(LBM) Portland, Oregon-based artist Anna Tivel is set to return with her seventh studio album of all new original material, Animal Poem, on August 29 via Fluff & Gravy Records.
Today, she is sharing a new single from the 10-track set, "White Goose," alongside a breathtaking naturescape music video shot on 16mm by short film director Ryland Bouchard and starring Anastasiia Duvallie. Tivel says it's "a song about the way the natural world shapes our understanding - of life, death, truth and meaning."
With the album's announcement last month, the title track was met with enthusiasm from Pitchfork, Brooklyn Vegan, Glide, Americana UK, KLOF Mag, Various Small Flames, and more. Western AF recently premiered a live session of Tivel performing the song, which she calls "a meditation on the stories we tell ourselves and each other."
Recorded live in a circle with some of her dearest friends, including fellow Portland artist and co-producer Sam Weber, Animal Poem was made in conversation: everyone together in the room, listening and responding in real time without the separation of walls and headphones. Of the record, Tivel writes:
"Every album is a snapshot, a momentary study of the way a mind reaches for understanding. I can feel myself reaching in these songs, for whatever is right beyond my grasp. Mortality and connection. Suffering and meaning. People lead the narratives, come into orbit, spin away again - an exhausted mother at a freeway exit, an aging neighbor surrounded by a growing pile of newspapers, the unsung heroes of a midwest uprising, two lovers looking at the sky.
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. What good are poems when affordable housing is scarce, the climate teeters on a dangerous edge, and war breaks out over misinformation spread by profit hungry algorithms? 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."
This weekend, Tivel will appear at Newport Folk Festival as part of a pop up performance curated by Nathaniel Rateliff. Immediately following Animal Poem's release, she will embark on an extensive North American tour supporting The Waterboys.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
[an error occurred while processing this directive]