Anna Tivel - White Goose (Fluff and Gravy)

The Slow Music Movement
3 days ago
2 min read

This is the cover art for Anna Tivel's Animal Poem album. It shows a man running nakes along a trail on a grassy hillside, surrounded by bushes and scattered branches. The black and white image feels calm and natural.

Now residing in Portland, but born in Washington in a musical family where she learnt violin and fiddle as a child, and having developed an interest in songwriting and performing when she was eighteen, there was always a good chance Anna Tivel would head in a musical direction. Well her fascination with the lives and struggles of your average Janes and Joes in an unforgiving world and her desire to express that in song is showing no signs of letting up, and her seventh album is on the way.

To make the record happen Tivel has called up some of her closest friends, and adopted something of an improvised approach to recording. Aiming for a conversational tone with everyone in the same space, eschewing separate booths or headphone isolation, listening and responding in real time, celebrating community and creation in an age of uncaring peak capitalism that only knows one god.

Anna Tivel with long hair sits outdoors against a draped cloth backdrop, near a house. Black and white image with a calm, pensive mood.

"White Goose" is the second single to lay down some folk petals along the road to the August 29th album, after the vocally catchy, mainstream flirting, mellow folk rock of the album title track, "Animal Poem".

The Youtube version of the song below is pleasingly extended by ninety seconds to incorporate field recordings of her natural surroundings as she communes with nature, the streaming version more succinct, getting straight to the musical point, as it should.

A moment of pleasantly leftfield strings and percussion get the ball rolling, before quickly morphing into more familiar acoustic guitar and singer songwriter fare as Tivel's sweet voice takes a trip down memory lane, contemplating scenes of natural beauty, seasonal change and even the morphing of night into day, and how they shaped her view of the human condition on her/our all too few trips around the sun.

The vocal micing is close, giving an intimate feel to the recording, beckoning you closer to hear her thoughts and truths, which ride Micah Hummel's languid percussion, Sam Weber's caressed rather than played electric guitar and Galen Clarks gentle piano, which surprisingly also leads a second half dinner jazz breakdown. The song has an easy going charm, as it suggests that time in nature, good friends and community might just be the part of life's puzzle missing for so many in these days of digital isolation and urban jungles.