(2021) Anna Tivel - Blue World


Review:
Working with Galen Clark on keys and drummer Micah Hummel on Blue World, Anna Tivel revisits songs from each of her albums, recasting them as sparse piano arrangements. Blue World aims to conjure the mood of early hours barrooms, empty save for the last slow-dancing couple, the guy nursing a glass and a heartache, and the tired pianist. It opens with the tinkling notes and quiet space of ‘Alleyway’ from Small Believer, an alcoholic’s reflective tale of a lost relationship, lost family and lost dreams drenched in regret and sadness all the weightier for the new arrangement. The same album yields a further three songs, the first, accompanied on electric piano, being Illinois, a snapshot of someone rediscovering how to be alone (“shattered glass, a photograph of a broken heart, a crack along the windshield of the world”) after emerging from an abusive relationship. The others form the last two tracks, Clark behind the piano for Riverside Hotel, a song written for a homeless veteran watching a luxury hotel being built by a river, longer and taken at a slightly slower pace than the original with an almost hymnal feel. Extended by nearly two minutes and closing the album, the lengthy title track is a song about death and leaving the world behind in the hope of something better (“there’s a shine to a night like this and the stars never fell so near your soul like a golden gift and it rises and disappears”). It takes on an even deeper resonance as a prayer of hope in the wake of recent events, the textures enriched by Clark plucking the interior strings of a grand piano with Hummell brushing the cymbals. Elsewhere, 2019’s The Question provides two reworks. Here sounding like a hushed piano ballad showpiece from a stage musical, Minneapolis is about trying to reignite a stagnant relationship (“Curled like two questions, a couple of dancers/Alone in our separate thoughts”) by uprooting and moving cities to escape. A similar idea informs Shadowland which, recast as a spare, jazzier, moodier and more experimental sounding piece, is about finding new ways to move through the world and learning to forgive yourself for who you were, the lyric rich in poetic metaphor (“I used to be a waste of time, an empty bottle lying down a trap door with the latches gone, hanging by a hinge/Now I guess I’m something else, a raven on an overpass/a wanderer, a silver ghost, a beacon”). Her 2014 debut, Before Machines, is represented by One Thousand & One, described as being “about mental health, about feeling fractured and unsettled and trying to find some beauty in the chaos of the mind”, an equally transformed version that puts greater focus on the hollow, minimal drum sounds, exchanging the guitar for scattered piano notes. The last of the revisits is the poignantly lovely Lillian & Martha from Heroes Waking Up, written about a couple who, following the legalisation of same-sex unions, are, after 50 years and their health fading, finally able to marry, here backdropped by a widescreen piano landscape. There’s one further number, Two Dark Horses, a taster from the forthcoming Outsiders album that first emerged as a poem describing seeing two horses shrouded in fog on an early morning drive. The piano and Tivel’s soaring vocals perfectly capture that atmosphere on a metaphorical song that explores the paradoxical nature of how profound humanity and animal rage, hatred and faith, prejudice and love, can co-exist in the same body but also the capacity to grow and escape such chains as it ends with the image of “two dark horses, storm behind them, freedom finally come”. Designed as a project to capture and reflect that sense of isolation and stillness brought about by the pandemic, but also to invest it with a sense of humanity, connection and hope, Tivel has crafted far more than simply some reimagined versions of her songs; this is a world with its own beauty and captivating intimacy.





Track Listing:
1.Alleyway (Map Room Sessions) 05:02
2.Minneapolis (Map Room Sessions) 05:17
3.Illinois (Map Room Sessions) 03:25
4.One Thousand And One (Map Room Sessions) 04:06
5.Two Dark Horses (Map Room Sessions) 03:57
6.Shadowland (Map Room Sessions) 04:59
7.Lillian And Martha (Map Room Sessions) 03:54
8.Riverside Hotel (Map Room Sessions) 05:44
9.Blue World (Map Room Sessions) 06:01


Media Report:
Genre: acoustic, indie-folk
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits