Few musicians observe life with as much acuity and depth of feeling as Anna Tivel. While she performs regularly around Portland and tours as much as she can, the singer/songwriter says sheâs more introvertedâthe perfect quality for sitting back and soaking up whatâs happening around her.
âIâd much rather sit in the corner and watch people do life than join them,â Tivel says. âI go on tour taking in the world and then come home, after being really open to people, and try to process it all.â
When the dust has settled from that processing, she winds up with a batch of new songs, each one adding little details and heartrending images that speak volumes in just a few finely chosen words. Tivelâs released her latest collection of musical observations, Small Believer, earlier this year via local imprint Fluff and Gravy Records.
It spills over with beauty and incidentâsome tracks capture full story arcs, like âDark Chandelier,â which follows the bloody, drunken exploits of a laid-off factory worker. But the most ache-inducing are those with more expressionistic flashes of imagery: âAnd the rise of your fragile bones/And the lift of the whispered wind/And a song that you never heard/And youâre riding on silver wings,â she sings on âBlue World.â
âI have a terrible, terrible memory,â Tivel insists. âI remember things with colors and sounds and not concrete details. So the stories I tell are these big blobs that I shave down into one personâs story thatâs partially fictional and partially attributable to me.â
Adding to the emotional pull of this material is the quietly powerful music that Tivelâs collaborator and producer Austin Nevins surrounds her voice and guitar with, just as he did on her last album, 2016âs Heroes Waking Up. He brings in subtle texturesâa heavily reverbed guitar line, a slowly shushing snare drum, a quiet woodwind lineâthat help the songs unfurl and bloom.
âOne thing that Iâve learned while recording,â says Tivel, âis that I donât want to sink too deep into the process of placing mics or figuring out different sounds. I mean, having to listen to my own damn voice over and over again really kills the magic for me. [Austin] has the brain for that, so it feels really nice to put our heads together.â
For now, Tivel doesnât have to worry about any of that. After a couple of local shows, sheâs planning on taking a break before jumping back into the fray of the new year with a run of shows through the Midwest and Europe, many with her friend and labelmate Jeffrey Martin. And, most importantly, trying to expand and improve upon the work sheâs done.
âI guess Iâve gotten obsessed with the storytelling craft,â she says. âIâm really loving the process of trying to distill a story from a bigger experience. I think with every album Iâve learned a ton about what makes a song stand on its own two feet and what makes one fall over and die. Iâm trying to hone that all the time.â