In Paste's latest cover story, Adrianne Lenker talks about the exploration of the bounds of familial and romantic love on 'Bright Future.'
, for the first time, I paused the music and immediately called my mother—not to say “I love you” but to hear her voice and remember the gift of connection we hold together even in distance. The song, easily Lenker’s rawest and intimate yet, rebels against mystery, refusing to be enshrouded by opaqueness. It’s a plainspoken, minimal and articulated collection of reflective vignettes—an archival of 22 years of Lenker’s life as she remembers them.
Lenker turned her room into a museum and charged her neighbors to come see it; she built human-sized dinosaurs out of cardboard and built mailboxes for her and her sister to send messages back and forth to each other in silence. Finding comfort inand, simply, “the place beyond,” Lenker searches for the reality—or, even, the hopefulness—of magic on Earth.
When Lenker was younger, her greatest fear was her parents splitting up—though, in retrospect, she realizes that it would have been an even more postive outcome had it happened sooner. “At the time, the idea of separation was terrifying and life shows ripples and ripples and ripples of separation,” she says.
On “Fool,” Lenker rests briefly on the shoulders of joy and an unbridled future, setting a Frank O’Hara-style supper table of names—sending loving lines out to Jamie, Max, Jon, Jer, Tommy, Kenna, Lu-y, Zoe and B, all of whom have lives moving forward around her. “We could watch a show, we could watch a garden grow,” she lets out. “We could grow old, you could come in from the cold. Oh, just say what it is that you want.
Lenker, too, has been thinking often about the concept of lostness as a positive. “It occurs to me that being anywhere we could get lost is exhilarating in itself—because everything is so mapped out, there’s roads everywhere,” she says. “Now, you don’t have to walk far before you could knock on someone’s door or walk into a facility somewhere and figure out where you are. True wilderness is something that’s more and more obsolete.
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