Life can oftentimes feel like a circus with the balancing acts, death-defying moments, and people in our lives who can feel like they’re breathing fire (down our necks), but for Anna May the circus was once her actual reality. We talked about that, but not too much as she’s more focused on music these days, like her latest singles “A Girl Like Me” and “The Night Calls.” Those were topics of conversation as we get to know more about this acoustic wonder.
Kendra: As a kid, you were drawn to singers who showcased strong songwriting abilities. Is there a particular artist, album, or song that you feel is responsible for kickstarting your love of lyrics?
Anna May: I was likely first influenced by my dad’s writing, and by hearing him play songs to me while I was growing up. He adds a touch of empathy to all of his lyrics, and I think that I take after him in that respect. I have learned the importance of being empathetic, passionate, and clever while writing. I would say .. songs like Bob Dylan’s “Idiot Wind,” “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue,” “Visions Of Johanna,” etc. were songs that influenced my writing style. I felt that I was understanding the content in songs like that, so much better than I was understanding my immediate environments at the time.
Leonard Cohen’s ‘The Future,” “My Secret Life,” and “You Want It Darker” were also influential, and “Polaroids,” “Trouble” and “Shotgun Down the Avalanche” by Shawn Colvin were earth-shattering revelations to me when I discovered them. To realize that one could do what these artists did with words, seeming to completely disrupt all that ever was mundane or uninspiring, and to turn life on its side like that, in those songs was a total marvel.
The authenticity of Neil Young’s songwriting was always captivating and influential to me, too. His music has brought me to very distinct places within myself upon hearing it. I have a memory of listening to him for one of the first times on a snowy road to a ski lodge in Western Massachusetts. The sense of connection and familiarity in his lyrics, and something prophetically mournful and untouched like snow is perpetual in his bed of work, and will always stay with me. These songs defined the way that I began to exist. John Lennon is an influence for melody and passion. Tom Waits is another favorite artist. I love Alanis Morissette and Ani DiFranco. There are too many influences to name, but as far as songwriters, these would be the main ones.
Part of the beauty of these artists is that they gave us something that life didn’t present us with, already. Their music wasn’t just an extension or facsimile of life, but a reaction to it that was deep and thoughtful. It was music of palpable resistance to what was, and I don’t know that this same rebellious energy is as present in music, anymore. It really was something special. Art was an act of resistance to the times that artists found themselves in, and the wrongs that plagued those times. Art seems to have a different aim now, that is to impress, falsify, or validate what already is, contrary to a separatist or bare-bones approach. These were artists who did not seek to enforce conformity in any way.
When I revisit great songs, I tend to think that exceptional songwriting is becoming a lost art. Songs from my favorite artists inspired me to see the world through a new lens, but also enforced what I had been feeling subconsciously in my own life, but I didn’t have an immediate avenue for expressing those things. To see others do it was very impactful, as a young person.
I had so much pent up inside of me for a long time that needed to come out, in the form of the written word. I don’t know how I would have made it through my early years without lyrics, to decipher my experiences. I fell into a symbiotic shelter of words, as a recovery process. In middle school and high school, I was bullied badly and decided to homeschool/unschool. During that time, I connected deeply to the lyrics and experienced a sort of rebirth.
I had space, peace, and clarity like never before, in being removed from some troubling social environments. That was an interval of my life for being truly inspired and this helped me discover my own relationship to words as I healed. I saw how lyrics alone could actually change how we perceive reality and other people. All of the fragments of lyrics and pathos that I felt were trying to manifest for most of my life now finally had this reservoir to exist in, and a purpose to serve. I felt validated finally to be grasping at something much higher than me and to see that reflected and defined in art.
The depths and the aches and the vulnerability all made sense when I heard it so confidently and tangibly from other artists. It was the same energy I had always been feeling that was on these albums that I was listening to, and I could recognize it, unmistakably. It was what I felt and saw from a windowpane on a family trip to Florida, or what I saw in my mother’s eyes. It all started to come together and I was determined to put the pieces together.
For writers in their early years, or at least for me, there was a lot of frustration and shame about learning how to harness all of what I was feeling or the inspiration that I was receiving. It sometimes would manifest as anger or withdrawal. I grew to understand myself better and my need for writing as a therapy.
I started to realize that everyone had these capacities to express themselves. It was only a matter of tapping into them and putting oneself on a certain wavelength to perceive that more ephemeral stuff. It was okay to be on that wavelength.
Encountering great writing is at once foreign and familiar, I think. It touches upon something that is already within us but might need the proper channel to effectively come out. It also shows us, in its intricate design, something totally unique. Having influences to challenge one’s mind is so important. What I heard in songs like these were things that I was already very much feeling, and after a lot of listening and learning, it felt like a natural form of expression, and that I could do that and needed to do that. I was really lucky to have grown up with an abundance of terrific influence as a kid, and I can thank my parents for that. Music was a way of life in my early life. It was an extension of everything that we did. Whether it was dance classes, singing on the microphone in our garage, or weekly jazz at Skipper’s dock with my parents and grandparents.
I have so many great memories associated with music and performance. It jump-started my quest to write lyrics, develop my own melodies, etc. I always have had an ample channel of imagination that has sustained me in very difficult times. Every artist develops this escape route for dealing with the unfavorable or the mundane.
I am an only child and spent so much time either with adults or alone, and it was almost essential for me to build a sort of creative world for protection and sustenance. Being taken to so many performances at a young age really instilled in me a deep appreciation for music and other art forms, and also gave me a high standard of excellence for when I began making my own music.
My life was graced with really excellent teachers and musical influences. I was always given high ceilings for what I could do. I felt a sense of limitless possibility from being exposed to amazing music that was inspiring and satisfying.
Kendra: You noted to Music Mecca that you have “always cared about people, and about what they do” and that’s why you “enjoy writing about them.” Has it always been music-based though or did you have daydreams about being a journalist or something of that nature?
Anna May: I always played piano, growing up and had music around me, but I mostly considered myself a writer, before I considered myself a musician. There are other elements of what I do as a writer that aren’t satisfied by music alone. I have always been interested in many forms of writing, including poetry, journalism, screenwriting, novel writing, etc. I still like to make room for those types of expression, as much as I can, because each discipline brings out a different part of myself. All of these forms seem to serve and enhance each other.
Sometimes I feel a little alien amongst other musicians because I have many other interests besides music and actively dabble in all of them. In high school, I won some student poetry contests and also drafted screenplays, short stories, and journalism pieces, for fun. When I was eighteen, I went away for a month on a writer’s retreat with other young writers. We shared space in a hostel for the month of November, which is National Novel Writing Month, in Colorado. It was an intense experience, but we encouraged one another and participated in various writing exercises, each ending with a finished rough draft of a novel at the end of the month. It was a really beautiful experience for me.
I love that music combines my love for words and melody, but if I weren’t pursuing music, I would most definitely be pursuing a career as a screenwriter. I have been actively cataloging my dreams most nights since around 2020 and there are many dreams that I have lofty ambitions to turn into movie scripts, and I hope that there is another lifetime that will allow me time to do that!
Writing has always been a comfort zone for me since the time I was very little. I have vivid memories of going to my room to write if I ever felt uncomfortable or bored. Writing can be an isolating, sort of cloistered way of being and perceiving, but it has always suited me. I grew up in New England and visited the homes of Thoreau, Robert Frost, and Emily Dickinson. I felt a sense of serenity in those environments.
For me, my desire to write stemmed from my fascination with people, and with their interior worlds and emotions. The complex character development in other forms of writing besides songwriting is something that really appeals to me. I love the ephemeral glimpses of people that come in songs.
I was a very sensitive kid who turned into an empathic adult, to a fault. I have recognized that I am really sensitive to the emotions of other people. That can be a hard thing to carry, at times because I tend to feel so much depth in even small interactions or take on someone else’s reality or symptoms or struggle. I am grateful for this, though, in that it gives me cause to write about people. I like to write about my own life, but I have written a good amount from the perspectives of other people, with a desire to understand who they are. We never can fully see another person, though.
That is part of my quest in music, to cast off judgments and refine how we perceive the world. Writing is an intricate process of examining and shedding light. It is not our job to judge our characters. Rather, it is to see something true, common, or recognizable in them, and share that authenticity and vulnerability. It is to help people see the light in themselves. April and Johnny is a song of mine that I wrote when I was very young. It is a story of an imagined couple that was modeled after two people that I knew but did not particularly get along with.
The song was about finding empathy for them by entering into the details of their lives and trying to see more of them. That is the beauty of songs in that we can color some things. We can fill in the blanks and have a say. The beauty of imagination and songwriting can be empowering when many of our experiences might feel dissatisfying or disempowering.
I have let myself be open with many people, and I learned from their perspectives and their stories through travel. It was truly the best learning. It is a wild thing to hold someone’s sadness or joy or anger when we write about others. We can transform ourselves by cultivating empathy.
Kendra: Well, many are glad you leaned towards music because you’ve got this great style, one you call tragic Americana, and in recent years you’ve dropped ‘Detach’ and a handful of singles, including “The Night Calls.” When you look back at your earlier work, are you able to notice your growth as a songwriter?
Anna May: Thanks so much for saying that! Yes, I can absolutely see my growth, whenever I look back. I’ve seen myself become more metaphorical and metaphysical in my writing, and more honest, too. I have become focused on smaller things. I had to first really find what was authentically me. I had a lot working against me when it came to finding my voice, but I am glad that I found it, somehow.
My dad played me a lot of country music as I was growing up, and introduced me to many female country singers. I was very influenced by that style of music when I was young and by female artists like Alison Krauss, Carlene Carter, Emmylou Harris, and others. Country music holds an undeniable part of me that
I sometimes forget about it because I’ve had so much exposure to other genres after that early influence, but my first introduction to women in music was very much from the honest songwriting of women in the country genre. I hear that influence so much in my earlier music. As my career has gone on, I’ve definitely come into a style of singing and writing that is more my own and less defined by a genre. I am happy that I didn’t stay strictly there, musically, and got to explore other sides of myself.
My voice now carries all the pieces of my experience .. perhaps a greater sadness and a waning of naiveté. I like listening to the old recordings though, sometimes, and it is very cool to have that snapshot of oneself, as if from a time machine. My style is more quiet and less insistent in nature than it once was. I think, navigating challenges in life softens us and changes our expression, as a result. My music feels more subtle now than it did, and colored by the things that I have done, rather than by who I have listened to. When I hear older recordings, I see the part of myself that was trying so hard to impress and belong, and I feel like saying to her, just wait for those experiences to come.
I was very eager to start performing, but as I grew up, I started to value the peaceful creative times more than the performance part. My music reflected my nature then which was strident and ambitious. Over time, I gradually came to a bigger understanding of letting things be, and I heard that change in myself happening in my music. Engaging in other forms of writing has helped me to become a better songwriter, too, I think. Listening is a big part of becoming better at writing, as well.
Kendra: Which, with your experience as both an artist and a teacher – what do you think attributes most to a person’s creative growth?
Anna May: I feel that both teaching and artistic pursuits can contribute to the expansion of creativity being an artist and living on that unique and sometimes treacherous path will definitely serve to give creative growth.
You have to wholeheartedly, and without reservations, dive into that if you want to do it. There have been times in my life when I’ve been insecure or have resisted committing to it fully for one reason or another. I wanted to protect other parts of myself.
Art is truly all-encompassing and is something that doesn’t switch off like a traditional job does, but however challenging, it is nonetheless a beautiful path in that it is a constantly giving gift, to choose to commit to it, loyally, and to harness and embrace what becomes available to us upon turning our attention to art. Art is forever flowing, in a way. I see it as a wellspring of being that we all very much have access to. The world of art is available to every one of us if we want it.
Art is very much a way of being, to be carried through every part of oneself, and that extends towards everything in one’s life. You have got to really embrace that and be prepared for some hard confrontations in taking that path. It is such a tender and sensitive one.
As an artist, one will be inherently going against the norm of how society functions. When beginning my path, I faced difficulty and judgment. I had to be conscious about carving out ample space to exist in a way that was different from, but proximate to what I saw around me. I was reflecting and interpreting my experiences, in pursuit of wisdom. I saw myself beginning to resist any need to assimilate into what might have been traditionally understood or viewed as ideal, and that isn’t the easiest shift for artists as they come into being.
I sometimes struggle to be in a mindset that is so deeply internal and so much about me, because I do have a part of myself that is social and craves normalcy, and doesn’t want to follow through, and yet, the persistence of that path always seems to call me back. It can feel really self-centered at times, and even like I am neglecting those around me, as time passes. Artistic inclination is innate, yet there is nothing traditional about it, especially in modern society.
I remember having the revelation once that I could go to a brewery or concert without playing at one. I had been so used to performing so, so much, that I lost connection with the simple joys of being. It was how I had always been, and it wasn’t until later in my life that I let go, a bit from that tether. I try my best to balance being present and staying committed to my work.
Teaching gives me so many gifts that I couldn’t have imagined, the main one being humility. Teaching adds an entirely new component to the artistic process by taking us outside of ourselves, and I am so grateful for it. It is giving in a way that is different from performance. Teaching requires communication, patience, and learning about someone else. I love to learn about people of different backgrounds, who possess talents that are different from my own.
As teachers, we find ourselves in the role of communicating a process that is so intrinsic to us, and that we sometimes even take for granted. There is nothing like bringing that same joy to another’s life. Teaching does help me grow creatively, in learning from my students. I grow in empathy, communication, and understanding and I am grateful for how that shows up in my songs.
Kendra: Let’s talk more about “The Night Calls.” It was your last single of 2023, but when did the idea for it start to come about? What inspired that track?
Anna May: Yeah! “The Night Calls” is cool, to me, because it holds so many separate moments, and I can see them as isolated snapshots from my life at the time. The song is rooted in a very clear and universal message, to open yourself up to heal wounds, in a metaphorical context. It is Healing vs. Temptation and a philosophical exploration of questions and answers.
This song calls to mind imagery from my hometown, where I wrote it .. filled with beaches and reclusive characters in its layers. I remember that the very first lyrics came on a February night around the time of the Super Bowl. I had just recovered from stomach flu and would be going to Texas in the spring to play a festival.
I dreamed of summer’s ease and abundance. I thought about the idea of cactus flowers embroidering my wintery home in New England .. of free and wild desert flowers finding themselves totally out of their natural habitat in a barren, ice-stricken landscape, much like I was feeling, in a winter devoid of life. I don’t say it in the song, but I had thought of myself as the cactus flowers, remembering summer as if remembering a past life or former incarnation of myself.
I had a pretty good deal of angst when I was writing this one. I always engage in this sort of dance when I spend time where I grew up. It is incredibly peaceful and conducive to peaceful pursuits. That peace is so much a part of me, yet I find myself often craving to be elsewhere and doing more when I am there.
There are parts of me that my home couldn’t ever satisfy. I was feeling a real sense of displacement when I wrote the night calls. I was so genuinely annoyed to be stuck in another snowstorm. All of those stuck feelings really started bubbling up, and I found myself yearning for and imagining another environment for myself at that moment. It was as if I took an imaginative ride to a different place, a trick that I had developed since childhood to deal with my dissatisfaction.
I wrote the song in 2019 and released a video for it but never released it as a single, so I decided to revisit it years later. I feel like this recording brings new resonance and maturity to the song that it didn’t have before. Steve Rizzo did such a wonderful job of capturing a sparse, yet full sound that we have cultivated over time together, allowing the space to gradually get filled in as the song progresses.
This song is very quintessentially me laid bare, and reflects so many of the emotions that I wrestle with, and that many others struggle with, too. I love that this song is very imagery-laden and it is cohesive, yet has many distinct parts. The night calls is so much a patchwork of moments and memories from a particular point in time.
I love to see how all of these very separate pieces connect in the song while revealing inner philosophical truths about myself. I am most proud of the fact that this song feels present and alive; the mention of driving in the initial verse and the last verse gives the whole song this sort of pulsating insistence to sustain it throughout.
A common pitfall for folk balladeers is that we can come across as analytical and past tense, in some respect, and while there are lessons in retrospection and in that classic folk format, I feel that so much of my own life is anchored in what is present and there is a conscious, yogic effort to be present and intentional in my life, so I love when a song that I write can reflect something of a present and kinetic nature. Lyrically, this song reflects a life very much in motion.
In the song, I examine my own relationship to the night. We all have one. The night can be many different things to me .. my distraction, my solace, my demons. I think often about what it means for the night to call me, both inwardly and outwardly, and I think about the various ways in which I respond to those calls.
When I wrote it, I was feeling the force of many external pressures in my life, and as a result, so much angst and anxiety, that shows up very clearly in this song. The contrast is that, four years later, my life is much more peaceful and more my own than it was at that time. There was more resistance in me than there is now, so it was cool to reinterpret these lyrics from a more balanced place. There is a real confession at the bridge of the song, where I confront my own perfectionism and overcompensating behaviors, and my giving to others at the expense of myself. One of my favorite lyrics in this song is, “I think they’re mad with something, frozen flowers in the snow, you just need protection, whenever these waters stop their flow.”
It might seem obscure, but I love the use of this imagery as the mechanism for uttering a profound truth. I wrote this and didn’t fully see the significance until later.
“Whenever these waters stop their flow” is another way to say winter, when water turns to ice and when the world transforms into a dead thing. This is about finding ways to preserve oneself in dark times. It was speaking to, remaining the vibrant self of summer, untouched, as the physical landscape inevitably changes, or as your social or emotional landscape might change, or to endure something hateful or undeserved, as I was, at the time of the song.
At that time in my life, I was finding myself with little protection, spiritually and emotionally, and was dealing with harsh and relentless criticism, both in my personal life and in my public life, so, I needed a lyric to reflect what I was feeling. I thought about somehow making myself into something indefatigable that could not be tarnished in the worst circumstances, like a forever summer self. It is a metaphor for perfectionism and also a message about optimism.
I was trying to survive in unfavorable circumstances. The lyric, “I think they’re mad with something” .. speaks to the haters who were in my life, and is my little nudge at them, circling back to the cactus flowers at the start of the song, ultimately to say that, what is hateful and critical and without truth will not sustain. It will die away as a result of its bitterness and fallacy. Those unwavering critics will be flowers that get frozen in the snow and not the perennial flora that survives the winter through the power of spirit and ingenuity.
Kendra: You’ve also said your music honors your nomadic experience. With that, do you feel more comfortable on the road, meeting new people, and gaining new experiences to write about?
Anna May: Yes, I tend to feel more at ease in nomadic or untethered settings because for a long time, that has been my primary way for learning about and engaging with the world. This was my way of being, and what did the most to influence the music that I have written.
I am a firm believer that being on the road and being in raw, vulnerable, or unpredictable situations leads to the best inspiration. Modern society functions in a very arbitrary way. It was not always like this. I can remember life in the 90s being more out of my comfort zone than we are today. Our experiences tend to be more organic, in a natural and unsheltered state. technology has changed the nature of our experiences.
I don’t feel that I write as well from a perspective of safety or comfort, as I do when I am in distress. I have written the most from discomfort and dissatisfaction, and perhaps subconsciously have even chased experiences and people who would bring me that sort of rough-around-the-edges perspective. Artists are called to exit our lives, in a sense. In my experience, too, I’ve found that adopting a nomadic way of being has led to being able to find contentment almost anywhere in the smallest of spaces or the biggest of spaces.
Everything about my path has been largely nomadic, unconventional, and unpopular, and I’m sure that those sentiments show up in my work. I have always made a pact with myself, to be exposed to the real world, and never to be too sheltered or contained. I always felt that taking a harder path intentionally, or a road less traveled would lead to artistic expression that was more authentic and poignant.
I took many risks in parting with tradition, but my risks have made me a unique person with a diversity of interests, and I would not trade any moment along the path that I have taken, however uncomfortable. I think, we mostly become comfortable with what we are accustomed to, and my lifestyle has led me to feel a sense of comfort in the unknown ..
That is what gives me hope and a sense of possibility. Some of what seems to bring many folks anxiety, like travel or uncertainty, seems to bring me joy, nostalgia, and comfort.
Many periods of my life were intensely, consciously unstructured, and my sense of security seemed to look much different from those around me. I have learned that spontaneity leads to creativity. When I am not being spontaneous, I do not entirely feel myself, and that’s an interesting thing to grapple with, as I come into my thirties and a time of life that is traditionally more stable. I know that I will always have the nomadic parts in me, if to a lesser degree. I feel content now with what is in front of me because I have seen so much.
Living in New Orleans was a favorite nomadic experience of mine. In New Orleans, every day is a different adventure with a new set of challenges and rules. It never looks the same. This is maybe the most authentic living that can be done in the United States in 2024 but is very distant from the comforts and shelters that we have in modern life. New Orleans is so special and so precarious with both divinity and strife, oscillating back and forth each day.
Every day there is a new, beautiful, and hard confrontation, it seems. It is never safe to assume that we will know what tomorrow could bring. That was a really interesting way to live, without a safety net and at the mercy of a culture that is distinctly immersive and apart from other cultures in its melting pot of autonomy.
Those who live there have one choice: to integrate into that world and to soften and accept it without trying to escape its difficult parts. I have not seen a depth of profound beauty or a depth of deplorable strangeness, simultaneously existing, anywhere else that I have been.
Kendra: I do want to mention your time in the circus. Such an interesting tidbit about your reality thus far! If you had to compare your music to one circus act, which do you think would best represent your style and sound, and why?
Anna May: A circus act to resemble what I do musically would be the tightrope, which was not something that I actively did but, I feel as if any artist walks the tightrope, nearly constantly. Changing and unpredictable circumstances with the potential for danger always reveal themselves in an artist’s career.
Any circus act, though, holds that same precarious proximity to both error and perfection, as singing on stage does. It is always simultaneously uncertain and exciting to be an artist. More so in this job than others, I have felt so much perched upon doubt and error, and the need to conquer imperfection, somehow. It is ambivalent, changing, and never steady as a lifestyle. It seems that the ground is not always underneath us, and out of necessity, we need to become comfortable with this strange reality. I really loved learning about the circus at the same time that I was deepening my interest in music because circus arts were so far outside of my comfort zone.
It was not something that I had ever previously trained in, and did not come easily to me, in the way that songwriting always had. I had never done gymnastics and so it all felt very unnatural, at first. I learned over time that taking on these feats was a way to symbolically conquer fears and insecurities in other aspects of my life. Hanging from a trapeze is so emblematic of not knowing what might come next.
I wasn’t ever that great at circus things but it was good for me in so many ways. I came to realize how similar circus arts were to music. They were both hinged on uncertainty and spontaneity. Both disciplines impacted each other. I have wanted to do more and more that is off-brand or outside of my genre, in life and art because doing so can make us so much more curious, well-rounded, and never stagnant. It allowed me to uncover and explore all the sides of myself. I want to be composed of many elements. I never want to just be a folk singer.
It scares me to ever feel that I might be relying on or lingering in that same space, too much. I have been lucky in that I’ve scattered myself across many various disciplines and I have learned different things from each of them. Artistically, the circus has always had this sort of dark and mystical lore that really aligns with the style of music that I have come to play, so I feel that the two have been symbiotic in a sense, for me, and have occupied the same space in my mind, of something deep and mysterious. It is exotic, unfamiliar and the stuff of fantasy, and was why I really wanted it to be part of my life.
Kendra: Time for a side note – With it being January and us all starting a new year, I’d love to know what non-musical resolution you have set for yourself?
Anna May: I love the beginning of the new year and the sense of rebirth that comes with it. Continuing to turn inward remains a resolution of mine, while not abandoning the outward. That is a tricky balance for me.
My resolution has been to start therapy again. I’ve been out of therapy for a little while, but it has helped me so much in moments of myself. I truly believe that every person can benefit from therapy and that it should be a requirement for people in the arts to do therapy, due to the unique circumstances that we work in as performers. I deal with anxiety in many ways as a result of what I have been presented with over the course of my music career.
I hope for more transparency and acceptance of mental health, especially surrounding performers. I have become a better person as a result of going to therapy and being able to examine my environment in better ways. I have many resolutions, though, being peaceful and less reactive in triggering situations is a big one. I would also like to become better at being less hard on myself. Always, to dance more/ I could say, to be on time but I do not want to get anyone’s hopes up!
Kendra: Lastly, with new music out now, what else can fans be on the lookout for as we get into 2024?
Anna May: I am hopeful and excited for 2024, musically. 2023 had lots of super high highs and some very low, lows. It was a year of extremes. I am hoping for more balance in the next year. I am about to head out on a tour in the Pacific Northwest and California for the first few weeks of January and then to Nashville for some performances. I plan to release a few more songs throughout the year and will continue recording. I am not sure when
I will release another album, or if it will be this year or in the next, but I have plenty of new songs, so I may end up doing that in the latter part of next year. Spring dates are currently taking shape. In April, I am excited to head back to Colorado for a show at Swall Hill Music in Denver. I’ll be sharing the night with Emelise, who is an amazing artist.
I have plans to continue growing, learning, and writing. I also just released a song at the end of December that I wrote for my grandmother, “A Girl Like Me.” I released it on her 92nd birthday. It is hard to write about forces in our lives that are constant and stable. Writing songs for those that I love is not something that has come easily, but I am happy with this one. I tried to just imagine my grandmother not as my grandmother, but as a young person that I might have known if our time being young had aligned. There is so much mystery in time, and in looking at photos. I have appreciated all of this more, as I have gotten older.
I tried to imagine some concrete realities for all of the photos that I saw of my grandmother as a young person, and tied all of the sentimental details to bigger themes. Sometimes we have to throw away our craftiness as songwriters and just let something be tender; let it be what comes out, as it is.