Writing doesn’t have to be something stagnant—its transformative power is shown when spoken or sung. Music can and is literature when written by a modern poet, like the cathartic moody singer Adrianne Lenker.

Her masterpiece album Songs and Instrumentals portrays out the same tone as a poetry collection written to a lover sung over soft guitar; which Songs and Instrumentals is exactly that, a sung collection of poetry to a lover named Indigo.

More specifically, found at the end of the album, Indigo is revealed as a past lover when Lenker focuses on their struggles, even asking quietly “didn’t you believe in me?” on the track “anything.”

Lenker also reflects on the same song like a child would to their mother, in a way so effortless that becomes so tragic when questing again and again if her lover even cared—if they were “the stars in heaven.”

A scarred singer reflecting on her past, Lenker also reflects in “anything” how she misses when she once felt totally safe when she had her lover, “[she] wanted to sleep in [their] car while [they] drove it,” showing forgotten trust in the image of a memory.

It’s heartbreaking and beautiful, Lenker’s language and voice is gentle in the sadness way. With every voice crack her words hold more power—showing how speech can change the feeling of given word.

Her collection tells of hopes and dreams of “being a good mother” and having forever—which to her is not a lot, it’s everything.

In the end she realises she was only left “sadness as a gift” by her lover, with the past, pain, and aspirations of family she once had replaced by simplistic melancholy.

Fluid language and instrumentals matching Lenker’s tone lead her poetry book of song to be bitter and beautiful. Her passive nature comes across both coy and taunting, while revealing glimpses of her self-declared destruction.

Lenker decrees that everything is “everything eats and is eaten [while] time is fed,” just as she is consumed by her past and chooses to embrace her future—she “[returns] to her oxygen.”