On 22nd April, Ana Silvera releases The Fabulist, her first release since her much-lauded ‘Oracles’ live album. ‘The Fabulist’ was produced with award-winning multi-instrumentalist Gerry Diver and features a stellar cast of musicians including LA-based singer-songwriter Alan Hampton (Fiona Apple, Andrew Bird) and double bassist Jasper Høiby (Phronesis, Planet B). The album title, meaning ‘teller of fables’, speaks to Ana’s love of story-telling, with the songs both drawing on the lives of “imagined others” as well as plumbing the depths of her own emotional experiences.
Ana has shared this personal insight into the album’s latest single ‘Halos’:
On a dull and cold spring day a few years back, sitting on a train headed north (where, I can’t quite recall but maybe for a show or for a meeting of some kind), I watched the London skyscrapers yield to suburban streets and then slide into open skies and countryside.
I let my gaze slacken and my mind wander, taking in the de-saturated landscape and the pale cataract of the sun, poking through soft grey clouds.
Frozen furrows of barren fields and the crows pecking and wheeling about the withered crops. The bright skirts of fog encircling black trees.
In my notebook, I scribbled, ‘halos, a benediction, circles drawn gold in the water’. Then – I imagine – I bought a terrible coffee served in a polystyrene cup (courtesy of Richard Branson) or fell into a brief conversation with another passenger or was distracted by a malfunctioning train door that opened and closed like a frantic eye. Par for the course.
A few days later, I sat down at the keyboard with this glimmer of an image in mind and wrote ‘Halos’. It was one of those songs that tumbled out fully formed, as if it had been gestating unawares for months or years.
When I reflect on that time, I can see that I was contending with major upheavals; two of my closest family members had passed away in quick succession and I was disorientated, dizzy with the changes and the grief.
There was something deeply comforting about the thought of the swallows returning as they do each year, to the chilly Northern hemisphere, and that seemed to contrast with the unpredictable, tectonic shifts of my own life.
Every time I perform this song it feels like prayer of sorts but it’s also about the altered air left in the wake of loss…about bravery and resolve… how remembering those gone is not done in broad sweeps but in those tiny, precious details – a ring of tobacco smoke, a strand of hair on a pillow, the slant of a certain dawn light, a moment of tangible love amidst chaos.
Ana will be touring the UK in support of ‘The Fabulist’ throughout May ‘22, alongside Jasper Høiby (d.bass), Marc Michel (guitar) and drummer/multi-instrumentalist Chris Vatalaro (Sam Amidon, Bat for Lashes). The London launch will be at Bush Hall on Thursday 19th May.
Web: https://www.anasilvera.com/
Bandcamp: https://anasilvera.bandcamp.com/