Closing off the main chapter of summer is Anna Tivel’s seventh full-length studio album Animal Poem. Produced with Sam Weber, most of the recordings were created in a wonderfully collaborative space with many of Tivel’s closest friends making music together in one room.
Infused with her characteristically evocative lyrics and soft vocals, the album explores how to be an artist in our divided world fraught with conflict, each track capturing a snapshot of humanity. In the singer-songwriter’s own words: “The songs were written on long drives across the country, airplanes, walks through my neighborhood, nights spent lying on the roof … a momentary study of the way a mind reaches for understanding.”
‘Holy Equation’ captures fleeting impressions of the everyday in a city and the daily struggles of its inhabitants, the instrumental backing rolling along gently in the background just as people quietly go about their lives. The music is raw and real – you can hear each guitar chord change as a hand slides over the strings, the breath as it enters the saxophone.
In the eponymous ‘Animal Poem’, Tivel steps into the shoes of a mother trying to juggle a chaos of tasks, care for her child, and answer their questions about what life is all about. The lyrics ooze a pervasive sense of weariness as the mother reflects on dreams made and lost.
‘Paradise (Is in the Mind)’ brings a tinge of melancholy as we visit an ageing hoarder, newspapers and all manner of memorabilia from their lifetime piled up around them, searching for paradise. Too old to travel, it seems that they have surrounded themselves with the world in order to feel far away. The music starts quiet and becomes more intense, perhaps reflecting the hoarder’s increasing frustration. Similarly dark is ‘Hough Ave, 1966’, the pensive guitar backing the tale of someone abandoned by the world, their struggles and ultimate death, snippets of a life unfulfilled.
Nature features heavily in ‘Badlands’ and ‘White Goose’, one wandering the barren wilderness searching for meaning amongst bursts of purple, yellow, and fiery heavens; the other a flashback to a searing childhood memory of shooting a white goose, which brings other memories flooding back in rich colours.
‘Airplane to Nowhere’ and ‘Fluorescence in the Future’ stand at opposite ends of the rhythmic spectrum, one purposefully rolling along, the other both dreamlike and staccatoed, but the characters revolve on the spot, not going anywhere but longing for change. The latter ends in an excellent musical chaos, free and messy like life itself.
This is a common thread through the final two tracks of the album, ‘Meantime’ and ‘The Humming’, one reflecting on how easily we judge others when our own lives are just as messy, the other a conversation between two lovers vowing to one day make sense of their tangled existence.
With Animal Poem, Anna Tivel showcases not only her trademark knack for capturing the human condition in exquisite detail and richly visual imagery, but also demonstrates beautifully how we can still make art in our troubled times: by zooming in on the smaller picture, reminding ourselves that amid all the chaos and pain, what matters is that we are alive and keep trying to live. As Tivel puts it: “Humanity is unfolding as we describe it. We’ll never get it right, but the attempt is everything.”