Episode 17: Anna Tivel
A life long native of the Pacific Northwest, Anna Tivel currently makes her home in Portland. Anna released her fourth full length album earlier in 2019, The Question, which NPR Music called “one of the most ambitious folk records of 2019”. She was also the recipient of No Depression’s singer songwriter award for 2019. Anna has a remarkably poetic lyrical style; we discuss her deft use of concrete imagery as she, in her words, attempts to have her “stories sit on a landscape of sounds”. We also talk about point of view in songwriting, as she has several songs in which she inhabits different characters to tell their tales, and her related admiration of John Prine. Anna and I also invent a new bar trivia game, and she agrees to join the postcard revolution.
To join the postcard revolution with us, drop Anna a card at the following address:
Box #555, 4207 SE Woodstock Blvd. Portland, OR 97206
Check out Anna’s website to join her email list and receive a poem every month: annativel.com
Somewhere deep in the middle of a good story, a simple and powerful thing happens. You begin to feel seen. The characters have been slowly undressed, layer upon layer of hope and human flaw, their struggles revealed. They remind you of your family, of a briefly encountered stranger, of yourself. Anna Tivel reaches for that thread of understanding with her music, that moment of recognition, of shared experience. There are thousands of miles on her touring odometer and each town is a tangled web of heartache and small reasons to believe. She gravitates toward the quiet stories of ordinary life. A homeless veteran sitting on a bench to watch the construction of a luxury hotel. A woman wondering about the life of the daughter she had to give up for adoption. Someone changing shape, someone falling in love, someone all alone.
“Tivel’s characters are both common and unforgettable,” Ann Powers of NPR writes, “She possesses a genuine poet's sense that words matter more than persona, or a showy performance. Her images linger, and become populated with the energy of the real.”
With four full-length albums out on Portland’s well-loved Fluff & Gravy Records, Tivel continues to touch on a common human thread. Her newest album ‘The Question’ was recorded mostly live at Hive studio in Eau Claire, WI, engineered by the esteemed Brian Joseph (Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens) and produced by drummer and multi-instrumentalist Shane Leonard. NPR called it ‘one of the most ambitious folk records of 2019.’ Her previous release, ‘Small Believer’ was heralded by NPR as an “album that repeatedly achieves this exquisite balance of the quotidian and the sublime.”
