhood memories and perpetually unresolved uncertainty. ‘Donut Seam’ tried to weave together her personal life and the reality of a physically changing world: ‘This whole world is dying/ Don’t it seem like a good time for swimming/ Before all the water disappears?’ (It’s an approach Tamara Lindeman, of the Weather Station, has been playing
with too.)
Perhaps the intimacy of her solo work – often recorded straight to tape, very close-miked – was lost in the concert-hall setting. And perhaps she might have been a bit quicker tuning up between songs, or had something to say that was audible. But no one was there in the expectation of epic bantz. At the end, all three tiers of the Barbican rose and cheered.
While Lenker looked like she had walked off the set of the Kevin Costner western Yellowstone, a ranch-hand ready for a day’s work, Wilson was actually one the stars of that TV series. But that’s not what brought her to prominence: she’s spent the past decade and a half building her career, gradually assembling a sound that was recognisably still rooted in country, even as it borrowed from southern rock (‘Hillbilly Hippie’), or took rhythmic cues from pop and R&B (‘Weak-End’). But she hasn’t gone the whole hog into playing rock or hip hop with a twangy voice and fiddle, which is the complaint of the music purists about Nashville these days.
Wilson’s set was divided between bangers and ballads, and the best of them were very good, expertly constructed and delivered precisely. The exact span of her appeal was outlined in the one-two of ‘Smell Like Smoke’ and ‘Watermelon Moonshine’, her biggest hits so far. The first was a witty example of country’s combination of pride and defiance: ‘If I look a little drunk, it’s ‘cause I drank some/ If my neck’s a little red, it’s ‘cause I am one.’ The second is a lush, nostalgic ballad, full of melodic cues that are half familiar.
It’s commercial music, designed to be enjoyed with ease, and I enjoyed it a great deal. But Lenker is a treasure for the ages.
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