ALBUM REVIEW: Burgeoning Singer-Songwriter Fenne Lily Captures the Details and the ‘Big Picture’

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the end of the year approaches, we’re taking a look back at albums we weren’t able to review when they first came out. Big Picture was released in April.

Lately it seems like there are more and more singer-songwriters blending breathy folk songs with indie rock, whispering stories of love and loss in both existential metaphors and shocking clarity. Just this year, for example, the crossover included artists like boygenius (ND review), Jess Williamson (ND review), Hello June (ND review), and more. This realization is not a knock, just a reflection of the shifting trends and popularizations within the wider realm of roots music.

Although three albums into her career now, Fenne Lily is one of the newer and most exciting musicians in this style. Originally from the south of England, she moved to Brooklyn last year, and Big Picture came out on venerable indie label Dead Oceans this spring. She wrote most of the album — which chronicles the trajectory of a relationship from beginning to bust — during lockdown with her then-partner.

Fenne Lily (photo by Michael Tyrone Delaney)

The result is a thoughtful 10-track album (although November’s re-release includes four bonus tracks and a demo) that shines in its storytelling, subtleties, and intentionality. The album’s track-by-track details describe the fleetingness and endlessness of 2020’s stasis. Those details include the quiet banjo picking only audible in songs like “Red Deer Day” and “Dawncolored Horse” as well as the lyrical wordplay of “listening to the neighbors in the garden grow their family tree” on “In My Own Time.”

However, the “big picture,” so to speak, encompasses the journey of a love expedited due to unprecedented circumstance, condensed into too small a space, and relinquished in due time. Electric guitar moans and drones carry the songs together in a cohesive sound, as the stories vacillate from massive life shifts to details of listening to Ronnie Lane’s version of the folk song “Roll On Babe” from 1974.

Throughout Big Picture, Lily sings from a mostly omniscient perspective. She muses in “Pick,” for example, “Did she pick a bad time to have you? / Did he pick a bad time to leave?” In fact, it’s the only couplet in the song in third person, before she reverts back to a more personal directive: “Call me if you need me, I’ll be around.” Similarly, in the exceptional “Lights Light Up,” she switches the lyrical dialoguing from third person to first person throughout the song, ending with: “You said, ‘So do you ever wanna leave here?’ / And I said, ‘Well that depends on the day.’ / And you said, ‘Oh do you even wanna be here?’ / And I said, ‘Well that depends on the way.’”

Having performed professionally since she was 18, Lily already has nearly 10 years of musical experience. And with this record, she’s amassed a list of collaborators including co-producer Brad Cook (Hiss Golden Messenger, Waxahatchee, Kevin Morby), Jay Som’s Melina Duterte (who mixed Big Picture), guitarist Christian Lee Hutson, and singer-songwriter Katy Kirby. Toward the end of the record, on the penultimate track “Red Deer Day,” Lily defines the breakup in the clearest terms. But there’s hope in the song, too, an acceptance and determination as she sings, “I’m alright, or I will be in time.” Based on Big Picture’s critical and communal successes since its release, she’s well on her way.

Fenne Lily’s Big Picture was released on April 14 on Dead Oceans.