Pure-voiced, outstanding guitar player and evocative songwriter, Brooklyn-based Ana Egge, now onto her seventh album, has certainly come up with something very profound and original here. The keynote of most of the songs on this collection is the severe problems caused by mental illness within close family, something Egge has had to cope with pretty well all her life. She wanted to put it out in bluegrass style that was until producer and country rebel Steve Earle piled in a thumping drumbeat on most of the tracks which it has to be said works really well.The opener ‘Driving With No Hands’ sets the scene describing destructive mood swings: ‘when I wake up … will I wake up?’ and the tone doesn’t change too much with the next two songs ‘Hole In Your Halo’ and the title track, all complete with some brutal guitar chords and menacing strings. Steve Earle says it far better than I can: ‘Ana Egge’s songs are low and lonesome, big, square noir ballads which she plays on a guitar built with her own two hands and sings like she’s telling us her deepest darkest secrets.’‘Evil’ is another utterly enthralling track telling of a man compulsively driven to the ultimate crime but unable to live with the guilt that follows. The tone does change for several of the later tracks. ‘Motor Cycle’ is a song in praise of the freedom that pastime brings and Egge’s personal experience and enjoyment is evident. I must also commend ‘Silver Heels’ a graphic song dedicated to the ladies of the night on the high plains of Colorado, ‘Your Voice Convinces Me’ with vocal backing from Earle and wife Alison Moorer and Ana’s fine rendition of Charlie Rich’s out and out country ‘There Won’t Be Anymore’ which is the closing track.No less authority than Lucinda Williams has called Ana Egge: ‘an exceptional songwriter—the Nina Simone of folk.’ One day Egge will make it really big and maybe her career path will follow that of Williams who was producing superb albums for nigh on twenty years before CAR WHEELS ON A GRAVEL ROAD really awakened everyone to her talents. There again the very courageous BAD BLOOD may just do it for her, I certainly hope so. Paul Collins www.anaegge.com

The shows on the road since SXSW have been a backroads-shining diner-country road-main street adventure.
I’m looking forward to playing every Tuesday night in April at The Rockwood Music Hall with my band and working up some new songs, besides a few shows in NJ, CT and The Parkinson’s Unity Walk in Central Park in April. All dates below, I hope to see you soon!
Ana

Tuesday, April 3, 2012 | Rockwood Music Hall | New York, NY
Tuesday, April 10, 2012 | Rockwood Music Hall | New York, NY
Saturday, April 14, 2012 | Northwest Park Nature Center | Windsor, CT
Tuesday, April 17, 2012 | Rockwood Music Hall | New York, NY
Saturday, April 21, 2012 | Union County Performing Arts Center | Rahway, NJ
Tuesday, April 24, 2012 | Rockwood Music Hall | New York, NY
Saturday, April 28, 2012 | 72nd Street Bandshell, Central Park | New York City, NY

At the moment I’m packing for my trip to Austin for SXSW. I’ll be keeping busy, so many tacos, so little time. Besides my showcase, I’m playing a day party out on Willie Nelson’s Luck, TX ranch on Thursday afternoon with a bunch of amazing songwriters.. all info below.

See you on down the road,

Ana

When is a Canadian not quite Canadian?

When she’s Americana songwriting folksinger Ana Egge (pronounced Eg-gy), born 35 years ago in Estevan, Saskatchewan, but raised in Ambrose, North Dakota and Silver City, New Mexico.

“I was born in ’76 when it wasn’t automatic — you weren’t automatically deemed Canadian for being born there,” she laments down the line during a break from writing at her Brooklyn, New York home.

“My parents are both American, so I was naturalized American. But I’m about to apply to get dual citizenship. I’m so excited!”

Regardless of her citizenry, Egge should be given the fast track to nationalization for the amount of domestic musical-community service she’s accumulated over 15 years and seven albums.

First, there’s the Ron Sexsmith connection: she covered his “Lebanon,

TN” on her sophomore effort, 1999′s Mile Marker and “Wastin’ Time” on 2007′s Lazy Days. He contributed harmonies to her 2005 albumOut Past the Lights; she to his 2001 Steve Earle-produced chestnutBlue Boy, a project that helped her decide to recruit Earle last summer as overseer of her current album, Bad Blood.

She’s even made good use of Sexsmith’s band, as bassist Jason Mercer produced Out Past the Lights and guitarist extraordinaire Tim Bovaconti has embellished a few of her recordings.

Nova Scotian Joel Plaskett produced a chunk of 2009′s Road to My Love after she contributed harmony to his Three, and also sang on Peter Elkas’ latest Repeat Offender, while Bourbon Tabernacle Choir founder Chris Brown and Be Good Tanyas’ co-founder Frazey Ford have chimed in on Egge albums as session musicians.

Even when she performs a two-night stand at the Dakota Tavern beginning Thursday, her accompanying band will be, as she says, “all Toronto guys” — led by Peter Elkas on guitar with Doug Friesen on bass and Gavin Maguire on drums.

Egge, whose sanguine alto sounds like a teakettle blend of Bonnie Raitt, Natalie Merchant and Kathleen Edwards, will be making her first local appearance to support Bad Blood, a 12-song album that tackles the theme of mental illness and how it’s impacted Egge’s immediate family.

“It wasn’t meant to be that way,” Egge concedes. “It was mostly just dealing with my own feelings about the reality of people I love — my family — dealing with mental illness. I was feeling stuck as a writer, because I didn’t want to make anything harder for anybody, but I came to realize that I had a lot of frustration and anger about the disease, not knowing what to do about it.”

“So I started writing with mental illness itself as the character, and that really set me free.”

“Sun don’t shine/ In the darkness I know,” Egge sings sadly on “Hole in Your Halo,” and whether she performs the strident title track or the mid-tempo rocker “Motorcycle,” she surprised at the chord the subject matter has struck with her audience.

“It’s been really healing,” says Egge of fan reaction. “It’s one of those things that people don’t know how to deal with or talk about . . So it’s been pretty amazing hearing stories and experiences from people who come up to me at shows, and those who reach out to me online. I think they do it just because of that silence that surrounds it.”

Born to hippie parents, Egge spent her first five formative musical years in Austin, Texas, first inspired by the Silver City visits of noted bass player Sarah Brown, the aunt of one of Egge’s friends.

“I’d hear stories of Sarah playing bass with Bonnie Raitt and Antone’s Blues Band, so when she would come to visit I’d pick her brain about everything,” Egge recalls. “After a second visit, Austin became this mythical place, and I could not just wait to go there.

“So I visited once and they let me go into all the music clubs despite the fact that I was underage. That was it: I was moving there as soon as I graduated high school.”

She immediately established musical connections with songwriter Jimmie Dale Gilmore and western swing band Asleep At The Wheel, whose drummer Dave Sanger produced her 1997 acclaimed debutRiver Under the Road.

Ana Egge’s haunting CD captures the feelings of those who have a mentally ill loved one

by Mark Moring

Your picture’s fallin’ like a figurine
Breaking branches in our family tree . . .
I loved you and I hated you
I prayed for you and stayed away from you

So sings Ana Egge on the title cut of her latest album, Bad Blood. Many of the songs were written about coping with mentally ill family members, and I, for one, can certainly relate to the lyrics above.

Our 20-year-old son has bipolar disorder and Asperger syndrome, and his family members have certainly felt all of those things and more. It really can be a love-hate relationship — intense love for the person, but intense hatred for the illness and the ugly, often hurtful, ways it manifests itself. Kudos to Egge for capturing many of those feelings.

A press release says that the album “conveys compassion and hope for redemption,” and while that’s certainly true, Egge also noted in one interview that it also captures her raw emotions. “There is some anger on this record,” she confesses. “When you have family members suffering, I’m not angry at them. I have had a lot of anger at the illness, wanting it to stop, go away. A lot of the writing freed up for me when I started writing about the illness itself as a character.”

Like many of us who love someone with a mental illness, Egge is trying to find that balance between loving the person but loathing the condition. These lines from “Hole in Your Halo” kind of capture that vibe:

Your flowers are growin’ wild in the west
They may be pretty but they’re poisonous
Behind the bars you’re falling apart
It’s not the first time you went too far

There’s a hole in your halo
Where the darkness don’t shine
In the darkness I know
It’s a thin line

Egge’s country-fied folk tunes, produced by Steve Earle, sound more upbeat than the subject matter they’re addressing, but the lyrics are spot on.

http://blog.christianitytoday.com/ctentertainment/2012/01/-your-pictures-fallin-like-1.html

http://www.musicradar.com/news/guitars/video-ana-egge-shows-off-her-homemade-guitar-484530

Ana Egge isn’t your average girl. Some years ago, the Brooklyn-based chanteuse built her own house in her hometown of Silver City, New Mexico. Before that, however, she made her own guitar.

“My dad was a farmer and a mechanic, my uncle was an upholsterer and my grandfather was a carpenter,” Egge explains. “Spending time with them, I was fascinated by everything they did. Tinkering with tools and building things came very naturally to me.”

While a teenager, Egge took up the guitar and was immediately hooked. One of her school teachers, Don Musser, was also an accomplished luthier. Egge saw a chance to combine her passions and asked Musser to let her apprentice with him. Before long, she was building her own acoustic guitar.

“It took me seven months, but they were the best seven months I ever spent,” says Egge. “That’s the thing about building a guitar that a lot of people don’t realize: it takes time. Yes, you have to familiarize yourself with the tools and learn about woods and so many other things. But you have to have patience. You have to take your time – and be prepared for a lot of trial and error.”

The guitar, which Egge based on a Gibson B-25, is a beauty, and it’s been the heartbeat of her folk-rock Americana approach to music for almost 20 years. However, on her new album, Bad Blood, due out 23 August, Egge has undergone something of a transition, dialing down the folk and cranking up the rock.
Folk-rock for the modern age

“Originally, I envisioned it being more of a bluegrass record with my acoustic guitar driving the sound,” says Egge. “But Steve Earle, my producer, heard the demos I did, and the first thing he said was, ‘I hear hard-hitting drums behind these songs.’ Before you knew it, I had a full band behind me in the studio.”

The combination of Egge’s lustrous, angelic voice with Earle’s gritty, knockabout production sensibilities (lots of fuzzed-out, tremolo-driven guitars!) makes yin-yang poetic sense, and Bad Blood a fascinating, rich and rewarding experience that blurs genre lines in ways that are neither stylized nor unnatural.

A deeply personal and courageous songwriter, Egge tackles thorny issues head-on. Several of Bad Blood’s 12 cuts – most notably, Hole In Your Halo, Driving With No Hands and the bracing title track – deal with mental illness, which has affected various members of the singer’s family.

“It’s a tricky thing to write about,” Egge says. “What I found worked for me was, I wrote about the illness as if it were a character or a thing – that way, I could separate it from the people. I’m not directing my anger at anyone in particular; I’m talking to the disease itself.”

To promote Bad Blood, Egge is hitting the road – she plays the US through September, and in October she’ll tour the UK. Enamored with the full-on band treatments from her work with Earle, she’s put together a group to render her new songs live. “I’ll probably do a few solo acoustic shows,” she says, “but I really do like the band sound. It’s going to be fun.”