With 2022 album Outsiders, Anna Tivel “positioned herself as one of the most imaginative and emotionally resonant songwriters today,” we wrote last year. Her songs are “able to probe deep into herself and others with perception and grace and consequently evoke the wider backdrop of the contemporary American experience.” Now the Portland, Oregon-based songwriter is back with brand new full-length Living Thing on Fluff and Gravy Records to cement this position. Written during the vertiginous uncertainty of 2020 and later recorded with long-term collaborator Shane Leonard, the album is a decidedly existential response to a period of entrapment and encroaching death. “I wrote feverishly in the strange chaos of that year, suddenly out of work and attempting to understand the shifting human fabric, the depth of desperation and the overwhelming tenacity of spirit,” as Tivel explains:
The resulting songs felt rhythmic and vital, with more melody and soaring chorus than I’ve explored in the past. There was no way and no means to gather a full band, and I brought the songs to Shane’s doorstep knowing and fully trusting the skill and exuberance of his creative imagination. Shane stripped everything down to the studs and we rebuilt it together, just the two of us for a month in his garage studio, Shane dreaming up each sonic layer while I chased the lyrics to one last double chorus.”
Recent single ‘Disposable Camera’ introduced what to expect from the record. It’s a song every bit as finely crafted as anything on Outsider, displaying Anna Tivel’s signature talent to ride the eddies and rapids of a sentence to charge her lines with tangible life. “Nobody tells it like it is / they say don’t rock the boat and shut up kid / but that big black train is rolling,” she sings, words gathering momentum like an engine of their own, “and that deep down scream is growing / a hurricane come howling / a shot heard from the mountain / a blessing and a burden / i swear this will be worth it.” The song is one “for the everything of it all,” as Tivel puts it. “For the wild science fiction of coming into the world. For the way it will break your heart. For the way it will make it race.” Watch the video filmed and produced by Kale Chesney below:
taking a picture to pass the time
a disposable camera and sore eyes
you’ll be leaning your head in the half light
what a feeling to be alive
Coming just before ‘Disposable Camera’ on the tracklisting, latest single ‘Desperation’ can be viewed as a kind of prequel to its tenacious energy. The despair at ground zero, where the only way to process the sense of injustice is a mental escape. “Close your eyes and go somewhere, the windy coast, the forest floor / an airplane, another world, a dream.” But as the song progresses it lifts itself, the sound of a beaten body rising from the canvas again, as if the mere spark of imagination was enough to convince it to give life another shot. “Future vision is forever married to imagination,” as Tivel puts it. “This is a song about being born into a harsh reality, about struggling to imagine something better than you’ve seen. Poverty, inequality, disenfranchisement—all these dark systems that devalue human capacity, crush human spirit and soul. To be born in that darkness, to see it mirrored all around you in the lives of everyone you love, is to read an unjust story about yourself that takes herculean strength to change.”
Living Thing will be released on the 31st May via Fluff and Gravy Records and you can pre-order it now from the Anna Tivel Bandcamp page.
