Big Thief will be concluding an extensive summer of touring with a night at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley on August 8th, before a final show of the tour down in LA the next night.

Composed of singer/guitarist Adrianne Lenker, guitarist Buck Meek, drummer James Krivchenia, and bassist Max Oleartchik, Big Thief has become one of the more beloved indie bands coming out of the US in recent years.

Lenker, Meek, Krivchenia, and Oleartchik all attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, but it wasn’t until Meek and Lenker were living in New York City that the two started to play gigs together at bars around the city. The story of how Oleartchik became a member of the band is quite a good one: he says, “I just decided to smoke a cigarette next to this tree, and randomly—or maybe not randomly—I look to my left and Buck and Adrianne are walking towards me… It had been 10 years. No text, no nothing… so it felt, like, from the stars.”

Krivchenia came on board as a sound engineer for their first album, Masterpiece, but quickly found himself volunteering to get behind the drum set and become a part of the band. That album, Masterpiece, was released in 2016, and was followed by another record, Capacity, in 2017 (produced by another Berklee graduate, Andrew Sarlo [Bon Iver, Nick Hakim, Mk.gee, Dijon]). Sarlo went on to produce the band’s following two records, U.F.O.F. and Two Hands, both released in 2019. On their latest record, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, Krivchenia was back in the producer role, and the album’s recording process took place during four different studio stays, lasting a total of five months: in upstate New York, in Topanga, California, in the Colorado Rockies, and in Tucson, Arizona. From these sessions, the group combed through 50 songs and cultivated their favorite 20 tracks. You can hear the spaces they play in on the records, which is awesome, whether through Adrianne’s casual “cool” at the beginning of “Time Escaping” or just from the sound of the drums’ natural reverb.

Amidst what people would traditionally label as “success” – i.e. touring globally with millions of fans – Lenker has her own beautiful relationship with the notion. She says, “For me, I’ve been working really hard to cultivate this idea of success [as] your relationship with yourself, with your friends, with your music, with your art being intact and as full as possible until the day you die—I feel really intense about this. I want to be making stuff and curious and digging into things and ripping things apart until I leave this earth… I would prefer to be in a shack in the woods to being in a mansion on the hill having sacrificed bits of myself all along the way.”

Having toured globally in both 2022 and 2023 following the release of this latest record, the band is playing at an incredible pitch, as can be seen from their appearance on the Stephen Colbert Show earlier this year. It should be a lovely evening on August 8th, outdoors at the Greek Theatre, with Big Thief playing some music.

You can get tickets for the concert here.

Location: Greek Theatre at UC Berkeley

Address: Hearst Greek Theatre, 2001 Gayley Rd, Berkeley, CA 94720

Date: August 8th, 2023

Doors Open: 6:00 pm

Ages: All ages