When music is your full-time job, making ends meet means it’s, “always sort of a patchwork quilt of touring and writing and recording, and they all sort of feed each other,” singer/songwriter Anna Tivel explains.
“Being out in the world touring is a lot of taking in the way things move, and people and their stories and connection. Then bringing all that back home and having the urge to express it in music and in writing, and then having the urge to lay that down, in a way that you can share with people those thoughts. And it sort of starts itself over again.”
For an artist like Tivel, 2020 sent shockwaves through her existence. “During the pandemic, I was so stationary for a while,” she says. Her normal life involved “moving about in the world and bumping up against unknown things. On tour, you really have no control. You just end up in all these mad situations, and you meet all these beautiful people who you didn’t expect to come upon. You just end up seeing a lot of different ways that life unfolds for a lot of different people, and I think that just really moves me and then that makes me want to write.
“I realized during the pandemic, I sort of lost the thread after a while because it was just very isolating. That part of the equation dropped out a little, and you can only write so many songs about your neighbors,” she jokes.
Contrary to what she says now, she did write a lot during the pandemic and took those songs to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where her friend Shane Leonard lives. Leonard, a producer and multi-instrumentalist, collaborated on Tivel’s 2019 record “The Question” and 2022’s “Outsiders,” so when “there was no way and no means to gather a full band,” she “brought the songs to Shane’s doorstep knowing and fully trusting the skill and exuberance of his creative imagination,” Tivel tells.
Tivel is known for weaving rich, stormy vignettes in her soft whisper while strumming an acoustic guitar. Over the years, her records have evolved into sparse, melancholic symphonies documenting life through her eyes, so one might imagine that the quarantine of the pandemic would take her down a darker rabbit hole. Yet, the record she emerged with — “Living Thing,” released this May on Portland’s Fluff & Gravy Records — has a newfound pep not previously heard in her work.
“Because the pandemic was so isolating and there were a lot of parameters, when we got in the studio, we really just wanted to have a joyful, rambunctious time.”
—Anna Tivel
The pandemic was all about rules, but once Tivel got in the studio with Leonard, they took a “try anything” approach to “Living Thing.”
“This album was a pandemic experiment,” Tivel says. “Because the pandemic was so isolating and there were a lot of parameters, when we got in the studio, we really just wanted to have a joyful, rambunctious time. We’d loop eight-track symphonies backwards. I played wine glasses through an echo machine.
“It felt fun to take a departure and really collaborate with a friend who I love and trust and let him go wild with his ideas,” Tivel says. “I do think it came out a bit more peppy and poppy. I don’t know if it’ll ever sound like that again.”
“The songs in general were a bit more melodic. There’s a lot more choruses happening in them. I sometimes can write a whole album of, like, 17-verse story, death dirges,” she laughs. “I’ve made another album since that’s not out yet and gone right back to recording live, and it has its same sort of tender, sparse darkness that just kind of happened naturally.”
She recorded this unreleased effort “right down the street from my house” in Portland at Anjuna Recording Studio. “I’m always trying to lean into something that feels right in the moment,” Tivel says. “Maybe from all the breaking down and building back of the ‘Living Thing’ album, I really craved just sitting in a circle and playing freely with people.”
Back on tour, this is exactly what Tivel, drummer Micah Hummel and guitar player Sam Weber (who is also opening the evening) will do when they play Silver Moon Brewing on Sunday, Nov. 17. For the trio, it’s less about recreating the recorded material of “Living Thing” live and more about how these three naturally interpret it in the moment.
“We kind of just do our own freedom adventure with it,” Tivel says. “I really love just doing whatever the specific people that I’m playing with have in their skill set and creative toolbox.”
“Nobody tells it like it is, they say don’t blow around on a different wind. But you’re gone and you’re not even listening, they were wrong, and the wind is a living thing,” she sings on “Disposable Camera,” a standout track with an opening twang reminiscent of The War On Drugs. It’s a song that poured out of her “in one furious motion” and sees her hollering lyrics like “what a feeling to be alive” and “how to dream until you believe yourself.”
“There’s an aliveness and a physical movement and a desperate hope to the songs on the album [and the title ‘Living Thing’] felt like an idea that encompassed the songs well to me,” Tivel explains. “Just this idea of being alive and how many things it is at once — how painful and how beautiful, and how [you] struggle some and how vibrant,” and that you still have to find hope in all of it.
This article appears in Source Weekly November 7, 2024.
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