Adrianne Lenker has been crankin' out solo records since she was 14, loooong before Big Thief was a thing.

If there's a fan favourite, however, it would seem to be Songs & Instrumentals, which is actually not one album but two -- Songs and Instrumentals (duh), her fourth and fifth solo offerings, respectively, released simultaneously by her indulgent label 4AD on Oct. 23 of 2020 -- and a painful lo-fi breakup record and a bit of a "hard go" but ... well ... we don't necessarily go to Adrianne Lenker for "easy" listening, do we?

Taking a page from Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago, Songs & Instrumentals was recorded at a remote woodland cabin -- this one a pine shack in the foothills of the Berkshire mountain range in western Massachusetts -- while Lenker nursed a broken heart during COVID-19 times. It was almost recorded directly to cassette tape until someone brought her an 8-track recorder, levelling it up from "no-fi" to something that doesn't sound like it was recorded on a cassette in the woods, but it's still as raw as it gets: 11 aching acoustic tunes on the Songs side, two lengthy improv pieces on the Instrumentals end. One of them, "Music For Indigo," was written for her former partner to fall asleep to. Other tracks, per Lenker's own liner notes, use "a paint brush and the needles of a white pine tree as instruments," while "recordings of the rain, the wind, the fire from a wood stove, the chimes on her front porch, the birds and the insects of the forest" are also incorporated. You know where this is all going. It's good to feel sad sometimes.