As we should all know by now, Big Thief never stop. Even in the midst of the pandemic, both Adrianne Lenker and Buck Meek managed to record and release solo albums. And, it seems, they’ve been back with their main hangs creating new music over the course of the last year. Today we get the first glimpses of what they’ve got in store, and their first new material since 2019, in “Little Things” and “Sparrow”.
The band’s drummer and multi-instrumentalist James Krivchenia produced both of the songs and gives us these insights.
On “Little Things”: “It’s in this sort of evolving free time signature where the beat is always changing, so Max [Oleartchik] and I were just flowing with it and guessing where the downbeats were – which gives the groove a really cool light feeling.”
On “Sparrow”, he says: “We all just scattered about the room without headphones, focused and in the music – you could feel that something special was happening. It was a funny instrumentation that had a really cool natural arrangement chemistry – Max on piano, Buck [Meek] providing this dark ambience, me on floor tom and snare and Adrianne in the middle of it with the acoustic and singing.”
About “Sparrow”, Lenker adds that they “kept wanting to put in a chorus and the song kept spitting it out.”
What results is what might be Big Thief’s most psychedelic song in “Little Things”, while “Sparrow” draws us back to their Americana roots – but with their usual fantasy magic.
Listen to both songs below or on streaming platforms.
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