Anna Tivel

Living Thing

Fluff & Gravy

Living Thing is singer-songwriter Anna Tivel’s sixth full-length studio album of original material. The album is existential yet relatable, and keenly provocative. During the pandemic, Tivel collaborated as she has done in the past with longtime friend, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Shane Leonard, ultimately recording the album at his garage studio in Eau Claire, WI. Essentially the album is the work of the two of them with Leonard functioning as an entire backup band while Tivel sang, played acoustic guitar and violin. Tivel felt condiment that she had a great batch of songs, rife with more melody and swelling choruses than her past work but also knew that Leonard would reshape them and add his creative touches. If one were to listen without knowing, the sound is as if she is backed by a full band.

She poses a series of rhetorical question without really stating them as such in the pulsating opener “Silver Flame,” which examines our place in the universe, the elusive grasp of religion, and the need to stay close to one another in this short time we have on earth. – “prayer and planetary motion, the whole thing dangling in orbit/and we can’t ever quite get turned around/maybe there’s a spaceship coming, a cloudy figure breathing thunder/but we’ve just got each other for now.” Unlike some of her prior work, Tivel, with her gentle, soothing vocals, is not bogged down in melancholy. Instead, she’s clearly more attuned to all that surrounds her from nature to the unspoken emotions of people while basking in the freedom and ability to focus on life’s small details, what comes naturally and what is learned. Having taken a minor fall recently myself, these lines hit home – “Before you come into the world, you should know/there are things that will hurt and things that won’t/ like scraping you knees on the asphalt/and the freedom right before you fell” from the single “Disposable Camera.”

Her second single “Bluebird” is in one sense a prototypical pandemic song, but Tivel offers hope through the chronic smell and eye-itching air of wildfires, tv benders, and the accompanying social unrest, looking toward the sky, beseeching a sense of comfort from the great beyond, even looking forward to a newer, rebuilt world. “Real Things” was clearly written during that same period, as she sings about a swirl of emotions and that seesaw of despair and hope we all shared – “someday I’ll fly the ocean, someday I’ll play a show/someday I’ll pick that phone up, and finally give my friend a call.” In both songs, she’s reveling in her ability to maintain her sanity, which she explores further in “Two Truths,” an insightful reckoning not about the ‘gray” but the stark reality of ‘black and white’ coexisting together. In the end it’s okay. It’s our reality. Events are moving so fast that it takes times to come to these kinds of conclusions – “maybe two things can be right/we’re kinder today than we once were/and hate is alive like a cancer/we’re trying, and we can try harder.”

Thematically the album remains remarkably consistent. “Altogther Alone” tells us that we’re not alone in our struggles. A call to a friend or family member may be all the assurance one needs. And she returns to those existential questions in the closing “Gold Web” which in a coincidental way shares a similar spiritual quest as Dylan’s “Every Grain of Sand” especially in this verse – “but under every eyelid, every heartbeat, every white rib, is someone who is asking why.”

Along the way Leonard does an astute job of keeping the musical backdrop jangly, poppy, and textured, surrounding Tivel’s on the surface dreamy lyrics, which are instead thoughtfully well grounded.

• Jim Hynes

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