Sunday, October 12, 7:30 Show (7 door): Jeffrey Martin, with Anna Tivel at Unity of the Valley (3912 Dillard Road)
Tickets $29.00 on Sale July 16.
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On a small corner lot in southeast Portland, Oregon, Jeffrey Martin holed up through the winter recording his quietly potent new album Thank God We Left The Garden. Long nights bled into mornings in the tiny shack he built in the backyard, eight feet by ten feet. What began as demos meant for a later visit to a proper studio became the album itself, spare and intimate and true. Recorded live and alone around two microphones, Jeffrey often held his breath to wait for the low diesel hum of a truck to pass one block over on the busy thoroughfare. During the coldest nights, he timed recording between the clicks of the oil coil heater cycling on and off.
So much has happened in the world since the release of his previous album One Go Around (heralded by No Depression as 'the poetry of America'), and Jeffrey has filled the time doggedly, but happily, touring the US and Europe, watching it all unfold in a stream of small town conversations and city sprawl. In a moment where depth is so often traded for the instantaneous, where tech billionaires are building rockets to escape the planet, where the dead-eyed stare of artificial intelligence is promising to existentially upend our world, and where divisiveness in our culture is breeding delusional levels of certainty, Jeffrey Martin's new record feels like a hopeful and fully human antidote.
There are holes in all the side walls where the wind it brings the rain in
And the gold crowns have been found out to be brass that has been painted
There are holes in all our bibles where we make secret compartments
To hide the broken treasures we smuggled out of the garden -Quiet Man
Anna Tivel is a Portland, OR-based songwriter who grounds her work in quiet stories of everyday struggle. She’s a keen and detailed observer, and the characters in her songs come alive in small moments of beauty and despair.
“Tivel’s characters are both common and unforgettable,” Ann Powers of NPR writes, “ She possesses a genuine poet's sense that words matter more than persona, or a showy performance. Her images linger, and become populated with the energy of the real.”
Of great depths and beautiful voice. Anna reaches for the thread of understanding with her music, that moment of recognition, of shared experience through her quiet stories of ordinary life. Her characters are both common and unforgettable. There are questions behind all her songs, things we all struggle with again and again, questions of identity and hurt and kindness.
Anna’s return to Tsunami will be a special night. www.annativel.com
From Wikipedia
Anna Tivel is an American singer-songwriter from Portland, Oregon. She has released four studio albums on Portland-based Fluff & Gravy Records.[3] Her 2017 album Small Believer received positive reviews[4][5] and was named a "Top 10 underheard album of 2017" by Ann Powers of NPR.[6] In 2019, NPR called her album The Question "one of the most ambitious folk records of 2019";[7] it was also listed by Paste as one of "10 essential folk albums from 2019".[8] Tivel's 2024 album Living Thing was rated No. 1 in the "Top 20 Favorite Folk Albums of 2024" by the listeners of FolkAlley.com.[9]
