There’s an imperial effortlessness to Big Thief’s music-making that’s hard not to find dazzling: five full-lengths, including a double album, three solo Adrianne Lenker albums, all in seven years, with no “minor” one, no asterisk in the catalog. Once you start grasping for comparison points, you wind up pretty quickly in superlatives territory: Elliott Smith. Bob Dylan. Prince.
It’s maybe not a coincidence then that on their breathless new single, “Vampire Empire,” Lenker offers her own twist on one of Prince's most famous lines, from one of his most canonical songs: “I wanted to be your woman/I wanted to be your man/I wanted to be the one that you could understand.” The song, simply put, is another marvel. In contrast to the loose, ambling Colbert performance, the studio take is pulled tighter, more fidgety and tense, marked by scrapes and clunks in the background. Lenker pours out a torrent of words aimed at a lover in an overwhelming tangle of love, lust, compassion, frustration, weariness, and anger. The song peaks with a cathartic declaration—“I am falling”—but in the context of Lenker’s catalog, the moment is just another crag in an emotional landscape the size of a mountain range.
