Dag og Tid - Øyvind Vågnes
Photo: Paal Audestad, Chorlton, Manchester Sept 2019
CECILIE ANNA releases the follow-up to her strong debut album from 2017.
What is needed in order to give a new album a really good start? An opening track which basically pushes everything else aside, of course, and demands your full attention as a listener: “Here I am, listen up!”
And that’s exactly what happens with New Bird, the new album from CECILIE ANNA. “Follow You” treads carefully at first, stealthily, almost surrounded by a sense of liturgical calm, until CECILIE ANNA’s voice makes its entrance, announcing that the evening is slowly fading, making way for nightfall.
EXCEPTIONALLY GIFTED
This is how the follow-up to I’m Here (2017), which many of us have been waiting for, begins. CECILIE ANNA’s debut album made it clear that we had come across an exceptionally gifted and unique composer, lyricist and vocalist. At the time I pointed out that everything on that record was so muted and low key, so elegant and minimalistic, and yet the material itself was strong enough to carry it off. Many others like myself often speculate around artistic strategies and their origins, but we simply have to resign ourselves to the fact that certain aesthetic choices were made for reasons that are of a more pragmatic nature and may indeed have been the result of simply random chains of events.
CONCILIATORY BATTLE MANIFESTO
When CECILIE ANNA was invited to perform at a music festival in Wales last summer, she simply didn’t have the funds to take along a lot of musical equipment. So she rearranged the songs from being played on the piano to being played on a small, smart synthesiser nicknamed Synthia, which easily fitted into her hand luggage. And that’s how it came to be that several of the songs on New Bird were created with Synthia in her hands.
Listening to these songs simply does you good. There is a real sense of caring that permeates everything, without it ever becoming simplistic or corny in nature, a genuine care for those that are close, for the joy of creating, a sense of wonder at life itself and a real sense of gratitude. I have listened to the new Wilco album “Ode to Joy” alongside CECILIE ANNA’s new songs, and what I see are two projects which generate a clear and contagious creative energy towards what is good rather than giving in to the despair at everything that is wrong in the world, which seem to be a lot of things.
In this way, New Bird becomes a conciliatory battle manifesto on its own terms. Whilst listening to the album, there have been occasions when I thought of Patti Smith’s worthy ethics, where the song and the vocal constantly weave in and around friends, lovers and spiritual sources of inspiration, including some which are no longer with us, and yet in some ways still remain present – in other words, everything that makes a mark on life itself and makes it worth living. We also need songs like these.