Anna Tivel – The Question
Fluff And Gravy Records – 19 April 2019
Bettering 2017’s Small Believer was always going to be a difficult task, one which, under the guiding hands of engineer Brian Joseph and multi-instrumentalist producer Shane Leonard, Anna Tivel has with The Question, as is evident from the airily, whisperingly sung, slow shuffle title track, accomplished with ease.
The song, which compassionately addresses themes of transgender and transitioning of gender identity, was inspired by a moment in New York when she looked up at a window and saw a man putting on makeup and a wig and felt herself transfixed as a voyeur wanting to seek and know more. Back home in her loft, that gave rise to her musing on the “the truth you gave it up for”, “the bible in a locked drawer” and how “the neighbors never mention, the woman they see leaving/Is the man who works the morning shift selling gasoline”, the track building to a muscular electric guitar climax as she talks of a “play with no good ending, a prayer that never mentioned The glory of the question and the answer is the same.”
Fenceline equally has its roots in contemporary issues, nervy piano notes and muted staccato drums setting the mood, strings sweeping in as she sketches the picture of a migrant in the moonlight, crawling through the dirt at a stretch of old wire fence on the Mexican border, dogs barking in the distance as he prays for the angels to “Unbar the pearly gate, unblock the road/ Cause down here at the border, I’m just an animal” so that he can cross over a try to pursue his dreams of “a house by a river/A small bit of land for my beautiful wife/Something to show for a lifetime of labor.”
Traced by minimal piano acoustic guitar accompaniment, embellished with strings and hinting at Suzanne Vega, Shadowland talks of the difficulty of making transition and trying again “the living and the breathing don’t come easy” but of clinging to hope and self-belief “I used to be a waste of time, a burning match lit underground a figure in the …now I hope I’m something else, a blinding flash… a bird released from some old bell, escaping.”
Again salvation “you got a way of believing the rest will work out”, here in the form of a tentative relationship, hovers around the quiet acoustic ache of Figure It Out as, sketching an evening urban landscape of a “siren, a cat fight, a thin clarinet/The neighbors reflecting the blue tv set”, a figure walks off home, perhaps after an argument, the narrator watches them go, feeling “I never wanted to hold something close until now” and that while “The darkness it scares me to death, but I’ll figure it out.”
Heralded by dreamy strings and coloured by woodwinds that conjure the atmosphere of looking out on to a quiet evening from some loft window, evoking the vulnerable balladry of Janis Ian , a slow waltzing Minneapolis brings a moment of stillness, lost in reverie, and the contemplation of moving on and making a change, “something lost and something won”, while there’s still something of the relationship left to save.
Worthless rides a brooding, swampy, bluesy groove through the oppressive city heat mirrored in the simmering frustration and anger in the narrator who, “Two quarters in my hand, nothing else in my pocket” has become “a wild horse pawing at the cracked dead earth …a dead man walking on the overpass” in the wake of being rejected and losing hope “I never did wrong, I was kind and careful/Til the day you called me worthless.”
Another number inspired by actual events, Tivel’s vocals and Leonard’s strings meld together on Anthony, written after her neighbour’s recently restored home was destroyed by fire ‘The building was burning/The plaster was crumbling/I lost my sense and I ran back inside”, as, introducing the image of a lost relationship ‘I opened the window where I used to call you”, the song unfolds as reflection on impermanence with its bittersweet refrain of how “I thought I knew what forever meant.”
It’s pointedly followed by Homeless Child which, an airy piano, upright bass and guitar jazz-tinted arrangement over which Tivel’s vocals float and soar, balances the promise of rebirth “Wake up it’s a new day, the old day forgot/You can start it over if you want” and the way life can change on dime “Jesus Christ, it don’t take much/To go from just enough to nothing in the end”, the lyrics referencing struggles with homelessness and alcoholism and ending with the stark observation that “The world will leave you hanging by a thread.”
She returns to the desperate need for salvation amid the darkness with the deeply moving Velvet Curtain, here found in the healing and cathartic power of music as, alone on a theatre stage, sweeping up after a show, a woman sings, a wooden broom handle for a microphone, to the empty rows “so the angels would never forget me.” As she ends, clapping emerges from the back row, a homeless man “all haggard and dirty/A bag of belongings, and tears in his eyes” who blesses her with his parting words – “I’ll never forget this, he said as he left me/I needed to hear someone singing tonight.”
Opening on backwards tape, it ends, again with images of shadows, with the five-minute plus connection-themed Two Strangers, the folksiest and most romantic of the tracks, and a final upbeat note with its tale of a chance meeting of eyes across a street, a subway, the hope of it being repeated until finally, “you crossed the street and suddenly your voice was in my ear/ Saying don’t I know your face from somewhere else.”
A consummate songwriter, Tivel’s attention to detail, both physical and emotional, draws you into the worlds her songs describe and inhabit, sometimes leaving you in tears, sometimes filled with radiance. Seek your answers within.
Performing The Question at the Paste Studios in NY
The Question is out on 19 April via Fluff and Gravy.
Photo Credit: Matt Dayak