Exploring Anna’s songs won’t bring you a lot of answers, but you will find some fascinating questions – literate and insightfully poetic emotionally charged questions - to make you think and, more importantly, feel. She asks: “How’d the world get so confusing, how’d the ache inside your chest/Go from something beautiful to something dangerous?”

Tivel grew up in rural Washington state where she accompanied her bluegrass dad on fiddle while sampling her mom’s diverse record collection. It was later, as a university student, that she put pen to paper, inspired by observing life and living her own. Think one hour of song writing for every four hours of observation and reflection. Anna’s warm and gentle voice singing compassionate and uncannily insightful stories about desperate people, herself included, reaching for that thread of understanding with her music, that moment of recognition, of shared experience. She gravitates toward the quiet stories of ordinary life: a homeless veteran sitting on a bench to watch the construction of a luxury hotel, a woman wondering about the daughter she gave up for adoption. Someone changing shape, someone falling in love, someone all alone. No Depression calls Tivel “one of the finest storytellers modern folk music has to offer. It’s tempting to think of her more as a poet with an exceptional gift for playing guitar and singing.”

— Eric Rosenbaum