Toronto Star- Folkie Ana Egge’s maple leaf with an asterisk

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.

Streaming live- Interview and 3 songs on WHRV/WHRO

http://hunteratsunrise.com./interviews/70-interviews

‘I Loved You and I Hated You’

CT Entertainment

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

Happy 2012 ~ New England, Midwest and Mid Atlantic shows in Jan. and Best of 2011 lists!

RIP

RIP Warren Hellman, founder of The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. You will be sadly missed. Thank you for your generosity!

Music Radar -video about making my guitar

MUSIC RADAR

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.”

No Depression best of 2011

Ana gets a shout out in the No Depression end of year list thing-y, below.

-A Steve Earle Production: Ana Egge’s Bad Blood. He produces, he plays, he sings…but she is the real treat here.

http://www.nodepression.com/profiles/blogs/raisin-hell-that-end-of-the-year-list-thing-y

DAYTROTTER SESSION

COPY and PASTE to stream 4 songs-

http://www.daytrotter.com/#!/concert/ana-egge/20055181-291

The guitar that Ana Egge plays is one that she made when she was 16 years old, after apprenticing for a year to learn how to do such a thing. Anyone can pick up a guitar and throws themselves into it, but it must be something incredibly different to actually pour yourself into a piece of wood that you hollowed out and shaped with your own hands. It’s not just being played on, but really and truly played in concert with. The hands on the frets and those going across the strings were the same ones that got bloody and were hardened into calloused skin while painstakingly crafting the instrument. It’s a baby. It’s something that shares and gives love in a completely different way and in listening to Egge sing, it’s obvious that there’s something else here. There’s something at work that’s very atypical. Her words are inner and poignant. They feel as if they’ve marinated or germinated and bloomed all in due time. Nothing has been rushed. It’s all been watched and felt and lived in, to the point where the elbows and the knees are getting tattered and worn and it’s then that she makes the decision to comment. They are comprehensive accounts of what her characters are going through – or what they’re putting themselves through. It’s a little difficult to tell which is happening more. She sings, “Your flowers are growing 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’ve gone too far/There’s a hole in your halo, where the sun don’t shine/In the darkness I know it’s a thin line,” at the beginning of “Hole In Your Halo,” a gorgeous song on her latest record, “Bad Blood,” which was produced by Steve Earle and record at Levon Helm’s barn in Woodstock, NY. It feels like some of the wonders of Helm’s property is tucked into the pockets of this record, or was appropriated for the mood. There are the densest of pine trees and the most impressively clear lake – with a dog plunging itself into its reflection – coming out of the sides of these songs. There are the whispery thoughts of people sitting out near the water’s edge, throwing those pieces of stick into the center of the body of water for that dog to fetch, wondering about it all. There are few to any sounds out there and Egge takes us to these intimate places that couldn’t have come from the intuitive places of a thinker or a learned person, but from the depths of someone who has endured the burns of many fires and still smells the distinct smoke in their nostrils. She’s been through these lumps and she’s had things handed to her that hurt, but ultimately what she gives us is a narrative that could have come from the pages of a Richard Yates novel, if there were just more inspirational segments to them, if there was more to be thankful for. There are the pains in here, but none of them are the ends of the world. The bad blood and the bad tastes can turn warm and good again.

Americana UK review

• Ana Egge “Bad Blood”  Condemnation to redemption: A day in the life
• Tim Merricks
  Wednesday, 28 September 2011

• Ana Egge has been recording her own special brand of wisdom since the late nineties and Bad Blood is her seventh and most bittersweet offering yet. On first listen it’s easy to dismiss Egge as another folk songstress with a pretty voice and vague lyrics. But before you file her away with the MySpace race, listen a bit harder; dig a bit deeper and a bigger picture will emerge. This is a woman exorcising her demons on an intensely personal level.

• As has always been the case with Egge, her songs improve with each listen, although her musical identity remains hard to pin down. The Bowery coffee shop indie folk of 2007’s ‘Road to my Love’ is still to be found, but the focus has shifted back to her country roots and ‘Bad Blood’ has a distinctly southern flavour.

  The story is one of mental illness based on Egge’s own family experiences and expressed with a sense of futility laced with compassion and hope. It’s the harsh reality of ‘Bad Blood’ which creates the edge. It’s a rallying call, a plea for normality and a paradox of injustice. And it makes for intoxicating listening. ‘Driving with No Hands’ sets the scene and although the metaphors come thick and fast they barely disguise the brooding sensibilities of the subject matter and, along with the driving guitars conspire to push the Travis Bickle style character of the narrative over the edge.

  ‘Bad Blood’, ‘Hole in Your Halo’ and ‘Evil are also, as the titles suggest, dark but fascinating products of troubled contemplation. Remarkably for a record so heavily reliant on such unfortunate circumstances it’s all surprisingly upbeat from thereon in. It’s as if Egge decides to wash away her own bad blood and a light appears at the end of the tunnel which we follow to the positive, hope filled conclusion of ‘Your Voice Convinces Me’. The drums and fiddle certainly compound this effect, for which I suspect that some of the credit goes to a certain famous collaborator. The fact that this was produced by country outlaw Steve Earle has obviously had an impact, but although his influence is noteworthy and his presence felt, this is very much Egge’s baby and not Earle’s protégé as some commentators have inferred.

  Egge has been around long enough now to inspire as well as be inspired by, she just flies a little too low under the radar to be easily picked up on these shores. She has been described as “the Nina Simone of folk” and much more besides. I can’t help imagining a Bakersfield version of Suzanne Vega at her peak.  You will draw your own comparisons, but one thing is certain; it will be with someone who has attitude and the courage of her convictions, and maybe young female artists will in time be hailed as the next Ana Egge.

• http://www.americana-uk.com/cd-reviews/item/ana-egge?category_id=175

Cowbell – Bad Blood review