Almost as important as an artist’s creative drive is their willingness to evolve.
Matt Wignall
A singer who lets past critical praise regulate their approach to a new project is at the mercy of bygone thoughts and feelings, rather than what’s truly inspiring them. Songwriter Michaela Anne knows exactly how important it is to keep moving forward with each release — her last album, Bright Lights and the Fame, received high acclaim from outlets like NPR and The New York Times, but her upcoming LP Desert Dove takes a different direction in both sound and style. It arrives on September 27 via Yep Roc Records.
“No one was asking me to make a record,” Anne says of the time she started writing for Desert Dove. “I didn’t have a record deal then, so any restrictions would be self-imposed. I really had nothing to lose, and I wanted to try something different.”
The album is unlike her past two releases, 2016’s Bright Lights and 2014’s Ease My Mind, in several ways, but most noticeably the majority of its tracks have a spacious, canyon-like ambience. The classic country-style songs sound as if they’re being sung from an expansive cave or Gilley’s-sized honky tonk. Several are equipped with synthesizers, fuzz guitar, or lilting, in-and-out string sections. The effect is a group of acoustic songs with the brevity of country songwriting and the capricious intensity of indie rock.
“I wanted to make a record that feels how an old Patti Loveless or Shania Twain record makes me feel, but with a modern edge that lets you know I listen to a lot of Tame Impala.”
Matt Wignall
The 33-year-old singer has always wanted to blend her Golden Era country style with sounds from the rock and pop genres, but has felt hamstrung by her identity as a “throwback” artist.
“I think I got put in like this old school, vintage-wearing, outlaw country scene,” she says. “That’s not my home, though. I grew up as a pure, ’90s pop person. It’s taken me a long time toown that.”
After Bright Lights was released, Anne experienced a somewhat specious turn of events. She was finally getting recognition for her music; touring as a headliner, receiving critical acclaim; but she was in heaps of credit card debt fundingthose tours, and she was being pigeonholed in a genre in a way that kept her from evolving as an artist. Nevertheless, she didn’t once consider quitting music, instead focusing on the positive aspects of her career and being grateful for what she’d achieved.“You’ve got to have some spiritual sensibility to be motivated by that type of optimism,” she says.
Holding firmly onto this optimism and the hope that she’d be able to make music that was truer to her own personal sound, Anne decided to leave Nashville for her next project.
“Nashville is incredibly inspiring,” she says. “But it can be a little bit oppressive at times. Like, how do you hear your own voice surrounded by so much output? I wanted to get away from the influences and the distractions.”
Matt Wignall
Along with her husband, musician Aaron Shafer-Haiss, Desert Dove producers Sam Outlaw and Delta Spirit’s Kelly Winrich, and a four-piece band, Anne decamped to a beachside house in San Clemente, California for three weeks to record and buff her forthcoming album. With songs that had been written in the wake of all the confusion surrounding the previous album, Desert Dove is steeped in a yearning for Anne and her loved ones, to find some purchase in the chaos around them—something to hold onto when the water gets rocky.
“I’m Not the Fire” is sung from the point of view of a woman in romantic détente with her lover, who sees her as far more of a threat than she is. She attempts to placate him throughout the track, which starts as a mid-tempo acoustic anthem and shifts gears, and keys, at the end to up the energy level for a double chorus outro. “By Our Design,” the LP’s lead single, is a wistful ballad in which each verse and chorus is stamped with an ambient string section motet, adding some dreaminess to the lyrics, which describe a life of long sought-after stability. This dreaminess seems appropriate; the stability unattainable. But perhaps that’s not a bad thing.
“At the end of the day, no matter what job you have, nobody really knows,” Anne says. “I think the idea of stability and security Is pretty false. It’s about having a balance. When I think about the life I wantto live, it’s the experiences I get from sharing my music and connecting with people. That’s what I keep going back to.”