At the Ryman Auditorium last weekend, the beloved indie band Big Thief took a risk. At first this seemed like a challenge to its audience, who'd purchased tickets to Saturday and Sunday's shows thinking that they'd hear their favorite songs from the group's considerable catalog. Instead, Adrianne Lenker explained each night, they'd experience the live debut of Horsepower, a triple album that won't be released until sometime next year. This turned out to be a gift, a three-hour-long excursion into new songs that fit in with the band's uniquely intimate approach to psychedelic, pastoral rock while also growing that sound in surprising new directions. Even though only a few songs were recognizable as former demos or cuts from Lenker's solo work, from the first notes, this was Big Thief on a really good night, interconnected and ready to reach out.
Going in, the real unknown was how the quartet of singer-guitarists Adrianne Lenker and Buck Meek, touring bassist Joshua Crumbly and drummer James Krivchenia would adapt to becoming part of a new organism: a 13-piece ensemble including four fiddlers, two multi-instrumentalists expert at pedal steel guitar and four other singer-songwriters of legendary status. This wasn't the first time Big Thief has invited many friends into its process — a similar number of collaborators joined on its last studio album, Double Infinity — but this was Nashville, and these particular friends came draped in country gold.
As I took my seat Sunday, I wondered if this music would feel a little bit bottled in rhinestones and dusty leather platitudes. I shouldn't have worried. This was one of the most engrossing experiences of music coming alive within its own moment that I've been lucky to join. Cliches were avoided; in fact, they never came into view. Lenker and Meek both repeatedly described the many players who joined them as guests as "our favorite musicians." Not "country music's greatest players," not "pioneering Americana artists," but musicians, untethered to others' definitions. Their names — the featured vocalists included Iris DeMent, Gillian Welch, Rodney Crowell and Lucinda Williams — were instantly recognizable, but instead of bringing little bursts of starpower, they set their own egos aside to participate in the night's generative process.
Everyone played multiple roles throughout the show, melding with the band to execute dense arrangements, getting loose within extended jams and taking expert solo turns as the ensemble made its way through this unfamiliar material. Their interplay realized what Horsepower's songs express: that music, like love, is an interpersonal thing before and beyond any label affixed to it.
The set began with Big Thief alone onstage, sitting around a large wooden table that, Lenker explained, they'd sourced on Facebook Marketplace and brought into the studio at Sound Emporium when they recorded Horsepower in May. The quartet played a couple of songs that set the night's calm but questing mood. Each guest then entered, one by one, over the course of the first hour. Meek, sitting dead center, was joined by Russ Pahl and Greg Leisz, both pedal steel masters and multi-instrumentalists known for taking instruments associated with country and folk into the realms of jazz, rock and pop through their work with artists as diverse as Beck, Miranda Lambert, Joni Mitchell, Bill Frisell and Lana Del Rey. Then came the trio of fiddlers: Hannah Read and Zosha Warpeha, two contemporary composers with eclectic side-person resumes, and Austin scene staple Richard Bowden, who has long been a key member of conceptual artist Terry Allen's Panhandle Mystery Band, among other accomplishments.
The considerable knowledge base of this lineup made it possible for the music to go wherever Lenker's voice led it, from playful hoedown singalongs to space-stretching ballads to long excursions into psychedelic country rock. The fiddle players held the music's key — instead of just twanging up the place, they played with textures and harmonies in ways that mapped the night's wide expanse. At any given moment, a listener might hear a trace of 1970s-era Neil Young mixing with the early Americana innovations of T-Bone Burnett (with whom Pahl played for years), then notice elements of Punch Brothers-style exploded bluegrass — all serving that well-established Big Thief sound that reaches skyward with its feet on the forest floor.
When Iris DeMent came to sit in a wooden chair next to Lenker, stage left, the cheers showed that this well-heeled crowd knew of her legend, though beyond folk circles she remains underestimated. She was Lenker's soulmate this evening, their golden, unpolished voices jangling together like charms on an heirloom necklace. On "Where Will We Go?," during which DeMent took the lead for one verse, the connection was intuitive, mystical; the pair's intense vocal blend made me wonder if, against biology, blood harmonies could be chosen.
Gillian Welch rounded out this vocal interplay with her deep, resonant alto while also serving the key function of percussionist, answering Krivchenia's snaky rhythms with her own on tambourine, guitar and banjo. DeMent and Welch were onstage for most of the night, just part of the band and clearly relishing the communal feeling. Near the show's end, Rodney Crowell entered to share two duets with Lenker, his wiry voice intertwining with hers in a different way on songs that showed she had studied his songbook of sharp-edged ballads. Finally, Lucinda Williams took a seat for the end of the set, beaming at the camaraderie as she joined in the chorus of the boisterous "Gift Pleasure Joy."
Big Thief has always refused genre definitions, but this new project shows a heightened awareness of how to embrace musical legacies without becoming confined. The show honored the spirit of the welcome outsider, a key figure within any thriving subculture: the singular talent who's also eager to learn, who absorbs the lessons of the past while living resolutely in the present. Every person onstage at the Ryman had spent time learning how to occupy that role, whether as a side player daring artists to push their own boundaries or as a singer-songwriter redefining what a "real" country or folk song might be. Uniting these favorite musicians, Big Thief revealed its own lineage in the most loving way possible. The feeling in the room was, indeed, gift pleasure joy, that rare experience of connectedness that tunes into frequencies usually drowned out by the noise of preconceived ideas.
We were all Iris DeMent, who couldn't contain herself, and why should she? Dancing with her arms while seated, she would respond to a fellow player's particularly great solo by leaping from her chair and raising her fists in a victory salute. At one point, after Lenker told her fans that they were wonderful, DeMent grabbed her mic and said, "She's wonderful," pointing at her new best friend. Lenker responded with "She's wonderful." We all felt it. Wonder all around.
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