Over the course of eight albums, Oregon’s Anna Tivel has demonstrated herself to be a consummate exponent of intricately textured, often minimalist compositions that draw on folk, jazz, and pop influences, with lyrics that delve into the nature of being human, communication, and existential matters. On Animal Poem, her latest, she asks, “In the face of endless avarice and cruelty, how do we talk about the realness of love? How do we talk about destiny from the balcony of a nation in decline? How does our attention shape the way we touch the natural world?” A meditation on the process and result of a creative life, an artist or otherwise, and the means of expression, recorded live in a circle with some subsequent overdubs, it’s another thoughtfully but never calculatedly crafted collection of melodies, lyrics and arrangements that deftly weave their way into your consciousness without ever feeling the need to batter down the walls. Backed by a core band of guitarist Sam Weber, drummer Micah Hummel, Galen Clark on keys, bassist Sam Howard and Nicole McCabe on sax.
She opens with the propulsively strummed acoustic and breathlessly sung Holy Equation, as, she sings “god bless this city, steel beamed and starless/exhaust and graffiti, a dirty glass forest/surrounded by faces…the discount groceries and the timing belt trouble/i’m waking up early, i’m bussing the tables” laying out an urban algorithm where “the math doesn’t add up, there’s holes in the fabric of dreams, you see right through/good luck to the lucky few, and god bless the rest of us fools”. A thumbnail snapshot of America, “a proud explosion of hope and anger”, it’s both critical (“the harshest language is one that fails to/give a person endless value”) and celebratory (“the purple bicycle kid rides home/his arms outstretched in the flight path soaring/a pickup swerves and honks his horn/if god exists, that math is holy”) and it makes the heart beat.
Carried by the steady rhythm of hissed drum brush strokes and tumbling chords, the title track (“a meditation on the stories we tell ourselves and each other…both painful and profound”) follows, another ode to humanity and stoicism (“courage is a tired mom, milk crate and a cardboard sign/trying to find a story for her daughter”) as she declares “this is how the world exists…everyone is in a play, characters in constant pain/reaching for a way to taste some beauty/you can be someone who loves, or you can be somebody else/that’s all there is… i tell you kid, the first one is the hardest”. It’s a picture of a world where you breathe and then you stop, where “everyone you come upon, holds a picture in their mind/ask them and they might just show you something/magpie on the dying grass, looking for a diamond/or some trash to build a temporary altar/everything’s a turning wheel, it comes around, you’re born, you feel/you leave the truth you stole for someone after” where love’s a “poem that’s always been/beautiful enough to kill the darkness”.
The first of two tracks pushing past five minutes, the early hours jazzed, slowly pulsed, musically atmospheric Paradise (Is In The Mind) picks up the magpie imagery (“you know i keep the paper for some future rainy day/i put it in a pile with all the other things i save bottle tops and broken watches, rubber bands and creamer cartons/all that i might need tomorrow”) in a number about trying to find an elusive contentment (“it gets hard/folding all the clothes, a growing pile upon the bed/tshirts from my travels, egypt, montreal, berlin/turning up the radio, the bbc, the world’s so close/my old car is dead you know, and all those papers block the door/i can’t find it, paradise, is in the mind, i just know it is but i’ve been searching, for a lifetime”).
Tivel adding violin with Weber on rubber bridge guitar, Clark on reflective piano and Jeffrey Martin adding vocals, the whisperingly sung Badlands again speaks of elusiveness as it summons a pathetic fallacy road song memory (“driving through the badlands, you were talking about time/all those strange formations making shadows, you followed./the purple of the ages and the painted yellow lines/a photo never catches what you’re after”) that touches on mortality and loneliness (“there’s a coyote on the rise/lonely as a figure in a painting, it’s painful/you learn it all so slow, you’ll be gone before you’re wise / but maybe it’s the highway that will change you…the sky is on fire above the badlands/and when you least expect it, you’re gonna find yourself traveling alone”).
Just Tivel on strummed acoustic, the past also haunts the sparse five-minute plus Hough Ave, 1966 (“the plane touched down, cleveland ohio/i raised my collar to the cold / on the cab ride home, that song was playing… i saw you last in late september / you were sleeping in your car again”), with references to Nina Simone’s Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, the song concerns the Hough Riots during which four African Americans were killed (“on the corner, where you bled out/and the bells began to ring/there’s a reason for those bells now and that song means everything”).
Picking up the tempo, Howard on acoustic bass, Airplane To Nowhere is another musing on “the wonder and the violence” of life and relationships with its hints of domestic abuse (“just how you learned in childhood, warm milk and dry blood … some other day, will find you smiling / pepper shaker, shattered plate / the way he kissed you after, good as any mother / made that anger fly away”), summing up life in the bittersweet simple line “don’t worry babe, this is kindness/a little pain, and then you’re flying”.
A regret-infused meditation on things that are gone (“the ghost of everything we loved and everything we didn’t fight for”), White Goose with its plucked acoustic and clicking percussion has the narrator recalling “i was a kid in some past life, i shot a white goose flying south / crimson rose blooming across the empty wildness he fell out of” as “driving back to oregon on the burned out path the fire took” with “only chimneys left alive” she’s reminded of “the ghost of everything we loved and everything we didn’t fight for/the wild midnight forest, the kid, the gun, the white goose”.
Weber on acetone and Tivel with music box, the sparsely percussive, jazzy stripped down and dreamy Fluorescence In The Future contemplates the ageing process and its inevitable eventuality (“a forever kid just hoping/for a better movie version, of the future fact of dying/you arrive, and every room is just a mirror facing you/a carpet path, a shift in shadow, you can turn but you can never turn away … there’s no way to avoid it, every engine has an end date”) and of not letting intentions go unacted (“happiness is fragile, a breath of air through a window maybe all the rest will help you hold the wind when it’s against you … close your eyes, it’s only fleeting, don’t forget the way it came on like a wave/is there something else you meant to say”).
Arranged for acetone, mellotron , octave bass and violin, the penultimate hushed, scuffed Meantime is also one of the album’s biggest highlights, the initial paradoxical account of abuse and kindness (“the family down the street moved out, that dad who slapped his kids around/then built a swing behind the house, that no one ever used”) prompting a reflection on how “the beautiful and brutal parts are beating in us too” and, although “it’s hard to keep the wheels attached”, a resolve to be the best you can (“sometimes when the morning comes, i roll away from everyone/holding all that hurt me once… the purple fading blue to black, when sunsets like a bruise …in the meantime, til the gold light ends/in the madness, of real life, i promise to do my best”). It ends back where it began but with a note of hope in the air (“the family down the street moved out, i wonder where they’re living now/they fixed it up, the swing is still, reaching in the wind/i reach for you something like that, eternally but never quite / becoming good, but god i’m trying, to be a better friend”).
Returning to a theme of communication (“you were trying to tell me something, i could not relate/language is a lover’s problem, listening is pain”), it closes with the quietly euphoric and tender The Humming, a mother’s love letter and promise to her child (“someday when we’re older i’ll do better/at watching you becoming everything you will become/i just want to live inside the realness of it all / hold you til you know you are the reason i know love”), the heart bursting in the lines “someday when we’re older i will tell you/everything i learned about the rain from watching you/every way i thought i couldn’t change until you moved … i will linger/over all the moments of an ordinary life … sitting quiet/everything will spread out like a history of love” as she ends with “what if that bright humming is all there ever was baby tell me something i can hear it”.
Anna Tivel’s “Animal Poem” is a masterclass in subtlety and emotional depth, offering hope amidst a nation’s decline. It’s an album that doesn’t demand your attention but instead earns it, drawing you in deeper with each listen.
Animal Poem (August 29th, 2025) Fluff and Gravy
Anna Tivel On Tour:
Sept 4 — 9:30 Club — Washington, DC*
Sept 5 — The Vogel — Red Bank, NJ*
Sept 6 — Webster Hall — New York, NY*
Sept 9 — Keswick Theatre — Glenside, PA*
Sept 10 — Théâtre Beanfield — Montréal, QC*
Sept 11 — The Danforth Music Hall — Toronto, ON*
Sept 12 — The Athenaeum Theatre — Columbus, OH*
Sept 15 — The Basement East — Nashville, TN*
Sept 16 — Thalia Hall — Chicago, IL*
Sept 17 — Uptown Theater — Minneapolis, MN*
Sept 20 — Commodore Ballroom — Vancouver, BC*
Sept 21 — Neptune Theatre — Seattle, WA*
Sept 23 — Aladdin Theater — Portland, OR*
Sept 25 — The Fillmore — San Francisco, CA*
Sept 26 — The Bellwether — Los Angeles, CA*
Sept 27 — Belly Up — Solana Beach, CA*
Sept 28 — Crescent Ballroom — Phoenix, AZ*
Sept 30 — Lensic Performing Arts Center — Santa Fe, NM*
Oct 2 — Paramount Theatre — Austin, TX*
Oct 3 — Longhorn Ballroom — Dallas, TX*
Oct 4 — Tower Theatre — Oklahoma City, OK*
Oct 10 New Prospect Theatre Bellingham, WA^
Oct 12 — Unity of the Valley — Eugene, OR^
Oct 15 — Pappy + Harriet’s — Pioneertown, CA^
Oct 17 — The Wayfarer — Costa Mesa, CA^
Oct 21 — South Broadway Cultural Center — Albuquerque, NM^
Oct 22 — Globe Hall — Denver, CO^
Oct 24 — The State Room — Salt Lake City, UT^
Oct 26 — Shrine Social Club — Boise, ID^
Nov 12 — Snapdragon — Vashon, WA^
Nov 14 — Miller’s — Carnation, WA^
Nov 15 — Port Gamble Theater — Port Gamble, WA^
~with support from Luke Henry
*supporting The Waterboys
^with Jeffrey Martin