Quotes from Adrianne Lenker

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.

Ingydar was the name of my great-aunt Becky's horse, who passed away when I was a kid.

I'd gotten used to recording background vocals perfectly, doing 18 takes of them until they line up. Not recognizing the inherent beauty in each performance, but just making something good.

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.

I'll get a few words and then go back to the music and then back to words, and play them off each other - and then I'll bring the song to the band.

I feel like there's such ancient pain in us as humans. For instance, we come from this patriarchal lineage where women have been oppressed, and we're feeling, I think, collective pain from these energies being so out of balance.

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

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

We were still quite religious until I was about eight or nine. Then I watched my parents take a dramatic turn and discard all religion.

I can't really choose how I'm going to connect to music. I find it just has to hit a wave, and just wash over me and take me completely to some other space.

I never went through a wave of hating Christianity, even though my parents were born-again Christians, and there were a lot of ideas that were being practiced that I think were misguided.

We all need ways of processing things. I think I was called to music because it was this thing that was always there for me that I could pour my heart into safely.

We pop into existence and we know that we die and we know that we lose everyone that we love and we know we even lose our own bodies. And what a paradigm. What a mystery.

I want everyone to feel very welcomed in the space of our music and our songs, it doesn't matter what you believe or think, I just want to cultivate a space of peace and to touch on these things that bind us as humans.

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.

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.

That's the way I started playing music: just playing guitar by myself in my room when I was a kid, and exploring the guitar and exploring the space I was in, with no project in mind.

I always said I got my music from my dad, but my mom had these cassettes - Bjoerk and the Cocteau Twins and the Talking Heads. That was her music, and she would just get so wild and free when she listened to it.

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.

It's like, the more you zoom in and focus on the details, the closer to the invisible and immeasurable qualities - like consciousness and energies - you get. And expanding outwards, into the cosmos, you learn more about the invisible or perceptible things.

A lot of our creative flow comes from a place of curiosity and exploration. It often feels like we're excavating and asking questions and not just giving answers but really just exploring.

When I was born, my dad was playing music, so I'm pretty sure he was singing to me in the womb. I was born into music, in a way, because he was playing acoustic guitar. I was around an instrument growing up.

Well, whenever I visit New York it feels pretty romantic, so I sometimes think about coming back here. But then I wonder if it's just 'cause I'm visiting that it feels so good. But also, Minnesota. I could imagine myself finding a place in Minneapolis.

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.