i won’t let go of your hand is marked by defiance, haste, and a little bit of exasperation. Its six songs – made available by Adrianne Lenker just days ahead of the release of her new solo LP – were put to record immediately after they were written, and arrive with a rawness that is not unusual to Lenker’s music and an urgency that kind of is.

It is not uncommon on i won’t let go of your hand to hear Lenker work through the kinks of a first recording. On ‘feel it all’ and ‘fangs lungs ankles’, she stumbles over her words a few times, false-starting on lines and quickly straightening up to go again. Her ever-gorgeous fingerpicking isn’t quite note perfect over the EP’s 21 minutes. And her writing, as it tends to these days, occasionally wrings with the naivety of a heady first draft. From ‘feel it all’:

I've been feeling for your five-year-old self shut up in your room
Feeling unseen and unheard as a handle of a broom

As loose as the music on the EP sounds, as if Lenker is wrestling with each song in real time, many of her lyrics land upon a resolution, or a request, with more directness than she is typically known for. ‘the music’, which seems to address her relationship with ex-husband and current Big Thief bandmate Buck Meek, circles around one line, “we gave it all for the music”. Each time it comes back around, it rings with more and more regret. They really did give it all up for the music; they divorced in 2018. Only on second listen do you really feel the sting: “Words come to me, some renew me / none of them ever remake what we had”. ‘i won’t let go of your hand’ draws similar power in steely-eyed repetition. Singing at the very bottom of her register, Lenker sounds deadly serious as she drawls the eponymous hook, “and I want you to know / I won’t let go of your hand”. It’s a world away from the last time she described hands meeting, uncertainly, on ‘heavy focus’: “Shaky like the first time / our palms met in the clam sweat”.

i won’t let go of your hand was released to raise benefit for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, in a context it cannot be detached from. It is hard to interpret ‘relief’ as anything other than a desperate plea peering through a phone screen horror show:

So much pulling you away
You seem so much older
The weight of the way it is today
The weight of the world on your shoulders

I don’t want you to have to lift this burden anymore
I wish I could give you the gift of relief

Hazy looking through
The window smeared with blood
A hard rain hurricane and you
In the center of the flood

It echoes a current of helplessness that pulses through the record. You can hear it on ‘feel it all’, as Lenker traces a line from a private breakdown to a scene of genuine human despair, “trying to find your father in a sea of other voices”. But you can also hear a crystalline hope: “No sad is too sad, no hurt too much / no pain too heavy, pretty scars to touch”. The song is buoyed and moored by two competing emotions, recalling a lonesome wooden boat relying on the goodwill of the waves to keep floating on the surface. Back to ‘relief’, one perfect line is charged with the same complex feeling: “A child can’t keep from laughing though the wound on his neck is new”.

All that said, for me, i won’t let go of your hand is most significant because it delivers the song ‘fangs lungs ankles’. It is a body blow of a song. It exists in a unity of violence, intimacy and tenderness, a space that Lenker inhabits so naturally. The words she uses to explain how small you can be made to feel are unnervingly resonant. “You come to me, you're like the setting sun / you warm me with your light and then you leave when you're done / on the day you called me your love / I cried into your jacket, wiped snot on my glove”. The chorus occupies a softer space, playing with simple rhymes and still-life imagery much like Bright Future does, but is just as impactful:

Guiding those tangles
Making strange angles
Fangs, lungs, ankles
Pain comes, pain goes

That’s my favourite passage on the record. It’s plainly Adrianne Lenker. No other working songwriter makes you feel closer to the song.

79

Sam Gollings

30 April 2024

i won’t let go of your hand cannot be embedded and is only available to purchase through Bandcamp. The link to the EP is here: https://adriannelenker.bandcamp.com/album/i-won-t-let-go-of-your-hand. All proceeds from the release go to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.