photo by Matt Kennelly / "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..."
The never ending sadness, uncanny healing, beautiful hanging on threads of "Animal Poem", the title track of Anna Tivel's seventh studio album, feel as comfortable as it feels sagely while shining a flashlight on real things that go bump in the night. Tivel possesses one of those voices that sells her stunning songs like your older sister, yes that one, who can somehow make you feel better when you are ready jump off that ledge and who you love for being the rock to hold onto while hating her a little bit for being that kind of rock. "Animal Poem", the album was co-produced by Tivel and fellow Portland-based multi-instrumentalist Sam Weber and will arrive on August 29 via Fluff & Gravy Records (Margo Cilker, Kassi Valazza).
Like millions, maybe billions, of us earthlings who currently wake up not believing the state we are in as earth beings, still fucking up our habitat and each other, the poetry of "Animal Poem", the song, is so dense in prose, in lines reflecting on the human condition and keeping the emotional chords easy, like a meditation. Tivels vocal countenance, measuredly aloof, maybe even stoic (to some), does express glimmer around the edges with beads of sweat glazed hope and (to me) a kind of absurdist optimism. Maybe realizing that if we dwell in the pain, the sadness of not being able to plug up the many holes that is sinking our ship, we will simply kill ourselves and maybe more to the point, maybe millions or billions of us living as good a life as we can with empathy and true love is the only answer that makes sense. I for one will make it a point to do that and to literally, one day, dance on Donald Trump's grave.
The entire poem, full of hugs and stomach punches is amazing but the ending passages stick in my head:
" everything’s a turning wheel, it comes around, you’re born, you feel / you leave the truth you stole for someone after high up silver howling bird, looking down to see the world / spinning out into the vast forever / flying is a faithful dance, animals suspended / at the place where understanding touches vapor / sorry and i’m listening, is a poem that’s always been / beautiful enough to kill the darkness / you can be someone who loves, or you can be somebody else / i tell you kid, the first one is the hardest"
About the album from LINER NOTES:
"Animal Poem" feels like many things to me, a reflective mirror, a eulogy, a lullaby to sing to a child before they can understand the words and to continue to sing to well into middle school. It is the kind of song that can make me smile in a know way and to cry to when I feel sad.
-Robb Donker Curtius
https://soundcloud.com/annativel
https://open.spotify.com/artist/112l2WmZaTlJcl13f4iFAs
https://annativel.bandcamp.com/album/animal-poem
https://www.instagram.com/annativel/
https://www.facebook.com/anna.tivel/
https://www.annativel.com/
high up silver howling bird / looking down to see the world / spinning out into the vast forever / flying is a faithful dance / animals suspended at the place where understanding touches vapor
Here we are. Mysterious humanity unfolding. Animal nature howling. How do we learn what it means? Maybe being here is a story told by all of us at once, a constant reaching for language, an impossible telling of something inherently indescribable. Animal Poem is a meditation on the attempt. How do we talk about destiny from the balcony of a nation in decline? How does our attention shape the way we touch the natural world? In the face of endless avarice and cruelty, how do we talk about the realness of love?
Recorded live in a circle with some of my dearest friends, Animal Poem was made in conversation. We wanted to be together in the room, to listen and respond in real time without the separation of walls and headphones. I met Sam Weber the summer before and resonated deeply with his musicality and his reasons. We sat around on porches swapping tunes and I asked if he would help me make something that felt as unadorned and free. He donned hats seamlessly – co-producer, engineer, musician – setting mics and checking levels before returning to curl around his guitar and disappear into each song. Everyone in the studio made it feel so open, made it easy to forget technology and permanence and just play, messy and alive. It’s this vital mess that moves me when I listen now – ghost notes in the high register of the piano, melodic guitar and bass lines briefly interwoven, earthy cymbals breathing, my dog barking. We came back to add saxophone, strings, vocal harmonies, and a few other tastes, but most of what you hear is just people sitting together in a small room, listening and talking with tenderness and abandon.
The songs were written on long drives across the country, airplanes, walks through my neighborhood, nights spent lying on the roof. 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.
sorry and i’m listening / is a poem that’s always been / beautiful enough to kill the darkness / you can be someone who loves or you can be somebody else / i tell you kid the first one is the hardest
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM
https://soundcloud.com/annativel
https://open.spotify.com/artist/112l2WmZaTlJcl13f4iFAs
https://annativel.bandcamp.com/album/animal-poem
https://www.instagram.com/annativel/
https://www.facebook.com/anna.tivel/
https://www.annativel.com/
high up silver howling bird / looking down to see the world / spinning out into the vast forever / flying is a faithful dance / animals suspended at the place where understanding touches vapor
Here we are. Mysterious humanity unfolding. Animal nature howling. How do we learn what it means? Maybe being here is a story told by all of us at once, a constant reaching for language, an impossible telling of something inherently indescribable. Animal Poem is a meditation on the attempt. How do we talk about destiny from the balcony of a nation in decline? How does our attention shape the way we touch the natural world? In the face of endless avarice and cruelty, how do we talk about the realness of love?
Recorded live in a circle with some of my dearest friends, Animal Poem was made in conversation. We wanted to be together in the room, to listen and respond in real time without the separation of walls and headphones. I met Sam Weber the summer before and resonated deeply with his musicality and his reasons. We sat around on porches swapping tunes and I asked if he would help me make something that felt as unadorned and free. He donned hats seamlessly – co-producer, engineer, musician – setting mics and checking levels before returning to curl around his guitar and disappear into each song. Everyone in the studio made it feel so open, made it easy to forget technology and permanence and just play, messy and alive. It’s this vital mess that moves me when I listen now – ghost notes in the high register of the piano, melodic guitar and bass lines briefly interwoven, earthy cymbals breathing, my dog barking. We came back to add saxophone, strings, vocal harmonies, and a few other tastes, but most of what you hear is just people sitting together in a small room, listening and talking with tenderness and abandon.
The songs were written on long drives across the country, airplanes, walks through my neighborhood, nights spent lying on the roof. 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.
sorry and i’m listening / is a poem that’s always been / beautiful enough to kill the darkness / you can be someone who loves or you can be somebody else / i tell you kid the first one is the hardest
Anna Tivel, multi-instrumentalist, singer songwriter, singer, 7th album "Animal Poem", folk, indie rock, indie folk, reflective music, deep poetry, social commentary, songs about the human condition,
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