“It’s hard to know how to hold a creative life in a time that feels fraught with venomous division, careening technological advance, and an ever-widening chasm between the affluent and the dispossessed,” says Anna Tivel, the songwriter who has won acclaim with albums like Blue World, Outsiders (plus its stripped back Live in a Living Room twin) and Living Thing. Such concerns have long troubled Tivel’s work, the latter record being was what we called “a decidedly existential response to a period of entrapment and encroaching death.” It used the pandemic as a platform to explore human suffering more generally, though dwell on such ideas too long and the entire artistic endeavour can come to seem futile. “What good are poems when affordable housing is scarce,” as she continues, “the climate teeters on a dangerous edge, and war breaks out over misinformation spread by profit hungry algorithms?”
Anna Tivel’s latest full-length Animal Poem , forthcoming later this summer on Fluff & Gravy Records, is not so much an answer to this question as one artist’s small contribution towards one. A small piece of the colossal, communal whole demanded of us. The imperative to celebrate life and warn of its fragility. To remind everyone of just what we stand to lose should the malevolent forces of this world be allowed to grow. As Tivel continues:
I think about being here. How brief it is. How incomplete our understanding. I think about history. All the worlds we’ve created and broken. Revolution and renaissance. Hope and humility. Everyone here is living a creative life—teachers and parents, kids and convenience store clerks. We’re all tasting this wild existence, finding ways to express how much it hurts and moves us. This work is my own small addition to that communal story. The water we swim in. The way our attention molds our truths. Humanity is unfolding as we describe it. We’ll never get it right, but the attempt is everything.
The first single and title track both introduces the tone of the album and serves as its mission statement. What Tivel describes as “a meditation on the stories we tell ourselves and each other” in order to persevere in a painful, disheartening present.
courage is a tired mom, milk crate and a cardboard sign
trying to find a story for her daughter
this is how the world exists, let me spin it for you kid
in a way that’s easier to swallow
Watch the video by Kale Chesney below:
Animal Poem will be released on the 29th August via Fluff and Gravy Records and you can pre-order it now from the Anna Tivel Bandcamp page.
Photo by Matt Kennelly