Anna Tivel is a consummate storyteller whose keen eye and compassionate heart have dazzled us with stories of floating balloons; an elderly queer couple whose momentoes of their quiet defiance are destroyed in a house fire; a troubled young man who is mistaken as a suspect in a mass shooting; and a horse who has broken free of its paddock. Tivel often relates these tiny tragedies and triumphs at a remove, as a distant observer. On her latest album Animal Poem, Tivel erupts past this tried-and-true framework to explore her final frontier: herself.
Those story songs are still there, of course. “Hough Ave, 1966” tells the story of a person whose life withers and is extinguished before their potential can be found. “Holy Equation,” the album’s opening track, is as much a political jeremiad as it is a love letter to the narrator’s neighbors and their daily routines. There’s something about the spaces between Tivel’s minimalist writing, precision-targeted rhetorical flourishes, and her spare delivery that make her music vivid and alive: pregnant with possibility and a future that is never quite foreclosed, even when the protagonist is dead. Tivel can make us believe in resurrection – if not in fact, then in memory.
