Pretty Things

Pretty Things is the first song on Capacity, and it does something unusual for an album opener: it lowers its voice. Instead of announcing itself, it asks the listener to lean in. Over a little more than three minutes^[1], Adrianne Lenker sets out the terms of the whole record, which are quiet on the surface and unsettled underneath.

It is not a single, and it has no famous backstory. Lenker has not, as far as public interviews show, laid out a track-by-track explanation of it. What we have instead is the song itself, the way critics heard it, and the album that surrounds it. That is enough to say a good deal about what it is doing.

Where the song comes from

Capacity is Big Thief's second album, released on June 9, 2017 by Saddle Creek Records and produced by Andrew Sarlo^[1]. The band recorded it on analog equipment while house-sitting a farmhouse, with the owner away and a month of uninterrupted time^[1]. Sessions took place at the Outlier Inn in Woodridge, New York, with additional work in Brooklyn and Manhattan^[1].

Lenker is a Minnesota transplant who began as a solo singer-songwriter, worked with Buck Meek, and then formed Big Thief in Brooklyn^[5]. By the time of Capacity the band had already made a loud, raw debut called Masterpiece. This second record turned the volume down and the focus inward.

PopMatters drew that distinction clearly. The debut looked outward at Lenker's parents and at how young people absorb ideas about love, while the new songs concern how those experiences affected her^[4]. The same review lists gender roles, loneliness, sacrifice and love as recurring concerns, with conclusions that arrive only after great exhaustion^[4].

A declaration of intent

Placing this song first was a choice, and reviewers noticed. One critic called the opener unsettling, with an oddly strummed guitar and subdued vocals, and read it as a declaration of intent for an album full of deliberately strange, misshapen songs^[2]. Another heard hushed singing and a muted acoustic strum, a deliberate contrast with the debut that still left no doubt this was the same band^[3].

That detail matters. A band known for volume opens by whispering, and the whisper turns out to be more disquieting than a shout would have been. The guitar does not settle into a comfortable pattern, so the listener is kept slightly off balance from the first bar. The song makes calm and unease sit in the same room.

The sound of a small room

The recording context adds to this effect. A farmhouse, a month of undisturbed time and analog gear^[1] all point toward a record made close to the ground, without the polish that comes from endless revision. The opener sounds like it was captured rather than assembled.

That closeness is a kind of argument. When a voice is recorded this near and this soft, the listener hears breath, hesitation and the small imperfections of a hand on a string. Those details become part of the meaning. They suggest a person who is not performing for the back row.

The title as a lens

The phrase in the title points at ornament, at things that are charming to look at and easy to collect. Set at the head of an album concerned with vulnerability and self-acceptance^[1], it invites a question: what do attractive surfaces do for us, and what do they cover?

This is interpretation rather than reported fact, but it fits the way the record behaves. Much of Capacity is about the distance between what a person presents and what a person carries. A pretty thing can be a gift, a disguise, a distraction, or a standard someone is judged against. The song lets all of those meanings hover without choosing one.

It also fits the lyrical manner Lenker is known for. Her writing favors images and open-ended metaphor over plain explanation, so a listener often gets part of a scene and has to supply the rest. One review of the album put it as being only halfway let in, which obliges the listener to do some interpreting^[3].

Confinement and retreat

Highway Queens described the album's central subject as introspection, an inward retreat in both words and music, and linked it to confinement, whether imposed or chosen^[2]. That reading helps with the opener. A song sung softly is a song sung in a small space. The hush implies a room with a door closed, where something is being said that would not survive being said out loud on a stage.

The ambiguity inside the phrase imposed or chosen is the interesting part. Retreat can be self-protection, and it can also be the result of pressure from somewhere else. The song's restraint carries both possibilities. It sounds like someone keeping a secret and someone being kept quiet at once.

Gender, expectation and performance

The themes PopMatters named, gender roles and sacrifice among them^[4], give the title another angle. Pretty things are often what women and girls are encouraged to be or to produce, and a reading of the opener through that lens is natural, if not confirmed by the writer. Being valued for appearance and being seen for who you are are rarely the same experience.

Read this way, the song's quiet delivery becomes a kind of refusal. It does not dress itself up or reach for a big chorus. It declines to be pretty in the expected way, and its oddly shaped guitar playing makes that refusal audible.

How it sets up the album

The Fire Note described Capacity as a song cycle with a novelistic arc, where the story becomes clearer over repeated listens, and where memory, desire and regret recur alongside mortality and vulnerability^[3]. If that is right, the first song works like an opening chapter that withholds more than it reveals.

The records that follow are warmer in places and sharper in others, and the band later released the singles Mythological Beauty and Shark Smile^[1]. But the opener is where the contract is signed. It promises intimacy without comfort, which is a hard promise to keep and one the album mostly keeps.

There is also a practical point about sequencing. Because the song is short and quiet, it does not use up the listener's attention. It leaves room for the long, slow songs later in the running order, which ask for much more patience. By starting small, the album earns the right to go deeper.

Reception and resonance

The album was received with real enthusiasm. It holds a Metacritic score of 81 from 15 reviews, with Pitchfork giving it 8.3 and Exclaim! a 9 out of 10^[1]. Stereogum called it a big step forward made with confidence, intuition and empathy^[5].

Within that praise, the opener tends to be read as a mood-setter rather than a showpiece, and that is probably why it lasts. Listeners who come back to the record often find that the quietest song at the start is the one that sounds strangest on a tenth listen. It rewards attention and does not demand it.

Its resonance also comes from how recognizable the feeling is. Nearly everyone has lowered their voice to say something true, or has been told that being pleasant is the same as being fine. A song that sits in that gap speaks to a very common experience without having to name it.

Other ways to hear it

Because Lenker has said so little about the song directly, several readings stay open. It can be heard as a portrait of a relationship in which one person is admired for surface qualities. It can be heard as a statement about the artist's own work, with beauty offered up while something less presentable waits behind it. Or it can be heard simply as an invitation, a way of telling the audience that the record to come will be intimate and a little strange.

None of these cancels the others. The song is built to hold more than one meaning, and that looseness is part of why it works as an opener. A single clear statement would close the door, and this song would rather leave it ajar.

Conclusion

Pretty Things is short, soft and slightly off-kilter, and it announces everything that matters about Capacity without raising its voice. It moves the band from the outward-facing debut toward introspection, it sets a title that questions surface beauty, and it teaches the listener how to listen: closely, patiently, and without expecting every question to be answered.

For a listener meeting Big Thief for the first time, it is also a good door in. Nothing about it requires knowing the band's history, and yet every later song seems to echo something first heard here.

That may be the best thing an opening track can do. It makes a promise about how the rest of the record will treat you, and then it lets the quiet do the persuading.