Carla Richmond Coffing
Vogelzang is back in the Midwest, and brings her new tunes to The Winnebago on Oct. 12.
It’s fitting that the title track of an album of new songs inspired by transience would be composed while driving a car. Indie folk freewheeler Anna Vogelzang, who has always been somewhat of an artistic moving target herself, wrote “Beacon” from behind the wheel during bursts of inspiration.
The Boston native helped spearhead a Madison folk revival during the eight years she spent here before moving to Los Angeles in 2016. She started the song “Beacon” while on a Madison-based tour. She finished it during a return drive to her home in Los Angeles, where she was living at the time, from a gig in San Francisco.
“The whole song is about that feeling of movement in search of something, looking for home, waiting for it to call out to you from the dark,” she explains. She says the lyrics, “Stars shaped like stones guiding you down the coastline,” were literal. “Of course, the punchline is that home isn’t a place — it’s a person, people, a set of smells, a feeling in your shoulders as they relax, a certain sound.” In short, a beacon.
Vogelzang seems to net melodies like catching monarchs. Chiming guitars and keys create an almost pixie atmosphere for the compositions on Beacon. It’s a likely environment for her mischievous voice to swoop, float and dart across the melodies as though the airspace is a play space. Some noted L.A. musicians enter the space along with her. People like Beacon co-producer and multi-instrumentalist Tyler Chester who, having worked with Andrew Bird, knows a thing or two about creating atmospherics.
Vogelzang was surprised when established L.A. artists like Chester said “yes” when she asked them to record. She was new to L.A. but hit the ground running in a way that got notice and buzz. Together with Adam Levy (who provides some guitar on Beacon) she created Song Salon, an L.A. songwriter collective that produced weekly house concerts. That, in turn, opened the door to others who found their way into her life and on the new album.
Vogelzang says these were the right players for Beacon: “Not only are they L.A. pros who sound amazing and do good work; they also could hear the pieces I couldn’t. Each song ended up better than the best version I could imagine — it wouldn’t have happened without their ears, minds, hearts.”
Nor would it have happened without Vogelzang’s knack for curating art and performance. Madison music lovers may know her work as creator of Wintersong, the annual Second Harvest benefit at the Barrymore, where she plays the role of producer and den mother to an unwieldy, talented array of local folkies and rockers (including yours truly). Not even her move to L.A. stopped her work on the event. This year’s Wintersong takes place Dec. 7 at the Barrymore Theatre.
Vogelzang will not have to travel far. In August, together with her 2-year-old son and husband, she moved to Chicago for new opportunities. Vogelzang will play an album release show at The Winnebago on Oct. 12 (with Courtney Hartman and Coyote Brother).
The movement she writes about on Beacon seems to never stop.
