‘White Goose‘ is a meditation on things that are gone and is shot through with regret. Mistakes and regrets and not only for the tangible things “the ghost of everything we loved and everything we didn’t fight for.” Anna Tivel knows that once you let go of something – it might be love, it might be a belief – with no effort made to retain it then, well, then it’s gone. We’re not going to lead you astray, this is not an overwhelmingly happy song – sometimes life isn’t overwhelmingly happy though, is it? As Anna Tivel says: “It’s hard to know how to hold a creative life in a time that feels fraught with venomous division, careening technological advance, and an ever widening chasm between the affluent and the dispossessed. What good are poems when affordable housing is scarce, the climate teeters on a dangerous edge, and war breaks out over misinformation spread by profit hungry algorithms? I think about being here. How brief it is. How incomplete our understanding. I think about history. All the worlds we’ve created and broken. Revolution and renaissance. Hope and humility. Everyone here is living a creative life – teachers and parents, kids and convenience store clerks. We’re all tasting this wild existence, finding ways to express how much it hurts and moves us.”
Here, though, is a happy thought – this song is taken from the upcoming new album “Animal Poem” which will be released on 29th August on Fluff & Gravy Records. And live gigs? Well, if you happen to be at the Newport Folk Festival this weekend then Anna Tivel is playing as part of a pop up performance curated by Nathaniel Rateliff. And immediately following “Animal Poem”‘s release, she will embark on an extensive North American tour supporting The Waterboys.
