Adrianne Lenker

“Everything is fleeting and passing and impermanent in life. Relationships, people, our finite physical forms... We let go of our childhoods, we let go of different parts of our body, we lose elasticity in our skin, and we lose hair and we lose teeth.”

“There's a natural separation that kids have to go through with their parents, but then when you put that on top of actually having a career, it gets even more painful.”

“There's something special in music about the repetition of playing something where it becomes a home and a fortress and a space that you inhabit, like maybe we could move this little thing here, or rearrange the furniture. You're so acquainted with every part of it.”

“When I first started out in the band, I had so many walls up.”

“I think that being alive is intense for most beings in some way. Even the process of being born is an intense one, and coming to see and understand and experience the physical world, and all that goes along with being a physical being, and experiencing all of these different forms of loss throughout life.”

“My mother was really beautiful, and I had to deal with her being objectified my entire childhood. But she also had this depth and purity that was almost otherworldly.”

“I had a band and I didn't go to high school, all my friends were older than me. It was pretty cool to have such a focus at that age, but also it alienated me from a lot of people my age. So I felt pretty lonely and I didn't really have many friends when I was a kid.”

“I really love crafting albums and thinking of albums as a whole, not just individual songs or singles or just tracks, but a whole entire album.”

“It's about surrendering to this feeling of utter fragility, and singing through the volatility of it all. The earth is unstable, and I'm part of the earth. I can feel it coursing through my own body. I feel the energy of everything, flickering. Let's just sing together.”

“The first song I wrote, when I was 8, was about feeling really angry - like the weight of everything on my shoulders.”

“There's a fullness that happens when someone is focussed on you. For me, if I'm being fully looked at and paid attention to and seen, I'm filled up by that.”

“I hadn't gone to high school. I left Minnesota, I left home, I was on my own. I was seventeen.”

“So we're in this process of letting go of our own attachments to our physical forms and to the people we love, and... basically everything. Life is like this one big process of letting go.”

“I grew up in the suburbs, sometimes country-like suburbs because we moved around, but mostly suburbs.”

“I'm committed to an honest expression, not necessarily a performance.”

“My dad was basically my manager from ages 13 to 16. I was on this train towards becoming a child pop star. Not that I would have necessarily become a star, but that was the goal.”

“Yeah it's mostly driving and taking airplanes but I like the trains - they're probably my favorite mode of transportation. They're smooth, steady, and you've got a lot of room and can walk around.”

“My parents divorced when I was 12, and leading up to that it was... not without turbulence.”

“When you're playing music and you're starting to expose yourself for the first time, there's nothing more powerful than being listened to and being actually heard.”

“I am always thinking about records I want to make.”