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An older woman falls asleep in her easy chair and dreams of eyeballs—not disembodied ones, but eyeballs with human bodies and free spirits, running joyfully in a field like the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night. There’s a tune in the air around them; it’s uplifting but somehow weathered and burnished-sounding, like antique brass. The song is “Disposable Camera,” the first single from Portland singer-songwriter Anna Tivel’s upcoming album, Living Thing, which comes out May 31 on Fluff & Gravy Records.
The idea for the striking music video came from a dream Tivel had in which she imagined “eyeballs getting free,” which she connected to the larger uncertainty of being human.
“In that song there’s kind of an absurdity, the strangeness of even being in the world or even being born,” Tivel says. “And nobody really understands it, and everyone’s trying to tell you what it is, but they don’t know either. It’s sort of communally floundering.”
That sentiment could also describe the collective experience of musicians during the pandemic. Though Living Thing is Tivel’s third album since the beginning of COVID, it was the first one she wrote during the stretches of idle time that accompanied it. Long an observational songwriter with an eye for liminal details—discarded newspapers, barking dogs, vacant car lots—Tivel found her field of vision suddenly limited to what she could see from her home.
“I’m in a constant state of touring and moving around, and there was a very sudden stillness,” Tivel says. “Instead of watching the world from the car and from various towns, I was watching just from my window. I think the songs have a lot of escapism.”
Adorned with a striking, honey-yellow sleeve by illustrator Heather Layton featuring dozens of human figures in a communal embrace, Living Thing has a more propulsive sound than folkier, earlier records like 2017′s Small Believer and 2019′s The Question. The music approaches the mix of soft-rock sheen and ancient mystery Fleetwood Mac perfected on their 1975 self-titled album, leaning as much towards pop as folk while retaining a sense of autumnal chill.
Much of the sonic detail comes from multi-instrumentalist Shane Leonard, the only other person besides Tivel to appear on the album, who provided most of the arrangements. Tivel traveled to Eau Claire, Wis., a longtime indie-rock hub, to work with Leonard at his studio during a time when close contact between musicians was still largely restricted.
“[Living Thing] is definitely the most collaborative, least live-in-the-room thing I’ve ever made,” Tivel says. “I wrote all these dark, sparse, sad pandemic songs, and then [Leonard] lured them into this more forward zone than I’ve ever explored with music. It was very much a collaboration, more than anything else I’ve made.”
Tivel was born in La Conner in northern Washington and moved to Portland at age 18 to attend Portland State University. She had no plans to make music her career, working at various restaurants while studying to become a nurse, but as she became more acquainted with members of the Portland music scene, she found her talents as a fiddle player much in demand.
Tivel toured as a violinist with folk singer Nathaniel Talbot and local roots-music stalwarts the Shook Twins before she began writing her own songs and touring with her own project—often sharing bills with her partner, local singer-songwriter Jeffrey Martin, who released the very good album Thank God We Left the Garden last year on Fluff & Gravy.
“There’s no feeling of business or anything,” Tivel says of the Portland music scene. “Everyone just wants to play together and be making things, and I’ve always really liked that feeling. There’s no like closed doors or exclusion to it. It feels very wide open, very experimental.”
Tivel released her debut album, Brimstone Lullaby, in 2012 (under the name Anna and the Underbelly) and received praise by NPR for Small Believer and The Question. Across her albums, her voice became duskier and more confident, developing from the hushed whisper of Brimstone Lullaby to a wiry and tastefully creaky tone reminiscent of alt-country figurehead Emmylou Harris.
For someone who never intended to become a professional musician, Tivel has been fearsomely prolific. Living Thing is her ninth album in 12 years, including an acoustic version of her 2022 album, Outsiders. She’s currently planning an acoustic version of Living Thing, which strips away Leonard’s arrangement and presents her songs as something more like “poems.”
“It feels good to let things be simple and unadorned,” Tivel says. “I seek out people just playing music with no bells and whistles, and then I also love to collaborate and explore in the studio. There are things that are gained and lost in both, but I just love to explore music and get wild and let whatever happens happen.”