Back in May we introduced Outsiders, the latest album from Portland, Oregon-based songwriter Anna Tivel on Mama Bird Recording Co., with the title track. A song which saw Tivel take inspiration from the Apollo 11 moon landings, something she viewed in direct contrast to the pessimism and petty brutality of the contemporary news. “A slow-moving, mysterious track nevertheless grounded in the human experience,” as we wrote, “looking to connect what seems faraway to our immediate situation.”
After following with poetic and urgent second single ‘Black Umbrella’, where misunderstandings turn a violent situation worse, Anna Tivel is back with the album’s latest track, ‘The Dial’. It’s a song which continues to develop the ideas of loneliness and otherness conjured by the record’s title, as well as the stubborn forces which underpin and accentuate such phenomena. “Outsiders is an album about looking more deeply into ourselves and each other,” as Tivel puts it, “really trying to see and examine the internal and external forces that keep us from connecting in real ways and the forces that draw us together.”
Where previous songs conjured bank robbers and far-away astronauts, ‘The Dial’ examines this from the perspective of a touring musician. A figure no less removed from the people around them, having to open themselves up to audiences of varying degrees of enthusiasm night after night yet always made to move on. “I wrote [the song] on the back of a gas receipt on a long drive from Utah to Colorado,” Tivel explains:
A car in front of me threw some trash out the window and when I got closer it turned out one of the items was a little dreamcatcher. I was at the tail end of a long tour, just feeling kind of raw and doubtful and it made me feel like throwing up my hands and laughing. Driving all over the place playing songs about my feelings for strangers is serious business to me, a deep devotion and a privilege. And it’s also sometimes totally nuts, like some hilarious simulation where you keep finding yourself peeing through a funnel drilled in the floor of a shitty van outside the place where you just poured your heart out in front of three drunk people who kept asking the bartender to turn the TV back on. I’m glad both things exist, the expansive and the humbling, and I’ll never toss my dreamcatcher.
The song comes complete with a video directed by Eric J. Loeffler and Tivel herself, with choreography from the main dancer Twyla Tharp and additional performances by Rose Marie Wright, Kenneth Rinker, Tom Rawe and Barry Nelson.
Outsiders is out on 19th August via Mama Bird Recording Co. and you can pre-order it now.
Photo by Vincent Bancheri