We first wrote about Portland, Oregon songwriter Anna Tivel back in 2018, when single ‘Fenceline‘ highlighted her ability to explore complex themes and emotions with haunting clarity. The resulting album, The Question, not only won acclaim but marked Tivel as an artist pushing further than many of her peers. Through poetic lyricism and a wide thematic scope, the record was as ambitious as it was emotive, its delicate arrangements and use of space painting environments into which the listener was invited.
The title of the new Anna Tivel record is therefore fitting. Released this month on Fluff and Gravy Records, Blue World is a lesson in crafting atmosphere, returning to material from previous releases and reimagining it within a comprehensive soundscape of loneliness and longing. Fellow Portland musicians Galen Clark and Micah Hummel help develop this sound, pushing deeper into the sparse tones of The Question with an exploratory, intuitive style. “We chose the songs by story and feel and played them in all directions for hours on end in Galen’s basement in our coats and masks,” Tivel says:
We wanted them sparse and strange, isolated and alive. Each of these songs exists in another form, from another time when making music shoulder to shoulder in goodsweaty rooms was an everyday adventure. In this year of strange and difficult isolation, I kept craving the sound of the piano, something warm and resonant to cure the vast empty. Galen and Micah agreed to create the sonic landscape and I closed my eyes and imagined each scene in color as I sang. This project felt like breathing again, a chance to be together, to listen and express something with good friends whose music forever moves me.
Lead single ‘One Thousand & One’ is a perfect introduction to the record. The song, Tivel says, is about mental health. “Feeling fractured and unsettled and trying to find some beauty in the chaos of the mind.” The drums patter as though barely there for much of the track, Tivel’s vocals echoing as though from an empty room, and the piano emerging staccato as if summoned from within the motion of the track itself. The result is melancholic but nevertheless driven by some empowered force, a song strung between doubt and certainty which finds humanity in the contradiction.
I am a holy ghost, I am a pounding heart
I am an easy lover, even when this loving gets so damn hard
I am asleep I guess, until you come for me
out in the wilderness, in the dark I am lost, but I am almost freeI am a fighting chance, I am a wrecking ball, I am a pounding
heart, I am alive that’s all
I am the water’s edge, I am the deepest end
I want a thousand things to be one more than a thousand
