Big Thief's Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You is Finally Here
At twenty songs across four recording sessions, we have a landmark record for the Brooklyn-based band.
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Double albums aren’t a new concept, having taken off in the mid-60s with Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, but the mid-90s were the heyday for cramming as much material as possible onto a single compact disc. Seventy-four minutes of audio real estate meant that artists were inclined to include too much, with so many fifteen song albums full of fluff in hindsight. After revisiting engineering practices, the runtime increased to 80 minutes for a single disc, which would be unthinkable during vinyl’s first pinnacle.
Now in a time when albums mostly hover around the thirty minutes and Tik Tok makes tunes that fall below the minute mark wildly popular, Big Thief is bucking the trend with their new landmark epic, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You. At twenty songs and an 80-minute runtime, which harkens back to the compact disc’s apex, Big Thief has made the bold choice of testing the modern attention span by releasing an album of disparate sketches recorded all over the country.
And damn, does it work.
Delivering a ton of quality songs isn’t a new concept for the Brooklyn-based indie rockers who released two records, U.F.O.F. and Two Hands, in 2019. The gamble paid off, leading to their career’s most significant commercial success to that point, including a Grammy nom. If that’s not enough, singer Adrianne Lenker stays busy releasing solo efforts between Big Thief albums.
After the pandemic canceled the band’s European Tour in March of 2020, Big Thief took advantage of the free time by realizing a recording vision put forth by drummer James Krivchenia, who also produced Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You. The band would travel to four locations to work with different engineers, the first being Flying Cloud Recordings, tucked in the Catskills in Upstate New York. The second session took them to Topanga Canyon before heading to Music Gardens Ranch outside Telluride and wrapping up in Tuscon.
It’s been a long wait to hear the entire record, with double singles “Little Things” and “Sparrow” coming out last August, but it’s stunning how the varied recording settings all come together for a cohesive masterpiece. The sessions that stand out immediately are Tuscon, which feature longtime collaborator Mat Davidson on fiddle. His work elevates songs like “Red Moon,” “Dried Roses,” and “Spud Infinity,” which has led to my favorite meme for the record so far:
I covered many earlier singles when I reviewed the Change EP in October, like the spontaneity of “Change,” recorded to a four track powered by an F-250’s cigarette lighter, or the propulsive “Little Things,” which remains one of the best tracks. Still, we hadn't heard all of the great stuff until now. “Time Escaping” is in the spirit of the Grateful Dead’s “Sugar Magnolia,” thanks to Buck Meek’s prepared guitar, a technique in which objects are placed on and within the instrument’s strings to change the timbre. The back half is full of lovely quiet numbers like “12,000 Miles,” which recalls something closer to Lenker’s solo material and the hushed fingerpicking of “The Only Place.” The free-spirited “Blue Lightning” closes out the set, with someone in the studio asking, “what should we do now?” After this record, the answer is “anything” for Big Thief.
In the past, it has taken me multiple listens to get into Big Thief’s work, like their debut Masterpiece or break out record Capacity. But Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You is immediate in its intimacy. Rolling somewhere between the hodgepodge of The Beatles’ White Album or the relaxed earthiness of when Bob Dylan and The Band got together for The Basement Tapes, it’s the sound of Big Thief at the top of their game.
Don’t let the runtime intimidate you. There are another 25 songs to these sessions that didn’t find their way onto the album, and I would gladly take another outing of these cross-country postcards because Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You is a record we will discuss for the next decade.