Portland musician Anna Tivel releases new album

Portland musician Anna Tivel’s new album, “Outsiders,” is a folk homage to empathy. In her bio, she notes the album is “a small prayer of recognition for loneliness and love and all the ways we try and fail and try and fail again, to see each other clearly and let ourselves be seen.” We talk to Tivel in our studio and hear her play a few of her songs.

Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. The Portland musician Anna Tivel joins us now. Three years ago when she released ‘The Question’, NPR called it one of the most ambitious folk records of the year. Her new album which came out in August is called ‘Outsiders’. She said that the album is about looking more deeply into ourselves and each other, trying to understand the forces that keep us from connecting in real ways and the forces that draw us together. Anna Tivel came to our studio with her guitar last week. I started by having her play the title track from the album.

(Music: Imagine the very first man on the moon…)

Miller: That is the song ‘Outsiders’, the title track and the first song on Anna Tivel’s new album ‘Outsiders’. What was the first kernel for that song?

Anna Tivel: That song, I actually was watching that Apollo 11 documentary and I think it was in the middle of an especially ugly news cycle and just a lot of awful, awful rhetoric and I was watching that documentary and there’s all this old footage of people looking up and people gathered around their TVs when we were about to do this thing that we’ve never done before. And just this kind of communal worldwide moment of stopping the crazy time that was happening, then to just be like, oh I hope we do, I hope we do this thing.

Miller: And some of, we’re all in this together too.

Tivel: Yeah, kind of just a very momentary, united hope, which felt, I think I just needed a dose of that right then and just sort of put it on mute and started writing that song.

Miller: Does that happen a lot, that you’re living your life, you’re reading something or watching something and then a piece of a song comes to you and you put it on mute or you close the book and just start writing?

Tivel: Sometimes. I think more often it’s just everything is sort of like a chaos pile, swirling around in there and you’re just sort of storing things away without really being conscious of it. And then sometimes a feeling is just working, it needs to get out and and you have all these images and things that you’ve sort of seen and heard and read and watched and and then it all sort of informs your writing, eventually when you sit down. I gotta work out this thing on my heart.

Miller: Out of the chaos pile?

Tivel: Yep, out of the chaos pile.

Miller: You had that line, “Outsiders look up, it turns out we are not so different.” I’ve been listening a lot recently to this King song, ‘Strangers’, which is weirdly similar. “It’s strangers on this road, we are on, we are not two, we are one.” Which is, different takes, but they get to this same thing. Are you reminding yourself that ‘outsider, look up’ or is it just for us as listeners?

Tivel: I think always myself too. It’s like songs start in this very quiet, unadorned, alone place, for me anyway, and it was like a whole unawareness that anyone else might ever even hear it like sort of when, when I’m in that writing space, I’m not thinking about anything else, but working out something. And yeah, something about that documentary that really I kept thinking about everybody, like getting so far away from the planet that you could look back and no one had ever done that before, been so out of our atmosphere to look and see the world and you can’t even see a person, we’re so small, you can’t even see us. We don’t really, we’re just, we’re all over the place and we’re tiny specks and yeah, like what a feeling that would have been.

Miller: Do you feel like an outsider yourself?

Tivel: Yeah. And I think everybody does, in whatever, everybody has their ways of feeling like they can’t quite fit into the mix or the system or yeah, they’re trying to connect. But it’s hard to connect. I think a lot of this album is kind of like thinking about ways that we’re trying to reach toward each other, but it’s so hard because we’re such strange internal animals.

Miller: The last line of the song is haunting, “Pausing the burning of cities to say we are beautiful when we believe.” Do you remember when that line came to you? What was, what came out of the chaos, to form that line?

Tivel: I think just listening to the news, like it’s so easy to take in the news and just be like, wow, we are the worst and we’re way worse than we’ve ever been and everything is just hell in a handbasket and we’re never going to get better. But then also yeah, there’s just so much ugliness, if you’re only paying attention to the ugliness, but also all the things that we achieve and the way love is so important to us, even though we spend so much time being awful, we still, like all we’re trying to do is is connect and feel worth. Like it’s worth something and I don’t know, I think I just was thinking how those two things exist at once all the time, our just extreme awfulness and our extreme beauty and heart.

Miller: You noted that you were thinking a lot about our yearning for connection and also the destructiveness and the way we approach relationships, sometimes. I’ve read that you wrote a lot of these songs on the album in 2019 and 2020. Was it mainly pre-pandemic? I mean, is this in terms of the song writing, a pre-pandemic album?

Tivel: Yeah, for sure. It was all written and it was recorded as well before the pandemic, actually right before the pandemic in February. Yes.

Miller: So it’s like a time capsule in a sense. Not like life was great before then, but life was different.

Tivel: It was a definite time capsule. We sort of left the studio and slowly, one of one of the guys who played bass on the album had just gotten back from a tour in China and we sort of left the studio and none of us was even aware and he was very vaguely aware that there might be a thing brewing.

Miller: It brewed

Tivel: It brewed.

Miller: Spoiler alert. Can we hear another song? And this one is called ‘Black Umbrella’ and it’s a story song.

(Music: Under the black umbrella, you were keeping to yourself and the rain came down like diamonds on the sidewalk…)

Miller: That’s my guest Anna Tivel, playing her song ‘Black Umbrella’ from her new album ‘Outsiders’ which came out in August. It’s a real epic story that takes place in, I don’t know, three or four minutes maybe, of action. Where did this song come from?

Tivel: I wrote this song in a motel in Virginia, actually, on tour. I just had a day off and it was a long driving day and I was sort of going through all these really tiny rural spots in the south that it just, it would just be like some trailers in a gas station and people just sort of like sitting out, outside and it just sort of felt like all systems had forgotten. Just nobody seemed to be doing okay. And it just felt like, oh this is a place where people aren’t getting what they need and. I was thinking about how history informs that and how the economy informs that and just families’ abilities to build something based on those systems. Just sort of feeling heavy about it. And I think I wrote this in the motel that night.

Miller: You wrote it in the second person. So “you were keeping to yourself, you tried to stop the bleeding, a bullet danced right through you”. Why make that choice?

Tivel: That’s a good question. Sometimes I like to tell the story to connect yourself to the character, but you aren’t the character but you’re watching it like a movie. But the character is also someone that you know, and I like the feeling of of like watching stories from a window or seeing things happen in you’re, the narrator is also affected by it because they’re watching, which feels different than being the character or telling it like this was Jim and then you have no connection to the character. I think I’m drawn to that voice.

Miller: To implicate us as listeners, to make us feel it more.

Tivel: Yeah, you’re in the sea. You’re also in the scene, you’re in the story.

Miller: You recorded this in February of 2020 in Rock Island, Illinois, right on the border with Iowa. Why record there?

Tivel: There’s a really beautiful group of musicians that all live in O’Claire, Wisconsin and I’ve done a couple of records there. And the same crew of people, we were going to make this record and Shane Leonard, who produced it. They’re all friends with this guy who has this great warehouse studio in Rock Island and we were like, let’s just rent a little house and we can all stay in it together and sometimes it’s nice to go into recording and just fully enter that world and nobody goes home at night. Everyone, we’re just like a unit and we also sleep together and eat together and talk about the songs and walk to the studio. So we kind of had that idea in mind…

Miller: Like a group retreat.

Tivel: Yeah.

Miller: How do you think, I don’t even know if there’s something you can put into words, but how do you think that affects the way you make music?

Tivel: I think sometimes you really get to live inside songs and not let other parts of your day or your life enter it. So you’re like fully in it and that’s always a really good feeling, especially when you’re making a record to not come home and be like, oh I gotta vacuum the car, I gotta pay this bill. You’re just for a week or whatever it is, you just, all you think about, you just eat, drink and dream music.

Miller: You’re in it together, too.

Tivel: Yeah, you’re in it together and each other’s emotions are always kind of informing and you’re when you’re playing, you’re getting to know each other in this certain way and and then you’re also talking about your lives over dinner and asking each other questions and it sort of all adds. I really liked the process of making this record because I felt like we were this funky little family, making crock pot meals and making music together.

Miller: On your website, it says that this was recorded as live to tape. And I know what that means from just a radio perspective of, sometimes a guest is available only at 10a.m. So record it, but then we don’t make any changes and press play at noon. But what does that mean in terms of recording an album and how is that different from the way albums in 2022 are often made?

Tivel: It’s very analog. It’s so you have literal reel to reel tape and you’re recording it on a tape machine. So there’s no computers happening at all, like what it is, is what it is. You do something and you’ll also only have so much reel, so you can only do so many takes and later it’s, now you can digitize. I’m also not a technological person, so I’m bad at describing this...

Miller: But I don’t want a technological person’s response to this.

Tivel: But you can, so later we did a little bit of overdubs, but mostly you’re just, we just stood in a circle and you’re just sort of, you have so much tape and we tried to get the emotion right and then there’s flaws and stuff in there, but you’re sort of accepting everything that is live and yeah.

Miller: The most prominent sounds on the album are your voice, guitar, drums, but at times there are also what seemed like more electronic additions, a synthesizer sound or swirl or some drum machine kind of hits. How do you decide what the sonic landscape should be for these songs?

Tivel: A lot of that is my buddy Shane, who produced, and I’ve done a few things with him now. And he’s an amazing drummer and a great songwriter and he just gets so excited about sounds and he has a lot of vision for drawing things out of normal folk song landscape. And I’m very deeply a word person and I have very little sonic vision. I just get excited about playing with people who make sounds that feel like something deep to my heart and I kind of like the freedom of just letting them have at it while I try to give the right emotion to the words, you know? And Shane has been very much that to me where he just gets so excited about different sounds and bringing in this strange drum machine and, but I also really trust that he’ll never suggest anything that that kind of gets in the way of the lyrics. Yeah.

Miller: But it seems like you, not that you’re ceding control, but you have the part that you care most about and you trust this collaborator to make good decisions.

Tivel: Yeah. I just like things to feel free and in the moment and making it with people that care about the parts of the song that I care about. Then I just want to hear what their take on things is and it feels like it gets a new life and that feels exciting and I don’t think I’m too precious about recording in that way. I just have at it and I go, it can go a lot of different ways and and as long as you’re with people that care and then it just it just is a moment in time, I think.

Miller: When you listen to the album or when you were listening to the mastering or whatever, did you hear little blemishes that you came to love and you had the ability to get rid of it digitally, but you kept them in?

Tivel: Yeah. And even there’s plenty of blemishes that I don’t love.

Miller: But they’re still there.

Tivel: Yeah.

Miller: That’s just part of the tape world.

Tivel: And even if you do everything digitally and very strategically, you never will listen back to it in a year and think, well that is the perfect one, so I sort of just, I think if the emotion is there, then it’s there. And as long as the words aren’t messed up, I am really kind of…

Miller: Get the words right.

Tivel: Yep, if I say “it” instead of “and”, we have to do it over, that’s the one place where I can be a stickler.

Miller: Can we hear one more song? Can we hear ‘Astrovan’?

Tivel: Yeah, absolutely.

(Music: I love you, I’m nervous…)

Miller: That’s the song ‘Astrovan’ by Anna Tivel from her new album, ‘Outsiders’. It’s both a beautiful love song and a sad love song, somehow at the same time, in a way that feels just really honest. How do you decide in general how much of yourself to show to the world?

Tivel: I think that’s an ever changing journey. This album, I feel like I’m in there a lot more than I’ve allowed in the past and actually this song especially. I’m not someone who’s let it out very much and I think I tend to explore my own heart, in the stories of others, in my writing. And I’ve been sort of testing the waters and maybe just slowly realizing in my own life that being vulnerable with people is the way that you connect with them. And I think the song especially sort of talking about getting past the fresh part of the relationship to the part where you really start to see each other and how scary that can be and how much feeling seen can make you want to run. But also how much it can connect you to someone in a relationship and how maybe that’s just the hard work. That’s the good work of love and I think this song is just exactly about that. How much of yourself do you put in the song?

Miller: Yeah. What do you think changed that made you more willing or interested in sharing in that way?

Tivel: Writing songs and making music has just been such a integral part of the way that I’ve learned to move through the world, and I just feel like it’s always because you have so little control on tour and you’re just sort of slapped up against the world and all these things and people and their stories are coming at you and you’re just sort of out there in the ether. I think it’s just this constant lesson that you can never know people just by looking at them. And also you can never connect with them until you let a little bit of yourself out.

And songwriting can be this really vulnerable thing to do in front of people. And I can feel the way that the more honest I can move toward being on stage, the more people come up after the show and be like, oh, that song reminded me of this thing in my own life and then you have these interactions that are like, really deep with strangers and it feels sort of like magic. And I, I think maybe I wasn’t good at fostering that in my life before I started writing songs and it’s just I’m always getting reminded like, oh, the more generous I can be with my internal self, the more that’s received and returned. And that feels like a better way to me, even though it’s kind of raw and scary. Yeah, I just, I feel like that’ll just be a journey for me always, to find better ways to connect.

Miller: Anna Tivel, it was a pleasure to talk to you and to hear your songs. Thank you for coming in.

Tivel: Thank you so much.

Miller: Anna Tivel is a Portland-based musician. Her new album is called ‘Outsiders’. We talked last week.

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