Big Thief and music without storytelling
In music we have A problem with “storytelling”. This word in Italian often has a slightly different meaning from its Anglo -Saxon consideration, or narration, the act of telling. It is often used with us also in marketing: A story made “to sell” a product metaphorically, to position it; In the case of music, a song or an artist.
A musical project, to work, must have a storywhich must be created, told by any means and medium possible often by exaggerating or inventing something, moving away from the realtò. In music, in which credibility is fundamental, it is a necessary, but sometimes risky operation.
What happens when it comes out a beautiful record, but where there is no story Or is it almost completely absent? And what happens when the story takes over the music? The album I refer to is the “Double Infinity” of the Big Thief, coming out in these days – three years after the beautiful “Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You”. A record in which storytelling simply is not there: there is only music, at the opposite extreme.
Nevertheless, “Double Infinity” is far from a “simple” album: It is a job that claims diversity, “misunderstood, let me be”, as Adrianne Lenker sings. It is an album where the songs are born at the very moment in which they are played, recorded live in the studio together with a small community of musicians who enter and leave the rooms of the Power Station in New York, while the group – as they tell – moved by bicycle between Brooklyn and Manhattan under the snow, for three consecutive weeks, as in a daily ritual. This, together with the exit of the bassist Max Oleartchik, is the only story around the album: A disc where storytelling simply is not there. There is only music, at the opposite extreme. These are just some artists who go to the studio and play songs together, recalling the idea of ”Live in the studio”, which yes, is one of the great storytelling of music: the idea that an album was recorded exactly as we feel it. Often this is also marketing this: but in the case of “Double Infinity” it is absolutely credible, a group of people who play together and sing straight songs is heard.
There is storytelling – pardon, the story – inside songs, not around the songs. Also this simple and essential: “Turn it all into rock and roll skirt”, as they sing in “Grandmother”, one of the most beautiful pieces of the disc, together with “Misshadowible”: texts that oscillate between the contemplative and the philosophical, between cosmic questions and minimal images, intimate: “Let gravity be my sculptor, Let the Wind Do My Hair”. It is an invitation to let go, not to fear the incomprehensible, not to seek the sense of everything (with a storytelling?). Straight music, guitars, bass and battery, and little else: an imperfect sound, without a concept but that creates a sound world. It does not need storytelling, because it is music that is told by itself.
The idea that music is story and image is certainly not new, there has always been: we like artists and songs because we like their stories. The artist who gave birth to rock.pop music as we know it, or Elvis Presley, was a huge talent but also a result of a story built darkly with the use of the media – is recently talked about in this book on Colonel Parker, his manager, a great strategist who used television to position, as we would say today, his artist and enhance his talent.
The big thiefs come from what, for brevity, we call “indie”, and even there the storytelling is central, and not from today: credibility, purity, is (almost everything). There are areas where the approach is even more radical, until excess: to mention a recent case, the Drake concert that we have just seen in Italy seemed more centered on the repositioning of the rapper after the dissing with Kendrick Lamar than on performance and music: storytelling was the return of an artist who tries to get closer to the public, literally and metaphorically, playing in a small place. Too bad that the performance and songs ended up being secondary compared to this story. The important thing was to be there, Drake who tells himself with the stage and the audience that he says he saw Drake.
Concerts are also storytelling, we would miss it. The Big Thief will finally return to Italy, have a date in Milan on June 14, 2026. I am reasonably certain that they will do like other bands of that kind – they remind me of the Wilco very much: a band on stage, and away, no storytelling. Alleluia: We unbalanced ourselves to “simple” concerts, in the midst of the competition for increasingly large, more spectacular (and more expensive) shows. Mind you, Storytelling, marketing and social media (every media) are an integral part of music: we like artists and bands because we like their stories, what they represent, in addition to the songs. To think that it is not so it is naive and illusory.
But every now and then it’s good remind us that everything starts from the songs, Especially when they pass in the background and when the proportions with storytelling unbalance themselves on the latter, as often happens. Every now and then it is good to go back to music-musical, without superstructures, to remind us where everything comes from. “Double Infinity” of Big Thief does exactly this: Clean musical air to breathe.
