"Grandmother" is a track from Big Thief's sixth album, Double Infinity, released in September 2025. The album was recorded over three weeks at New York's Power Station as a newly minted trio, the band's first project after bassist Max Oleartchik left in 2024.
Adrianne Lenker, Buck Meek and James Krivchenia, the three remaining core members, wrote the song collectively. It was the first time the trio penned a song together.
"We came up with the concept together and wrote it like that," Meek told Uncut magazine. "That was the least typical Big Thief experience, as it's not how any of us would usually write songs. It was an exercise in trust working together as a trio. It was part of the transition from being a four-piece, so the writing seems deeper and more important than the songs themselves."
The song circles the gravitational pull of family. Lenker reflects on her mother and grandmother, and the desire to understand the subterranean parts of the people who made you.
"Grandmother" represents "love beyond romance or friendship," Lenker explained, "concentrated true love, where telepathy of different kinds exists."
The central refrain - "Gonna turn it all into rock and roll" - reads like a cousin to the emotional alchemy of "
Change." It's the idea that music works as storage medium for feelings too large to keep in the fridge.
"This one shows me that rock and roll goes way outside of any genre and is really in a spirit," Leneker wrote on Instagram. "The earth is rock and roll, and so are our bodies, with the power to heal. This song comforts me and reminds me that we have the power to transform energy and reclaim disconnected or alienated parts of ourselves. There's a world worth living for, a love bigger than everything that is always there."
Laraaji, a multi-instrumentalist and vocalist known for his experimental music work, provides wordless vocalizations and plays the zither, instruments that infuse the track with an ethereal, mystical quality.
"Adrianne met him at a festival in pretty auspicious circumstances, under a blood moon or solar eclipse up a mountain or something," Krivchenia told Uncut. "He gave her his business card, so we called him."
"When we talked about making a record in New York, one of the elements was having a drone aspect," Meek added. "That was something we talked about constantly. He was our first instinct."
Big Thief debuted "Grandmother" live at Project Pabst in Portland, Oregon, on July 28, 2024. The band brought it to late-night television in October 2025,
performing it on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon with a 12-piece ensemble that included all the musicians who contributed to the
Double Infinity album. The performance was one of the band's most ambitious live arrangements.
When Mojo magazine asked Adrianne Lenker if the line "gonna turn it all into rock 'n' roll" from "Gtandmother" was meant as a kind of Big Thief mission statement, her answer turned into a meditation on what rock 'n' roll actually means.
Lenker explained that one of its main purposes was to question the definition of the genre itself. Early on, Big Thief had imagined Double Infinity as a heavy rock 'n' roll record, but the song ended up challenging that idea instead.
One surprise was the presence of Laraaji, whose ethereal singing pushed the track far from any conventional rock template. That unexpected turn made the band rethink the term altogether. For Lenker, "rock 'n' roll" isn't confined to a style of music; it's something elemental. "Like, the earth has mountains and the bedrock and the core and the crust – it's the rock," she said. "Then there's the roll of the rivers, the ether, the wind, the clouds ; these things that flow and blow across the surface of the rock."
She also connected the phrase to what she called two infinities: the microcosm and the macro-universe, and the tension between knowing our bodies are finite while sensing something infinite within us. To Lenker, that paradox is rock 'n' roll.
In the end, she described it as a kind of alchemy, taking all these forces, ideas, and contradictions and transforming them into something communal. "That's rock 'n' roll," she said: music that brings people together so they can sing, connect, and process the chaos of life side by side.
