It was winter in Manhattan. The streets were frozen and still the band rode bicycles to the Power Station on 53rd and back to Brooklyn every day for three weeks. Just the tip of the iceberg of time put into creating this body of songs. Three weeks that would mark the birth of Double Infinity - the album that constitutes a grand departure for Big Thief. An ultramodern community of musicians gathered together in the warm wooden room where Bruce once stood. They all tracked together - simultaneously - improvising arrangements and making collective discoveries.

Laraaji created drones with zither and an iPad and sang intuitive vocal melodies. Joshua Crumbly played bass; Mikey Buishas made live tape loops and played keys; Mikel Patrick Avery, Jon Nellen, and Caleb Michel played percussion; Adam Brisbin played guitar; and Hannah Cohen, June McDoom, and Alena Spanger sang background vocals. Along with core members Adrianne, Buck, and James, the group played for nine hours a day. Double Infinity is the archive of this play. It could only have been produced, engineered and mixed by longtime Big Thief collaborator Dom Monks.

In the opening song, ‘Incomprehensible’, Adrianne drives with childhood mementos. Nose against the future, she understands “everything I see from now on will be something new.” The silver hairs on her shoulders are new as well. Yet fear of aging is cracked by proof. Her mother and grandmother exist as answers, “How can beauty that is living be anything but true?” If a life is shaped by living, “Let gravity be my sculptor, let the wind do my hair.” Being born, then staying a while, remains the greatest mystery. Adrianne claims her place and time. “Incomprehensible, let me be.”

On ‘Words’, Adrianne’s voice emerges from delicacy. Words keep failing her. They can’t mend a distance, leaving her “only ever half home.” She can’t say what needs saying. Her subconscious is knowing, while “words won’t make it right.” A fire is rising, vitality starved for air. “Now I’m higher than I’ve ever been.” Below, words drift, pointless.

Classic and steadfast, ‘Los Angeles’ is a song of revival. In the years after lovers part, friendship breathes at the surface. Reunions spark memories. “The picture box is full and we are kissing in a fistful of fragments falling down.” Time may reshape this love, but can’t sink it. “I’ll follow you forever. Even without looking. You call we come together.” The chorus names a magic, the spell that first bound them, and still braids their lives. “You sang for me. You sang for me.”

Piano keys drop prettily from a floating groove in ‘All Night All Day’, a song of pleasure. Bodies are glorious. Praising your lover calls for singing, “All night, all day, I could go down on you.” Too often shame’s bitterness seals our lips. “Swallow poison swallow sugar, sometimes they taste the same, but I know your love is neither, and love is just a name. It's a thing we say for what pulls through 'til we come together.” A union called “love” is a place where shame weakens. Love is neither poison, nor sugar, neither the bitterness nor the sweetness, but something deeper than both, deeper than sensation. It is the "eye behind the essence" which is bigger than naming. Making love can be the expression of this nameless thing.

‘Grandmother’ is the first song all three members of Big Thief wrote together. They ask, “what should be done with generations of love and pain?” A future is coming when the bar where they dance and the car where they kiss will be gone. Worry for the future keeps Grandmother from sleeping. Saying sorry to a lover for being lazy is followed by a clear-eyed case for transformation. “I saw sun through the clouds. I saw love through the pain.” The chorus knows what needs doing: “Gonna turn it all into rock and roll.”

‘Double Infinity’ reaches into the idea of inner and outer worlds, and the body as the bridge. It speaks to the purgatory created by the human brain, always looking to the past or future, between the things we’ve lost and the things we want, between desire and regret. “Beauty speak to me, let me know you, let me see myself inside your mystery, through the crystal cage of aging.” It calls for true beauty to speak, not fabricated, conditioned ideas of beauty. At the bridge between “what is forming” and “what is fading”, between “losing and of gaining”, “mourning and celebrating”, perhaps there is solace in “the eye behind the essence, still, unmovable”, that which is “unchanging”, outside of time. Is it love?

A1. Incomprehensible
A2. Words
A3. Los Angeles
A4. All Night All Day
A5. Double Infinity
B6. No Fear
B7. Grandmother
B8. Happy With You
B9. How Could I Have Known