There’s a funny fact that we can impart before you go and break your heart listening to then latest single from Anna Tivel. ‘Swan Song‘ is taken from a new collection called “B Sides” which acts as a companion piece to the current full album “Animal Poem“. Yes, this song of fragile beauty is a B-side. Unbelievable, but true.
Anna Tivel herself tells that the song is: “a rumination on ephemerality and all the ways this life will move us before the whole thing flies away.” We say that it is the quintessential essence of subtle beauty, the music a soft support for lyrics which are both poetic, insightful and timelessly elegant. Or, put another way, we like this song. What drives Tivel’s intense creativity? Wow, we are full of questions today, no, no, that’s fine – isn’t the exchange of ideas out intellectual pinnacle? Anna Tivel has also given an answer to that question, saying: “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. This work is my own small addition to that communal story.”
