Dana Anastasia – cry if you need to
Self Released – Out Now
It takes a special person to release an album that is completely their own. Dana Anastasia has done just that with cry if you want to, her first album. It’s all her, every note of the music, every word she sings, all the production and mixing, even the album art. We enter her world and are immediately taken over by what she has to say, as she points out this is “a collection of songs written over the course of five years, as an incidental meditation on grief, heartbreak, and the roles we all play in the world we inhabit and the worlds we hope to build.”
Musically gentle, the opening instrumental, The Tunnel begins with a droning organ and an eastern sounding acoustic guitar, setting up a notion of how foreign some of this may be. The drone continues into the beginning of Cassiopeia, while the entrance of a plucked acoustic guitar puts the music into more familiar territory. Lyrically the song mines the Greek myth, “Harried prayers for waking washed over me. Like the glowing eye of a watchful beast, some unlikely light rose up from the East.”
Sounding like an old ballad, I Thought I Was A Bird questions some of the basic assumptions of life. Growing up isn’t an easy process; it flies by much too quickly. There’s a sense of fragility to the basic guitar pattern reinforced by the singer as she questions the basic nature of life, “The world was good. The world was green. Till one day, the morning came later than before, and the chill in the air hung around till it fell like a fog to my feet on the floor. Oh, but I don’t want to die.”
There’s nothing for Anastasia to hide behind on Scouring Sun. With just her voice and guitar, she asks for a greater understanding of what is at stake in our lives and in our world, “This life, it means nothing if all that we’ve done is lower our heads and wait for the gun.” While not explicitly enumerated, we all have choices to make and she asks us, “Where will you stand at the moment of truth when the weight of your promises comes looking for you? Where will you stand?”
Accompanied by guitar with a piano and second voice in the background, Ocean Moon is a meditation on what remains at the end of days, after the apocalypse? “Ocean Moon, wash me clean. This world is looking awful mean. My tears are as salty as the sea.” The final track on the album, Sleep Well, offers hope that tragedy doesn’t have to be the only human dance, “When I’m dreaming, we’re all okay, we’re all okay, everyone’s safe. Cry if you need to. Cry if you want.”
Dana Anastasia’s cry if you need to is a song cycle and meditation on what it means to be human in these strange days of the twenty-first century. That these are questions without answers just makes this collection all the more compelling.
Order’ cry if you need to’ via Bandcamp: https://danaanastasia.bandcamp.com
Listen to Dana Anastasia in our latest Folk Show (Episode 70)