high up silver howling bird / looking down to see the world / spinning out into the vast forever / flying is a faithful dance / animals suspended at the place where understanding touches vapor 

Here we are. Mysterious humanity unfolding. Animal nature howling. How do we learn what it means? Maybe being here is a story told by all of us at once, a constant reaching for language, an impossible telling of something inherently indescribable. Animal Poem is a meditation on the attempt. How do we talk about destiny from the balcony of a nation in decline? How does our attention shape the way we touch the natural world? In the face of endless avarice and cruelty, how do we talk about the realness of love? 

Recorded live in a circle with some of my dearest friends, Animal Poem was made in conversation. We wanted to be together in the room, to listen and respond in real time without the separation of walls and headphones. I met Sam Weber the summer before and resonated deeply with his musicality and his reasons. We sat around on porches swapping tunes and I asked if he would help me make something that felt as unadorned and free. He donned hats seamlessly – co-producer, engineer, musician – setting mics and checking levels before returning to curl around his guitar and disappear into each song. Everyone in the studio made it feel so open, made it easy to forget technology and permanence and just play, messy and alive. It’s this vital mess that moves me when I listen now – ghost notes in the high register of the piano, melodic guitar and bass lines briefly interwoven, earthy cymbals breathing, my dog barking. We came back to add saxophone, strings, vocal harmonies, and a few other tastes, but most of what you hear is just people sitting together in a small room, listening and talking with tenderness and abandon. 

The songs were written on long drives across the country, airplanes, walks through my neighborhood, nights spent lying on the roof. Every album is a snapshot, a momentary study of the way a mind reaches for understanding. I can feel myself reaching in these songs, for whatever is right beyond my grasp. Mortality and connection. Suffering and meaning. People lead the narratives, come into orbit, spin away again – an exhausted mother at a freeway exit, an aging neighbor surrounded by a growing pile of newspapers, the unsung heroes of a midwest uprising, two lovers looking at the sky. 

It’s hard to know how to hold a creative life in a time that feels fraught with venomous division, careening technological advance, and an ever widening chasm between the affluent and the dispossessed. What good are poems when affordable housing is scarce, the climate teeters on a dangerous edge, and war breaks out over misinformation spread by profit hungry algorithms? I think about being here. How brief it is. How incomplete our understanding. I think about history. All the worlds we’ve created and broken. Revolution and renaissance. Hope and humility. Everyone here is living a creative life – teachers and parents, kids and convenience store clerks. We’re all tasting this wild existence, finding ways to express how much it hurts and moves us. This work is my own small addition to that communal story. The water we swim in. The way our attention molds our truths. Humanity is unfolding as we describe it. We’ll never get it right, but the attempt is everything.

sorry and i’m listening / is a poem that’s always been / beautiful enough to kill the darkness / you can be someone who loves or you can be somebody else / i tell you kid the first one is the hardest

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Animal Poem will be Tivel's seventh studio full-length of all new, original material. It follows 2024’s Living Thing, which was named the #1 album of 2024 by Folk Alley and gained praise from KEXP for expanding the sounds of her previous work: "A beautiful collection of melodic folk-rock. Living Thing finds Tivel building upon her brand of folk music with richly layered guitar, violin, field recordings, keys and programmed loops with a pop sensibility to accompany her excellent storytelling." 

Tivel’s 2022 breakout Outsiders received multiple Best of the Year accolades from NPR Music, including "Best Roots Music of 2022," "Best Songs of 2022" (for single "Black Umbrella"), "Ann Powers' Top Album of 2022," and "Bob Boilen's Favorite Music of 2022." Upon release, Ann Powers said on-air, "She's one of my absolute favorite songwriters living right now and I think this is her best record yet...Her writing on this record is at the level Paul Simon was at when he wrote 'The Boxer' and 'American Tune.'" Outsiders was also named among Brooklyn Vegan's "15 Great Folk Albums from 2022" and Aquarium Drunkard's 2022 Year in Review. Roots music journal No Depression praised, "Tivel has many strengths and no flaws. She's one of the finest storytellers modern folk music has to offer, with lyrics so literary that it's tempting to think of her as a poet with an exceptional gift for playing guitar and singing." The album led to her NPR Tiny Desk debut on May 22, 2023.

Tivel’s highly acclaimed fourth album The Question was deemed "One Of The Most Ambitious Folk Records Of 2019” by NPR Music. She first began garnering critical attention throughout the U.S. and UK with 2017's Small Believer, after establishing herself within the Pacific Northwest folk scene with 2016's Heroes Waking Up and her 2014 debut, Before Machines.

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Living Thing (2024)

Outsiders (2022)