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Folk, acoustic, americana, singer-songwriter.

Prachtig. Speel eerst Outsiders van votig jaar even af en dan deze.

Last August, Anna Tivel released Outsiders, a heady listening experience featuring synths, tack piano, trumpet, jazz bass, Wurlitzer and vocoder. As the title suggests, Outsiders (Live in a Living Room) is a decidedly more stripped-down affair, literally recorded in a living room with Jon Neufeld adding his acoustic guitar to hers, capturing the songs as they were originally conceived minus the production and band sound.

They’re performed in the same running order, opening with the dreamy sway of Outsiders and its musing on the first moon landing and a sense of global community and closing with the fingerpicked notes The Bell, itself unadorned in the original setting, with its hope for those in a dark place to free their minds. I don’t intend to reprise the commentary on the songs, which you can check out in the previous review, but suffice it to say that, generally shorter, these naked and exposed renditions both accentuate the focus on the lyrics and illuminate the folksy nature of her music and the emotional power of her voice at its most intimate. It’s the sound of an artist at the peak of her powers.

Particular born-again highlights would include the delicate, moody Heroes, shorn of its percussion and beats, Two Dark Horses, still slowly waltzing but now more pastoral and evocative of a tranquil waterfall, and the guitar notes conjuring thoughts of a harp, while Royal Blue digs into the aching sadness at its heart. Likewise, the original couched in heavy jazz scuffs and electronics, The Dial is totally transformed here with its whispery vocals and the pairing of fingerpicked and resonant  Spanish-style guitar.

There’s also a bonus with the inclusion of a live version of the almost standalone narrative single American Novella, one of her finest and most empathetic songs (“I want a baby but I’m scared to let it grow inside of me/Where there’s been only emptiness and truths/I struggle to believe“) with its two characters facing beginnings and endings, birth and death, here fully capturing those Ian influences in both the poetry and imagery of her words and her phrasings. A completely different listening – and indeed emotional – experience to the studio version, to be perhaps best savoured in a similarly intimate setting with the lights down and the glow of a good wine, while I wish she’d included a live take of her other Outsiders’ B’ side, The Good Fight, it’s the sound of an artist at the peak of her powers.

Tracks:
01 - Outsiders 
02 - Black Umbrella 
03 - Astrovan 
04 - Heroes 
05 - Two Dark Horses 
06 - Royal Blue 
07 - Ruins 
08 - The Dial 
09 - American Novella 
10 - Invisible Man 
11 - The Basement 
12 - The Bell 

Staat er compleet op, 10% pars mee gepost. Met zeer veel dank aan de originele poster. Laat af en toe eens weten wat je van het album vindt. Altijd leuk, de mening van anderen. Oh ja, MP3 doe ik niet aan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_Lm3cX5uFk