Anda Marie
Anna Vogelzang’s been spending a lot of time lately in her rehearsal space. But the Madison singer-songwriter isn’t so much honing the songs from Hiker, her upcoming fifth full-length album, as figuring out how to handle the album’s multi-layered, multi-instrumental arrangements when she heads out on the solo leg of her upcoming tour, which includes a May 1 show at High Noon Saloon.
“I’ve gotten into gear, things like guitar pedals,” Vogelzang says. “I’m thinking, what can I do that’s representative of the album even though I’m going to be by myself? I’m messing with guitar effects and secondary vocals — all of this crazy stuff.”
It’s just another creative exploration for the Massachusetts native, who’s spent most of her decade-plus professional musical career — the last five years of which have been spent in our fair city — doing just that.
Hiker is a textbook example, an album that’s taken an interesting and winding journey to completion. Slated for release on May 6, it features songs that she wrote in a cabin in Green Lake back in 2013. As she did with 2011’s Canary in a Coal Mine, Vogelzang used Kickstarter to help fund Hiker, but this time only for the postproduction piece of the equation. In 2014, to bridge the gap, Vogelzang released Driftless, a six-song EP featuring a collection of poppier songs.
But if Driftless represented a move away from Vogelzang’s earlier folk-pop work, Hiker is darker and grittier, a reflection of where she was mentally and emotionally at the time, grappling with difficult family relationships.
“A lot of the songs came from a place where I was thinking about how all humans are animals, like all of the things we do that reveal our animal nature to ourselves, whether that’s habitual patterns or self-destruction or loving someone,” she says. “These songs found each other.”
The theme’s overt in tunes like Hiker’s opener, a number called “Bear,” and the song “Howl,” but it’s subtler elsewhere. One of the album’s strongest songs, a number called “Reins,” almost got lost in a folder of demos Vogelzang recorded in 2014 as part of Real Women Real Songs, an online project that challenged female musicians across the country to write a song a week for a full year, posting their work online. Her California-based producer and musical collaborator, Todd Sickafoose, saw the song’s potential and rescued it from potential obscurity. Now everyone who hears the album ends up name-checking it.
“I was reading a newspaper article on the media’s portrayal of women,” says Vogelzang of the song’s genesis. “When I play it live, I like to tell the crowd that it’s a slow jam about the patriarchy.”
Vogelzang, who ended up writing a whopping 70 songs in 2014 (she’s slowed down a little since then), says the Real Women Real Songs experience was essential for her development as a singer-songwriter.
“If I hadn’t done that project, I think I would have still been growing,” she says. “I’ve gotten out of my own way. Or maybe, as one of my friends put it when she heard the album, ‘It sounds like you’ve gotten out of the songs’ way.’”
Unlike her first album, 2005’s Some Kind of Parade, a record Vogelzang says sounds like “a kid who went to music school,” her more recent work reflects a hard-won maturity and understanding that she doesn’t have to follow all the rules she learned as a student. Now, she’s willing to let her powerful voice rasp a little.
“I’m choosing to do it because it has the effect I want,” she says. “My voice is becoming more and more my own.”
