Anna Tivel sings her songs of world-weariness and hope in a voice that sounds a lot younger than her words. The Northwest-raised Tivel currently calls Portland home, but she’s spent a lot of time on the road and with her own thoughts and a guitar. Heroes Waking Up is her third album, and I find it far above the general run of singer-songwriter folk.
I’m not usually taken with intimate, whispery vocals, but Tivel sings such hard-won, emotionally stark and honest verses with hers that I was immediately won over. And she casts her poetry in dark colors, the tunes taking unexpected melodic twists and down-turns that call to mind the likes of Bowerbirds, Everybodyfields and Blind Pilot.
I’m going through the tracks and trying to pull out exceptional ones to highlight in a brief review, but not succeeding. The two that hit me the hardest, I guess, are two that aren’t currently available in video form or on Soundcloud. “Lillian and Martha” is maybe the sunniest of these 11 songs, but even its message of the triumph of love rests on a bed of melancholy. The titular characters are two long-time lovers who the listener senses will barely have time to savor the joy in finally being able to get married after 50 years together, because their health is fading even if their love isn’t. And “Black Balloon” is a somewhat cryptic portrait of a man braving a storm (real or metaphoric doesn’t matter) out of an unwillingness to abandon his home. What to make of lines like this one in the first verse? “Get back little doggies I’m not your man, I was never the savior of anything, just a hungry laborer reticent to belong to a world that so soon forgets.”
But I don’t think there’s a weak track. The haunting love song “Wild Blue Field,” the elegiac remembrance of a young man lost in war titled “Shadow Of A Son,” the dark country war song of “Two Pencils And A Photograph,” and the ode to the lonely road “Slow Motion,” and more, every one has at least one breathtaking moment, when tune and words combine in a way you never expected and stop you in your tracks. Tivel sings volumes without ever turning up the volume. Take Dial Tone, for instance:
Heroes was recorded by Austin Nevins, who has played with the likes of Josh Ritter, Anais Mitchell and The Mountain Goats; here he also plays guitar, lap steel, banjo and pump organ. A handful of other musicians help Tivel flesh out these songs in arrangements that are never fussy or cluttered. It’s the kind of album that can renew your faith in singers, songwriters and folk music.
(Fluff & Gravy, 2016)
Anna Tivel has a website and is on Facebook. You can sample and buy Heroes on Bandcamp.
