We’ve been lucky enough here at Americana UK to have been aware of Anna Tivel and her astonishing songwriting pretty much from her emergence into the folk/singer-songwriter/americana combined genres. We haven’t been shy with our praise either; Paul Kerr commented: “One is reminded of two other singers from the seventies, Judee Sill and Dory Previn. That’s not to say that Tival sounds like them; rather, she breathes in the same rarefied air which sustained them. At times, the intimacy of the recordings is almost overwhelming.” Martin Johnson said: “Her lyrics are truly wonderful, full of detail and meaning, and they certainly deserve and need repeated listening to reveal their true character and meaning.” Someone else added, “If you thought Willy Vlautin was good at capturing scenes and telling short stories in the space of a five-minute song, then you really need to listen to Anna Tivel. Dark Chandelier is every inch the equal of Western Skyline for capturing a rage-fuelled car crash.” So we like Anna Tivel because her songs are so finely crafted, the presentation is so perfect, and the themes range from the chaos of human emotions to the beauty of human connections and the fundamental importance of protecting fragile progressive gains in the face of powerful reactionary forces.
And so to Rodeo Queens, which has complexities of one person’s life story, and how this entwines itself with a modern pushback on women’s rights and concerns for the future; will today’s girls grow up to follow their dreams as far as they want to, or will they have their lives prescribed by an encroaching patriarchy. As protests go, it is quiet and thoughtful and has a rod of steel running through it. If you ever get to see her live, this is the emotional intensity that you will get for an hour or more, with powerfully connecting words.
Anna Tivel says of Rodeo Queens that “Rodeo Queens came out of a deep rabbit hole of reading about Susan B. Anthony’s life, how she traveled alone by train with pamphlets promoting women’s rights, getting held up at every turn by angry people afraid of change. The rabbit hole also involved a few articles about the evolution of the lady of liberty coin. The image of the woman kept getting changed over the years because she was too suggestive, too manly, too foreign, too feminine, too powerful. I guess I was just spending a lot of time thinking about where we came from and where we are, thinking of my grandmother and my mother and my hopes for little girls growing up now.”
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