Are you the type who craves stability, or who’s always looking for something new?
A few years ago, I think I would have classified myself as a creature of habit. A lover of routine. I mean, you’ve got to be pretty into routine to write a blog post every week for over a decade, right?
But I think the pandemic made me realize that I’m not as change-averse as I may have previously thought. I still enjoy routines, but as the framework of my life shifted in 2020, I found that I enjoyed finding ways to establish routines within the strange new normality that we all had to deal with. So I guess what I’ve learned is that although I like stability, I fear complacence more than I fear change. Although, to be fair, my life has never seen quite as much upheaval as someone like Adrianne Lenker.
Lenker was born into a religious cult in Minnesota. Her parents met in the church, and were barely into their twenties when Adrianne was born. By the time Adrianne was four, her parents saw the cult for what it was and managed to escape.
Over the next four years, the family lived in a van, with an Amish couple, and in a dozen other houses either rented or borrowed. Lenker’s father, a musician, taught her piano and basic composition, and began entering her into open mic nights and various other competitions. By the time she was 13, her parents had split up. Her father was her manager, attempting to push her on course to become an adolescent pop star.
But Adrianne was strong enough to realize that she didn’t want to take that path – perhaps watching her parents have the strength to walk away from a cult was somewhere in her subconscious – and so she struck out on her own.
Having never attended high school she earned her GED, did a summer program at Berklee, and ended up studying there on a full scholarship. She’s now a Grammy-nominated musician who has released multiple albums on her own and as part of the critically acclaimed band Big Thief and…
…yeah, my own life is suddenly looking pretty stable. But when the next upheaval comes, I’ll remind myself of the resilience of people like Adrianne Lenker.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The soft pattering of percussion that I almost didn’t notice on first listen.
2. In the second verse there are backup vocals, but they don’t harmonize so much as echo the main vocal line, audible only during the off-beats when the main vocals are between words.
3. While the root of each chord moves up and down, the very top notes on the guitar remain the same. A nice combination of change and stability.
Recommended listening activity:
Breaking a habit. Or establishing a new one.