“You’re the cigarette in my fist, you’re so hard to resist,” Adrianne Lenker sings on Big
Thief’s 2022 song ‘Love Love Love.’ For fans of Adrianne’s writing for both Big Thief and her solo material, this type of lyricism will likely come as no surprise. Despite Adrianne’s deep level of romanticism in her lyrics, she also often sings of love’s destructive nature, painting it more as a force of nature than a purely positive feeling.
For Adrianne, any emotion that is strong and blind can cause profound pain. In the song “Love Love Love,” Adrianne specifically draws parallels between this dynamic of love and pain to chemical addiction. She knows her love is bad for her, but despite this, the intoxicating nature of it can cling like any type of severe chemical addiction. Even when self aware of how the love is affecting her it is impossible to be released from her love as she bellows “Release my love, my love. Release my love, my love.”
When talking about how Adrianne writes with love and romance, it’s impossible to separate this from her queer identity. The level of romantic connection formed with another queer person can be greater due to the inherent isolation many queer people face in their romantic and personal lives.
This metaphor of queer love and addiction that Adrianne Lenker sings about in “Love Love Love” is also at the core of Film Director Luca Guadagnino’s 2024 film “Queer”. William Lee, the lead of the movie—played by Actor Daniel Craig—is a remarkably lonely man who struggles with connection and uses heroin to cope. He then meets another queer man, Eugene—played by Actor Drew Starkey—who Lee quickly becomes hooked on.
When facing loneliness, especially as a queer person who has become isolated by society at large, you will take any connection you can get, regardless of how it affects you. It can feel impossible to let go. Lee and Eugene clearly aren’t good for each other, but when the only other option seems to be isolation, it can feel impossible to quit.
Even if you can reach sobriety, love can still haunt you like any chemical addiction. Despite eventually losing Eugene for good, Lee can never fully let go of him. We see Lee at
the end of the movie as an old man lying with Eugene, the same age he was when they first met. Despite their unhealthy dynamic, Lee has nothing else to cling to—even after decades.
“When I’m scared to die alone, that’s when I call you on the phone,” is another line Lenker sings in ‘Love Love Love,’ echoing this very moment we see at the end of the film.
While the final scene can be seen as a symbolic way to show how any sort of love can cling to someone, the level of isolation that comes with queerness cannot be stripped from the film’s clear thematic proclamation. Much of how Lenker’s metaphor gains emotional depth with the knowledge of her queer experience.
