Big Thief debuted their 29-song triple album ‘Horsepower’ live at Nashville’s Ryman with Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams
Big Thief have never been precious about the line between finished and unfinished, but even by their standards, the weekend was a swing. On Saturday, August 22, the band walked onto the stage of Nashville’s hallowed Ryman Auditorium and, rather than the career-spanning set the crowd expected, performed an entire unreleased triple album called Horsepower in full. All 29 songs, start to finish, with no phones allowed and none of the hits anyone came to hear.
Adrianne Lenker set the terms immediately. “If you had some hopes of hearing some of the songs you might know, those can also be discarded,” she told the room of roughly 2,400 fans, as the band took seats around a large wooden table onstage. What followed was a sprawling, roughly three-hour performance, filmed for future release, that doubled as both a listening party and a document of how this music came to be.
A Room Full of Roots Royalty
The guest list read like a canon of American roots music. Lenker, Buck Meek, Max Oleartchik, and James Krivchenia were joined over the course of the night by an expanding cast until eleven musicians flanked the stage.
Americana legends Gillian Welch, Iris DeMent, and Lucinda Williams all appear on the record and all took turns onstage, with Welch reportedly sitting in on nine songs, DeMent on twelve, and Williams surfacing for a single number during the encore. The core recording band filled out the rest, with Greg Leisz on guitar, Russ Pahl on pedal steel, and fiddle players Hannah Read, Richard Bowden, and Zosha Warpeha.
The setting was not incidental. Lenker explained that Horsepower was made in Nashville last May, and while the band did not confirm the studio, Welch co-owns the city’s storied Woodland Studios with David Rawlings, a detail that hangs suggestively over a record this steeped in country and Americana texture. The way the ensemble kept growing across the night, songs blossoming and gathering speed as more voices joined, made you wonder whether the album itself was born the same way, just people in a room figuring the material out on the fly.
Familiar Songs, New Shape
For longtime listeners, the setlist was a fascinating puzzle. Big Thief have long treated live shows as laboratories, and several Horsepower tracks have been circulating for a while. “Carry” and “Space and Time” first surfaced in May, and the band even folded in Lenker’s solo song “Sadness as a Gift,” along with “Oldest” and “Happiness,” two songs that appeared on her Live at Revolution Hall record but never got proper studio versions. Their 2023 single “Born for Loving You” made the cut too. It was less a clean unveiling than a gathering-up, the band collecting years of loose, road-tested material under one enormous roof.
The move fits a band operating at peak prolificacy. Horsepower follows 2025’s Double Infinity, and it signals that Big Thief’s restless creative engine has only revved higher. The country influence that has flickered through their catalog for years is embraced fully here, from spacious ballads like the reportedly gorgeous “Avalanche, Hurricane” to a few country-rock near-ragers, with Meek’s autumnal electric guitar pulling other moments toward the band’s dreamier edge.
No release date or label details were announced, leaving Horsepower a tantalizing rumor backed by a room full of witnesses. Big Thief will keep the momentum going into the fall, hitting the road for their “Somersault Slide 360” North American tour in September. Whenever Horsepower officially arrives, its origin story is already the stuff of Big Thief legend, unveiled once, in full, and then set loose.
