(2019) Anna Tivel - The Question

Review: Anna Tivel is a stickler for details. On The Question, the Portland-based songwriter breathes life into her compositions by reveling in the sometimes dirty and often overlooked features of her surroundings. A muddy river bathed in rain, a packrat’s junky side yard, or a desolate stretch of highway — over the course of the record’s ten songs, no setting is deemed too unimportant for Tivel’s lengthy gaze. The album’s lead single, “Fenceline,” is no exception. The lush folk song was inspired by America’s protracted battle over the construction of barriers on the 2000-mile border with Mexico. But Tivel distills the sprawling geopolitical topic down to a scene on a dusty stretch of poorly-maintained wire fence. There, a single migrant crawls in the dirt under the moonlight, his heart beating rapidly while dogs bark in the distance. “Oh, angels look away,” Tivel sings with sense of both hope and despair. “Unbar the pearly gate, unblock the road / Cause down here at the border, I’m just an animal.” It’s a devastating line made possible by Tivel’s near-sighted approach to songwriting — a style that lends an almost literary quality to the characters in The Question. You don’t just hear their stories, you can almost feel them. But that effect doesn’t come easy. During a recent interview and session with opbmusic, Tivel, a serial notetaker who often writes while traveling on tour, claims to have “twenty lame songs that are just lists of junk” for every song that appears on one of her records.

Tracklist: 01 - The Question 02 - Fenceline 03 - Shadowland 04 - Figure It Out 05 - Minneapolis 06 - Worthless 07 - Anthony 08 - Homeless Child 09 - Velvet Curtain 10 - Two Strangers

Summary: Country: USA Genre: folk-rock, indie-folk

Media Report: Source: CD Format: FLAC Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM Bit rate mode: Variable Bit rate: ~ 675-816 Kbps Channel(s): 2 channels Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz Bit depth: 16 bits