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Like many artists toughing out the pandemic years, Michaela Anne has seen a lot about her life change. But her evolution has been more complete than most.
With her 2019 album, Desert Dove, the Brooklyn transplant had finally perfected a sound and style she loved. Like a dust storm rolling across the plains, it was captivating and deceptively beautiful, looking harmless enough from a distance but with some real teeth up close, and she was making real strides in Americana’s upper echelons. Now though, things are more down to earth.
On a beautiful spring day in Nashville, Anne finishes up a leisurely backyard picnic with her 10-month-old daughter, then heads inside to chat with Nashville Lifestyles. On top of the soul-searching, we all did in response to Covid, she explains that her new album, Oh to Be That Free, was created in a personal maelstrom. Right in the middle of production, Anne got pregnant, and then her mother suffered a massive and debilitating stroke.
“My life is unrecognizable compared with what it was before,” she says. Reflecting on that period of drastic, traumatic change, Anne says one result was being forced to abandon the somewhat reckless nature of an artist’s life and refocus on caregiving. She could no longer indulge a penchant for taking risks and manifesting dreams, and instead had to appreciate what she already had. What’s spooky about that is how the theme shows up in her new songs, even though they were written before things changed.
“That kind of surrender was really informative for me,” Anne explains. “The songs were not written about all that happening, but they feel like a precursor to everything. They kind of helped me through and are still helping because I’m still in it. I’m not all the way through this period of my life.”
Anne is still getting acquainted with it creatively, too. Rooted in the emotional organics, her new music trades daydreamy folk-pop for a gritty-but-pretty sense of on-the-ground realism, turning page after page in a diary of inner turmoil. Caught in a developmental limbo, it’s like she can still feel all the innocence and excitement of “the best years of her life,” so close she can almost grab them. But she also knows for sure that a new chapter has begun, devastating as that may be.
“I’m for sure still grieving my life, and I have to because it’s the only way I can move forward,” Anne says. “I one hundred percent miss feeling free and untethered and traveling the world, sleeping when I want and doing what I want, and not having any deep pain of loss from my mother—or the burden of love in caring for a child. But at the same time, I feel like this is so much more ‘life.’”
That conflicted energy comes through in each track—and so does the intriguing crystal-ball effect. “Oh to Be That Free Again,” for example, was written as a simple meditation on a cousin’s young daughter. “She’s a wild little farm girl, and her name is Tiger Rose,” Anne says.
Trying to capture the essence of her freedom, Anne ended up boiling it down to a simple set of questions: “What is joy? And can I have it in the here and now, no matter what?” But her songwriting brain was ahead of her actual life, and now the song is about wanting her own daughter to know that wild freedom, too.
“It feels magical in a way,” Anne says of the artistic premonition. “I feel like I have this a lot in my life – thoughts or visions or songs that come to me and don’t make much sense, and then later it’s like ‘Oh, that’s what that was about!’”
With the album opening “I’m Only Human,” orchestral strings add drama to a plucky theme about the selfish glory of youth – ultimately conceding there’s a time and place for everything. Others speak to friendships strained past their breaking point or mourn the end of her “Chasing Days” with driving guitars and wistful synth additions. The poignant “Who You Are,” meanwhile, became a tribute to her mother and father’s unshakeable bond. Ultimately, family dynamics also made their way on to the project through Anne’s husband, Aaron Shafer-Haiss, who produced the set, and many of her longtime Music City friends, who served as studio musicians. It’s just more evidence of the back-to-basics approach Anne was forced into adopting—and now feels grateful to have.
“So much of this record, the theme is ‘simple,’” she says. “Really this whole record and time of my life is about slowing down and doing more with what you have. I’m not trying to impress anybody, I’m not trying to awe anybody with how great my photos look or how flamboyant I can be. I just want to share stories about working on growth in a spiritual and humane way. And I hope that’s what people can connect to and find some comfort in.”
Editor's note: Michaela has an upcoming in-store performance and record release celebration at Grimey's on June 9. For more information, click here.