ADRIANNE LENKER

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.

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

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.

I am always thinking about records I want to make.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I'm attracted to wilderness in any sense. Which is why I'm attracted to New York in a way, because I feel like it's a wilderness of people and textures. Just like, there's so much life and richness here. And you can get lost in it.

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.

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.

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.

We're in transit so often and when we're moving from one place to the next and I have to be very alert and present and aware of where we are. You know, just like protecting our gear and making sure we get from one place to the next safely, being around so many people's energies. It's not just like a totally open and relaxed state to be in.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.