Top 40 Adrianne Lenker Quotes

When an audience takes to a song and it becomes older, in a way it changes it entirely. And then the journey just begins.

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

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.

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.

Like, I’d rather tour maybe six months out of the year, instead of nine.

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

We lived in 14 different houses until I was 8, renting here and there.

I like leaving a space hollowed out, where as I change I can inject new meaning in the shell of the songs all of the time. Where anyone who listens can hopefully inhabit them in their own way.

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

I don’t like it when religions take it to the point where they discredit all other religions, because how could one sector of people have figured it out and know that that’s it? But I do think that there’s so much beauty in a lot of the stories or scriptures.

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.

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.

I feel that performing is its own art form, and recording is its own art form, and writing is its own art form, and that they all can happen simultaneously but at different paces.

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.

I think I’m learning how to release every day. Recognizing that everything you encounter, touch, or love can become part of you, and in essence never disappears, as long as you can recall it to memory or heart. It’s all so connected that we lose everything, but also, we never lose anything.

I was born into a religious cult in Indianapolis, straight up. They had an apartment complex in this one area, and there were all these rules. My parents met through church and got married really shortly after, when they were both searching for connection and meaning, just like everyone is when they’re 20.

Some people operate in complete fear that they’re gonna lose their stuff and their money. That sounds like hell to me. And then I guess some people operate with hands open, and maybe empty, but at least striving for a deeper understanding of what it means to care.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 am always thinking about records I want to make.

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.

The acoustic guitar is my first love, I’ve been playing since I was a kid, and I feel the most at home when I’m sitting with an acoustic, I just love it so much. It changes my heart. I love the vibration and frequencies and the resonance.

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 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.

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

It’s rare for me to sit in a room with my guitar and feel like I can’t stop playing, because it just sounds so good.

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.

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.

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

Mostly I’ve just been stealing little moments for myself in order to write – in the bathroom at a hotel, or just slipping away for a half an hour. Amidst all of the touring, life has been happening.

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.

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

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.

I’ve felt since I was a kid this desperate longing to be closer to – I don’t know what. Just to something bigger, to be in conversation with the mystery of everything.

It’s kind’ve a cliche but I like when it’s raining. I like the feeling of staying in and not being told I should be outside.