Dana Anastasia is a musician and artist based in Snoqualmie, Washington, who “explor[es] the experience of being alive through the living folk tradition.” Her latest album, cry if you want to, is what she describes as an “incidental meditation on grief, heartbreak, and the roles we all play in the world we inhabit and the worlds we hope to build.”
Anastasia dedicates the album to her ancestors, some of whom are pictured on the cover, photographed as they prepare to leave their home in Turkey at the onset of genocide. The woman on the right, Anastasia’s great-grandmother Anthoula Basil, holds a bouzouki, a traditional Mediterranean stringed instrument—a direct nod to the persistence of folk music in spite of (and maybe because of) persecution and personal hardship.
This tradition forms the backbone of cry if you want to. The music of Dana Anastasia sounds timeless, formed from that alchemical combination of voice and acoustic guitar, the poetic lyrics saturated with natural imagery and ruminations on the trials and tribulations of the human condition. “Through the brambles I called you back to me / with a willow branch and a rosary,” Anastasia sings on ‘Cassiopeia’, just one example of a song which explores a preternatural intersection between humankind and nature.
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Other songs evoke history and a strong sense of morality. “From mountain to sea, I hear the same speech: a community dreams of itself,” goes ‘Scouring Sun’, a track that is equally relevant in our uncertain times as it was for her aforementioned ancestors, “but what have we done if we hide and we run from the pain of a person in need?” Anastasia says the album is for “all those showing up to do the difficult work of being human, even and especially when that work means having to face the big fears and the big hurts; to all of the wounded places where a lack of presence and care has led to cycles of trauma.”
But it’s not all doom and gloom. Like all the best songwriters, Dana Anastasia finds golden threads of gladness and hope, even in the darkest moments. Anastasia describes these threads as “the mysterious forces of dream and beauty that keep us pushing forward and striving toward the light.”
Nowhere is this clearer than on closer ‘sleep well’, one of those perfectly simple folk songs, a combination of guitar and voice that evokes generations of singers and musicians, even as it deals with very contemporary themes. “Seasons change still,” Anastasia sings, “even though the world’s on fire. Crows still call in the morning, owls in the night.” Despite centering on a sense of sadness, the track is kindly and comforting, offering a final message of empathy, referring back to the album’s title.
We need you strong
we need you here
cry if you need to
cry if you want
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cry if you need to is out now and available from the Dana Anastasia Bandcamp page.