featuring the very best of americana, alt.country and roots music
September 14, 2022
Scott Foley, purveyor of dust
What's deceptive about Tom Waits' music is that there are classic songs that lie beneath the barking and the battered percussion. But listeners become tangled in the master's barbed-wire voice. The late-night carnival arrangements lead them to believe there's something alien going on. Fact is, the art Waits has made with longtime partner Kathleen Brennan and other collaborators is simply good songs.
Anna Tivel isn't Tom Waits. While the Portland songwriter has evolved over the span of her five studio records, she delivers her songs in a cottony, almost conspiratorial voice. From 2017's Small Believer, through The Question (2019) and Blue World (2021), Tivel has worked from a primarily acoustic base, even as her contemporary folk music explores elements of jazz or pop. As a lyricist, she has a painter's eye for detail, each song an Edward Hopper tableau set to song.
Anna Tivel's sixth studio effort, The Outsiders (Mama Bird) continues to push at the margins of her sound. With producer and instrumentalist Shane Leonard, she constructs each piece leading a small ensemble through an improvisational session, a live-in-studio run-through featuring Courtney Hartman on guitar, Ben Lester on piano, and Jeremy Boettcher on bass. Aside from Leonard's often entrancing percussion, the collection is an exercise in subtlety and restraint.
"Ruins" is haunted by the spirit of a lost relationship, brushed percussion like a gust of wind, tearing your mask away. Tivel's matter-of-fact voice rises momentarily like a breeze-blown leaf on the country-adjacent track, the echo of a trumpet enhancing the session: Forgiveness is easy, you just have to kneel and then promise to take it all back. Low woodwinds and piano lead to a momentary swell of strings, stirring the deep purple sadness of "Astrovan". The love in Tivel's songs is not a head-over-heels abandon, but instead portrays a fleeting balance of separation and connection in even the brightest moments. Beauty exists even in the back of a gold Astrovan, in a shared glance: Your eyes slowly open, two bluebirds arriving to land on the branch of my mind.
More typically, these moments of connection are portrayed in non-romantic settings, such as the startling recognition between the narrator and the backward talking fool on "Invisible Man". Tivel suggests a more grounded Kate Bush on the song, punctuated by a stuttering percussion. Not so much a storyteller as a suggester of scenarios, she embraces the former on "Black Umbrella", following the last moments of a figure who becomes the victim of random circumstance. She pairs a strummed guitar with unsteady keys, a lovely highwire balance that juxtaposes with the erratic drama of the lyrics.
The most impressive aspects of The Outsiders happen where Anna Tivel gives rein to more complex arrangements, lending to comparisons with Weather Station or Joe Henry's more complex productions. "Heroes" features bold and entrancing electronic percussion, guitars distorted and mumbling irregularly. Tivel's thin vocals are even more brittle and intimate in this setting, as she criticizes our adulation for flawed heroes: Their lives are fucked up movies and you've studied every one. Percussion dominates the gorgeous "Royal Blue" that asks what if? in the face of opportunity and doubt: Falling was so beautiful, I brushed my spirit off and fell again. Rather than hijacking or challenging Tivel's songs, collaborators are almost tentative, a restraint that contributes to the music's innocence even on its boldest cuts. "The Dial" is driven by the distorted slap of junkyard percussion, speaking to the perpetual wheel of touring. Tivel's secret power lies in a sudden attention to seemingly happenstance detail: a dreamcatcher lying on the roadside shoulder.
This seems to be a recurring theme in many of this year's R&B reviews: Our abiding appreciation of how noise and more adventurous arrangement can enhance rather than distract from an artist's impact. Like the purely great songs that can lie beneath the rubble of Tom Waits' carnival, Anna Tivel's flirtation with sound manipulation and atypical percussion can provide a more relevant bed for her urban-leaning tableaus. Tivel herself calls The Outsiders: 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. A perennially sense-uous voyeur, she looks down on our Earth from the Moon on the record's title track. On an uneven surface of percussion and guitar scratches, she calls Outsiders, look up. From such a far remove, she proposes what might pass as a artist's statement of purpose: Pausing the burning of cities to say we are beautiful when we believe.
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