From Bon Iver to
Taylor Swift, artists and audiences continue to be drawn to the homespun allure of the isolation album
For some, the “cabin in the woods” album aesthetic reached critical mass in 2011, with a headline in the Onion: “Man Just Going To Grab Guitar And Old Four-Track, Go Out To Cabin In Woods, Make Shittiest Album Anyone’s Ever Heard.” For others, it arrived in the form of Taylor Swift’s Folklore LP this July: an album so deliberately homespun in its marketing, it could only have been made more cottagecore if some bright spark had added the whiff of a wood-burning stove to the packaging. Suddenly, the musical mythology around albums recorded in isolation had become mainstream and stripped them of the very thing that made them interesting in the first place.
But then, in October, came Adrianne Lenker’s Songs. The Big Thief
Singer made the analogue recordings while holed up in a forest in Massachusetts during lockdown, as a way of working through the grief of heartbreak, and it is a record of such genuine intimacy it almost feels like walking in on someone else’s kiss or bath-cry.